Requiem for the Toy Tower

This morning I found some time to go over to the 6B Garden and watch the Tower of Toys be taken apart. It was an oddly hypnotic, elegant sight to see. Eddie Boros' sculpture, I am happy to say, did not go gentle into that good night. It resisted. Plank by plank, rusty nail by rusty nail, it fought back against the chainsaw and the cherry picker. A tangle of wood, wires, ropes, toys, and other junk, the tower, in its undoing, was perhaps just as regal as it was in its making.



The man with the chainsaw pulled on a hobby horse and the animal refused to budge. He tugged a board and was confounded. He placed a few strategic cuts, sending down a shower of golden sawdust. He tugged again. The sculpture resisted. He cut again. Withholding, restrained, the tower surrendered a few bits and pieces, which the man sent plummeting with a crash to the garden below.



Man and sculpture became--and it may be too sentimental to say so--like a pair of dancers, or boxers, moving from strike, to clutch, to separation. He tugged and the tower responded by twisting and swaying. He bumped and the tower shimmied. And like a tease, now and then, the tower relented, giving up a plank of wood, a silver ball, a string of Christmas lights, a bucket of water that tipped and cascaded down the length of the structure, foamy and brown.



Gradually, the tower gave in to the man's patient cajoling and coaxing. That little hobby horse that had at first resisted him, now seemed to leap into the man's hands. A lover to the end, he did not drop the horse. He lowered his cherry picker to the ground and gently, gently placed the toy upon a green bed of flowers.

Dare I say it? The tower has gone out the way it came in--with poetry and defiance and a fair share of beauty.