HEAVY LITTLE OBJECTS

#212 :: F. Scott Fitzgerald's Water Closet Handle

At some point, Fitzgerald settled in Towson, Maryland (the years 1932 and 1933, to be precise) to rent a house called "La Paix." At some point a couple of decades later, my folks were fun-loving college kids, and the house was being torn down. They made off with the pull-handle from his water-closet, and my father subsequently enshrined it in this ornate little inlaid-mother-of-pearl frame. It hung in our home as long as I can remember growing up, and hangs there still, beneath a venerable coating of dust. It struck me as funny at age 7 as it still does decades later. Because at some point - more likely on several hundred occasions - F. Scott Fitzgerald got up from the crapper like everyone else, and gave this thing a yank - and then unlike the rest of us resumed writing "Tender is the Night."