December 14, 2022

Rosebud’s Children

Rosebud did not die.

She did not burn.

No, that was a Rosebud replica they threw into the fire in Citizen Kane. A clone. A replacement.

Over the many years, amid endless storms, Charles Foster Kane found Rosebud after Rosebud, sled after sled, false memory after dashed hope.

But he never found the thing he lost. It was not in that vast pile of junk in Xanadu’s fortress dungeon. No, the true Rosebud, the original wooden sled, remained in Little Salem, Colorado for all those decades, up until the 1940s.

Then someone bought it in a sale that was held after Kane died. They, like Kane years before, got on a train to Chicago and took the sled with them, exactly what Kane wished he had been able to do.

Like Kane, Rosebud then ended up in New York City and got a new paint job, and the blades were sharpened but the Rosebud name stayed.

The war years had been tough and not many new sleds were produced so it was not uncommon for used sleds, even ones many years old, to end up on store shelves. And, on a shelf in a toy store in New York City in December, 1945, that’s where Tom Hagen, the Consigliere for the powerful Corleone mafia family, bought it as a Christmas gift for his children.

He was carrying that sled as he left the store when he was accosted by Virgil Sollozzo, who had just tried to kill Don Vito Corleone.

Tom, and the Corleones, eventually defeated Sollozzo, and then some, (bang-bang.) And, after conquering all of New York City, the Family moved west to Lake Tahoe, Nevada. And Tom Hagen and his family took Rosebud with them.

Lake Tahoe is gifted with 400 inches of snow a year so Rosebud got a lot of use. So many days in the snow with the Hagens, the Corleones, the laughter, the Christmases, the remembrances of the winters in New York that had far less snow but were so much colder.

And there was a day when Michael Corleone returned home to Lake Tahoe, to the snow, and saw a Christmas gift that Tom had bought for Michael’s son because Michael was not there. It was a large toy car, big enough for a child to sit in, resting in the snow, forgotten and likely ruined.

Abandoned.

And we know that somewhere else buried in the dangerous snow was Rosebud. Charlie Kane’s Rosebud, Tom Hagen’s Rosebud. A Rosebud of all lost seasons.

Where did Rosebud go after that? Did the snow melt and the cursed sled slide away into the lake? And there it sat in the deep, frigid water before eventually being discovered by someone swimming? They pulled the snow sled out of the water and wondered how many times such an act had ever occurred before. And they carried Rosebud back to the car, to their home, and maybe, it’s on another frosty hill somewhere in America to this day.

It hasn’t snowed yet in Chicago this Christmas. But it’s cold. And we can hear the rain. --TK