Beaver's Accordion

“I guess accordions don't bounce down stairs very cheap,” his little lips quivering, his brow furrowed into the generic recognizable expression for introspective confusion. The whole thing just a black and white whitewash, the type that had been in use, in one form or another, for so long it was nearly rote. Like spotlit stone tablets, dug into by desperate human hands whose implements were hard enough, sharp enough, and precise enough to carry their thoughts across centuries of time on the face of these rocks. The laughers laughing in unison, but with enough variance to sound like an entire Greek Chorus. So saccharine in the austerity of 1950s black and white television. All color imagined? Over compensation keeps the invisible in balance, the toothpaste and cigarette companies hoped and schemed. He had five whole days. Five whole days to get it back to 'em, free of charge. But that damned Eddie Haskel. With his young Jerry Lee Lewis good looks. That wavy blond hair, his know-it-all sneers. And the kid—the Beaver—himself, as a character, slowed in development to about the level of a naïve four-year-old. As an actor, already eight or nine. Wotta grind. And to think for the rest of his life. Accordions don't bounce down stairs very cheap—neither do pins, needles, or natural born freaks. This scripture was crafted for our conscription, metaphorical in exchange for good ol' parable, filtered to a safe and irradiated blandness, housing all that the world will remember of us centuries after we become a mere smudged speculation, a stray thread in the the weave of then-now.