Crumbled

It was just about time. I came apart like a toy watch when it hit. I’d pictured myself with both feet planted firmly, standing up to the tsunami, standing up to the raging fire, standing up to the oil spill, standing up to the pandemic, standing up to the last wisp of smoke at the end of all of everything.

When it came, though, I crumbled like cornmeal. Outside of my window I saw that things were going wrong, but when I looked for my backbone, I found it hidden in the warm, smoggy day. The smell of burning oil, the smell of old cooking grease, the grey spongy matter washing up against the shore – these sat just outside of my small sanctuary, and I sat looking at the calendar. When will I go home, when will I go home, when will I go home?  rolled through the circle cage in my brain. I thought this was the Peace Corps; this is not the Peace Corps, this is the Piece Corpse, hunks of former bodies, bayonets, screams of animals and people. Next thing is a series of flashing lights and darkness, and hunching under a blanket in an open truck that smokes, and staying silent as a sack of potatoes. The day approaches and shortly before it arrives another man comes, short and soft spoken, to take us to the airport. Already I am picturing myself sending postcards, buying stamps, writing letters, soaking in the long deep tub at the quiet old hotel. I picture the postcards when I sleep, placing the stamp, opening the mail box, the little worried thrill that I’ve dropped the wrong letter, the one I never meant to send, the one you should only open if you hear that I died in that jungle.

Equinox

The first Sunday after the first full moon after the autumn equinox is recognized with fire, with the roasting of nuts and the drawing of drapes. The windows are lighted, the evenings grow short. The children stare into flames and their cheeks are ruddy. The mothers and toddlers sit closest to the fires, cracking nuts, putting sweet meats into shallow wooden bowls. The dogs are subdued. The cats work feverishly through the night, catching the mice who come in as the evenings cool. The beeswax candles are fresh. The nuts and the squash and the onions are still new, waiting for the beatitudes of those first autumn celebrations. The elders sit gratefully in their bent wood, feet warming at the fire. The crackling fire marks each evening, first long and slow, then short and thankful. For this we are about to receive. Cold feet are pressed against warm bricks, the evenings count hours, then minutes, then seconds, then a moment’s sudden puff against a frozen window. Done, for children, for chickens, for sleeping bulbs, breathing in the cold air briefly. Not yet, they say. Not yet.

 

 

American

Once upon a time, an ancient Japanese ghost banged a cherry tree and lo, in the resultant pink and lucid blossoms, the American constitution was born. Aaah, says the Japanese ghost, I knew that these pink blossoms would bring reason and truth to America.

“America, what is America?” said the eagles, said the wrens, said the multitudes of birds who rode the air like water, their currents and circulations bending the stories of America and its conceptual underpinnings even as the ink was still wet.

The newspaper was the first dry message of America to Americans. They wrapped their meat and their fish in ink, they relied on stained and rumpled stories. What is American truth? said the halibut column and the features of cold beef. What is American truth? Said the bunches of flowers in the early undelivered morning? What is American truth? said the satori of tuberculosis and the crushing of children in dark heavy factories and the sudden brief enlightenment that burnt bright for 50 years, that threatens right at this very moment  to gutter and expire, here, in our very privileged lungs, gasping like dying fish, like first responders, like Massy men, waiting for someone to breathe deep, speak the American truth out loud, to bring the coral reef and the constitution back from the brink, bring air back into the discourse that fills each one of us, a gasp, a sigh, an exhalation, a prayer. 

Moment to moment

In the darkness, I can smell the fungus more clearly. I imagine they are feet, the feet of very old animals – old dogs, old chickens, old people, old fish, and there I stop. The feetless defeat me. The smell rises up once again in the chilly air. The smell of stale bread, of moldy hay, of paper in an old cigar box. The smell of bookstores, the smell of dirty ice. The smell compels me to stop, to cover my face, to breathe in the more familiar smell of myself. I wonder what I smell like to someone else. What do I smell like to the drawing man sitting across the duck pond at the groomed university? To the ducks, gliding and cursing, leaving green slime on the warm water? To the fat lady with the liver spots who will retire this year or next?

I smell like me, you smell like you, the rest of the world smells like strangers, or enemies, or memory, and that makes something happen on my face. The strangeness, the all-smell of memory makes my tear ducts react. My tear ducts, the ducks on the warm green pond, the regurgitation of rain from field to plain, from plain to highway; I am crying as heavily as the first tears ever cried. The evaporative cycle of hot and cold rises and I am speechless again.

The bones of youthful resilience bend and a light mist rolls in and away in the morning air. There is a rock nearby where tides approach and decline, approach and decline, and they tease one another in the fog. The open mouth of the rock is generous, waves slap and swallow, gulls call and clams do not call back. The gasping retreat pushes and pulls the heart, the heart that knows only the bivalve rhythm, the bivalve rhythm, self to other, night to day, small moments of air bursting, moment to moment to moment.

Feast

My mother ran the kitchen like clockwork and there was nothing that made her happier than preparing the annual summer family feast. Out of doors appetites are apt to be huge, and mother never let anyone go away hungry.

The year I turned seven was the first year I was allowed to help. While mother washed potatoes, got out bottles of pickles and okra and complained about the cost of flour, I ran to-ing and fro-ing, getting her the things she hadn’t known she’d want until just that moment.

“Tell Edwin to sharpen that axe,” she’d say, and I’d run outdoors and tell him quick as that.

“Take the buttermilk out of the cellar,” she’d say, and I’d bring it up, thick and chilled in a crockery pitcher.

“There’s elderberry wine for your uncle William,” she’d say. “Just leave it there for now, I don’t want to be giving it out to the whole family.” I went down there anyway and tasted it. Not very good. Kinda sour and bitter, not near as good as cough syrup.

The week went by fast, multiple preparations, pies to make, chickens to kill. Old chickens are stringy and tough, but bake them long enough in buttermilk in a deep casserole with a lot of potatoes and they come out okay. It was a hard year, I guess, but a feast is a feast, even if it’s spread a little thin.

Fortunately for us, there was a salesman came by in a wagon passing by on his way from Kansas to California. He had what he called crudités in his wagon, which looked like picked cauliflower and carrots to me, but it had a good sound to it. He talked to mother about how to handle chicken to keep it tender. Resist the temptation to toss, he said, while showing her how to handle those scrawny wrung out birds like they were made of silk, turning them gently in the flour then dunking in egg and browning them like they were royal damn peacocks or something.

What you need is some bigger meat for your feast, he said. And some fresh greens. I got a friend in Lawrence been raising lettuce and cucumber. Mother didn’t know about that. They sounded French to her. She’d also figured out that this salesman was probably going to hang around long enough to get himself invited. Father said go get it, then. He always did want to have the biggest best newest of everything, French or not, and especially so at the annual feast. So the salesman went, and came back with slabs of ribs lying on ice, with lettuce and cucumbers wrapped in soft cloths and tucked in between. 

Sweet tooth

My father is a dentist and he loves you more than Jesus, because your father owns the candy store. The candy store is always between the cigar store and the liquor store, that’s what my cousin Lily Marie said when she was sixteen and went to the cigar store to buy cigarettes and ask old Ben Murphy, who was janitor at the City of Cocola Elementary School from 1954 til 1997, to buy her some Annie Greensprings Apple Wine. He died of sugar diabetes, old age, and pesticide accumulation, according to Lily Marie’s uncle Ed Loughlin, who was the only doctor in the City of Cocola.

I myself am glad your father owns the candy store, because it means that every kid in Cocola will eventually come into my father’s business, and I get to hand out the lollipops and the troll dolls that my dad the dentist gives out to any kid that doesn’t bite him or kick. There are a surprising number of kids who won’t bite or kick if they think they might get something for not doing it. My dad says that proves  they can control their heathen impulses and if it was up to him he’d beat every last one of them for their cowardly ways and it was just proof that the City of Cocola was founded by fools.

The City of Co-cola was founded in 1896 by Jebediah Wright, a candy and whisky maker who moved from Sioux City Iowa to Flagstaff just in time to not freeze to death that year and with enough provisions to make a good living for himself when he set up the next spring.

 

 (15 minutes, just a scrap of an idea)

Personified

 

Some days it is just good enough to be whatever it is you are. An editor, a dog walker, a speech therapist. Some other days it might be better to be the tool and not the operator of the tool. I’d like to be a pencil. Sharp, focused, correctible. Authoritative and yet open to revision. A pencil might suit me well. I might also like to be a drum. Round, tight, silent except when called to service – the drum has a voice, a ritual meaning, transcendentalist habits, a rhythm in the belly, rhythm all the way to the souls of the feet. I could be a drum. I could also be a thief, stealing moments, eavesdropping on the lives and whispers of strangers and friends. I could be a thief without jewels, lifting the unvalued, leaving no fingerprints. I could be a window, looking out on everything, cold and clear and just. I could be a rug, honest and flat, unemotional, willing to wear dirt, willing to be shaken in the open air.  I might be a pet rock, a solid chunk of marketing sitting on a shelf, in a box, in a garage, in someone’s grandmother’s house. I could be an ice cube, temporary, cool, transient. Put me on your eyes, put me in your gin and tonic, put me anywhere absolution is needed and I will handle it for you. I might be a bowl, hugging those things that shouldn’t go flying off unattended. Your keys. Your pennies. Your yogurt. Your soup. Rely on me – I am a bowl. I could be a piece of paper. Lined, unlined. Blank, full. Waiting, smooth or crushed, for whatever comes next.