~   Note   ~

As a highly sensing person, navigating life as a man living within an aggression-encouraged male culture has been challenging. These enlightening essays present the story of how my childhood appreciation of love, nature, community, creativity, silence, the value of change, and how loving all people is important became overrun by the destructive forces of toxic masculinity and modern-day soul-sapping technology. It was only by returning to those foundations that I finally found solace again, coming to understand and appreciate they were also the values indigenous people's cultures used to survive and purportedly live harmoniously for centuries.

Each near-meditative essay is a vessel that concludes with a satisfying lesson or question - some playful, some profound, some scathing - that bring balance to what it means to be male, to appreciate the gifts and curses that come with sensitivity, and how to live in these increasingly technology-driven times. Everything Is explores the hilarity, calamity, and wisdom found in surviving a repressive family life and how I came to find my own renewed structure to live by, bolstered by the understanding it was the things I learned as a child that most soothed my chaotic adulthood.






Everything Is

~   SIMMERING   ~ 

    Sitting on the front steps of our new house, I was pleased to experience the current hush in the air after all the commotion that had come earlier from the street – the shout-outs from the old man pushing his cart down along lengthy Whitney Street, yelling “Straw … berries, straw … berries,” the constant jingles from the Mister Softie popsicle truck making its usual three o’clock rounds, and even the far-off screech of cicadas that gripped this neighborhood during the summer. But I knew I would miss these sounds soon. The first Tuesday after Labor Day was approaching, marking the beginning of another school year being stuck inside a dreary classroom. 

   By the end of October, though the summer sounds surrounding our front porch had left, my imagination had not. There, between the street lamppost and stop sign, I imagined roaming woolly mammoths crushing the underbrush. There, crossing the asphalt were bison and reindeer trampling the cat-tails, berry bushes, and fallen acorns. And over there in the Bennett’s yard, wasn’t that a scruffy, bearded man bending over, scraping the grass with his hands for seeds? Mrs. Clark, my third-grade teacher, had just taught us about people called hunter gatherers, nomadic, fire-loving people who had not only hunted and farmed for centuries but lived

healthy lives just by eating meat and wild vegetation. To think such creatures and people once roamed this very spot on Whitney Street as freely as Ford Mustangs, Chevy Impalas, and Buick Wildcats drove it now.

   But these were modern days with new-fangled electronics and fancy plastic appliances that replaced the heavier, time-honored metal ones. Some of these things were good, some not. Earlier in July, Mom couldn’t wait to get the “New and Improved” Mirro-Matic steamer for the house, but after using the fancy machine just once, she yelled, “This cheap thing is aluminum, not cast iron, and I want my money back!” There was the day she took me with her to the Sears furniture floor room in downtown Silver Spring to look for a modern couch. The salesman said, “Madam, what I always say is ‘Show me what you have and I’ll tell you who you are.’” All I knew was that he had bad breath. How could Mom not smell it? It nearly knocked me over. “And once I see this sofa in your home, then I’ll know you truly are a smart and sophisticated lady.” Mom not only bought the stinky sales pitch but the couch as well. Weeks later, however, she appeared no more sophisticated to me, and no one thought the couch placed in the living room was particularly suave either – not one family member or visiting neighbor chose to sit in it. Why did people call it a living room then? And why did adults say newer was always better than the old?

    Lazy autumn afternoons sitting on the front steps gave way to the bleak and wet late November weather Maryland was known for. The basement was the place to be now, the musty dwelling where old things like Mom’s sewing machine passed down from her grandmother and the beat up Silvertone lived. 

    On one drizzly, Sunday afternoon, I sat on the floor watching The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn while Mom darned clothes on the sewing machine. She hated that contraption. It never worked right. Wouldn’t a needle and thread have been easier to stitch the holes in our jeans and socks?

   If only Mom smiled more. Her face was just as pretty as Maid Marian’s in the movie. Even though Marian and evil Prince John had just been captured in Sherwood Forest by Robin, Marian’s smile shone through. But how could she love a mean man like Prince John who’d nearly taxed the poor, downtrodden villagers to death? Why did all the prettiest girls at my new school always seem more interested in the bad boys than the good? And, despite Mom’s slaving to make our new house a castle for Dad, why did he smile even less than Prince John? Even now, Mom was doing double duty, steaming Brussels sprouts in the Mirro-Matic up in the kitchen. Inhaling the sprouty stench invading the basement might now meant it’d be only a matter of minutes before the Mirro-Matic’s whistle would scream for Mom to let the pressure out or it’d explode. But, as usual, she’d keep her composure, hold her frustrations in, and dinner would once again be waiting for us on the table.
  

    Sort of.

   “You’re all late. Do not sit down yet. Do not speak. I have an announcement to make.”

   That we were moving back to the old house, the one in Takoma Park we all liked better?

   “From now on, we will eat here at exactly six o’clock, no later. And we will have good family discussion around the dinner table, even if it kills you to do so. So, that’s that. Let’s eat.” 

   Everyone sat – Dad to my left, Mom the right, twelve-year-old, Cathy, and sixteen-year-old twin brothers, Don and Doug, across from me – but no one within the circle said a thing. I, however, detected little noises going on everywhere, weird ones like Don’s knife squeaking against his plate trying to saw some fried liver in half, the bell on Dexter’s cat collar jangling as he dashed after a rock-hard pea Cathy’d dropped under the table, and Dad’s fork tapping against the glass cup filled with vinegar to soak another scorched Brussels sprout in – to think that repulsive vinegar was the same stuff Mom used to clean our bathroom drains with! She cooked all our food as if seared in a vat of acid. Beef, once pink and plump from the market, was always fried to a third its original size after her new electric fry cooker got done with it. Broccoli, once green as grass, was boiled gray every night on the range of her fancy, cutting-edge stovetop. Our breakfast eggs were fried so hot on her contemporary, deluxe oven that the egg whites turned clear as glass. How I missed the old house’s kitchen, the primitive pots and pans, how vegetables were actually colorful, yet no one in the family ever said a word about her near total destruction of food, that is, until tonight, when I let it out that the liver was, “Well, kinda dry, Mom. I mean really dry.”

   “Why, you ungrateful, eight-year-old little …. Growing up on our farm, we were thankful for anything we could get our hands on. We didn’t waste a scrap of vegetable or fat of anything. We ate strawberry stems if we had to! That’s all we had, just our meager house, our bit of land, our crops, and my father’s spare income. How dare you be so ungrateful.”

   Had Mom once been a hunter gatherer? Had she really grown up living on mere vegetables, stems, and animals to eat – and liked it? Learning to live and eat off the land is what got Mom here and she actually turned out okay.
  

    Sort of. 

~   INSIDE   ~

   It was the coldest day of the year so far, something Mom said after reading the icicle-laden thermometer hanging just outside our frosted kitchen window. I especially needed the warmth from Cookie on this early morning, his beagle body lying next to me on the floor beside the living room heat vent. His ears were like velvet, and petting them nearly lulled me back to sleep. So soothed in peace this morning, violins were playing, but it was merely the opening music to Captain Kangaroo’s theme song playing in the basement.

   Wandering down there, Cathy had already beaten me to the Silvertone and taken the space on the floor directly in front of it. Today, I would sit right next to her anyway.

   I guess I got too close – a static electric spark exploded within the paper-thin space between our bare elbows when they dared to connect.  

   “Ow!” she yelled.

   “Hey, say it, don’t spray it.”

   “Get away. Cooties, you pervert.”

   I had been told many times before I was a pervert and had cooties but still didn't know what they were. What was so wrong about touching someone in the family?

   “Michael, give your sister some room,” Mom said, standing over by the washing machine.

   "Hey, Dad, it's doing it again," Cathy said, trying to nudge his attention away from tightening a pipe under the wash basin. “The picture’s rolling over and over and over.”

   When a charged whisper came out from under the basin, Mom looked down at him as quickly as Cathy and I swiveled our heads in his direction. Dad had to know his whispers were a dead giveaway he had cussed. Why was it when someone whispered something you weren’t supposed to hear only made you want to hear it more?

   Crawling out from underneath the basin, Dad walked over toward the TV. There was a big screwdriver in one hand, a heavy wrench squeezed in the other. He wasn’t going to hurt the Silvertone was he, the cherished seventh member of the family?

   Actually, Dad was very gentle. In carefully taking off the set’s back panel, he had his hands all over the Silvertone, not only the wood exterior but the mess of wires and weird, glow-y glass things deep inside. I leaned in close to get a better look.

   "No, don't get too close! This is dangerous. Go out and play. Both of you."

   "But Mom won’t let us out," Cathy said. "Mom, we're bored when we can’t go out.”

   "I said no, and that's final. Twenty degrees is dangerous. You’re all staying inside."

   “Damn horizontal hold," Dad said, this time his words echoing from deep inside the set.

   Sitting back down alongside Cathy, but not too close, I stared into the screen and watched Captain Kangaroo’s body rise over and over again. Up, up, and up he rolled. I felt as if in a trance from it all.

   Then, down, down, down came footsteps. Or was I imagining them, those slow and steady steps getting closer to me, ones like Frankenstein’s boots shuffling forward, or the webbed feet of the ugly gill man’s in Creature from the Black Lagoon?
 

   Turning around, it was Doug’s silhouette approaching! That look in his eye, the weird smile on his face, all a sure warning of impending attack. Cathy ran off so fast she even touched my elbow passing by.

   "Douglas, leave your brother alone," Mom said.

   "Stop! Stop!" I said.

   "I'm just tickling him," Doug said.

   Fingers up my belly, up my chest, like ants crawling all over my skin.

   "Douglas, I said stop."

   “I’m not hurting him.”

   "I’m going crazy, Mom! Tell him to cut it out."

   “Douglas? Douglas?”

   “Mom … Mom … Mom ….”

   "Stop!" Dad yelled.

   All went quiet. Dead quiet.

   Doug had gone finger crazy. Why?

   “God, Mom, I was only ….” Doug whispered to Mom.

   “You need to be careful when touching people. Always,” she said.

   Cathy was about to cry. Dad’s stern voice always scared her; me too. Wanting so much to make her feel better, I closed in closer.

   “Michael, leave your sister alone. And all of you – behave today. Find something to do inside.”

   I would not be denied going outdoors. Mom still hadn’t learned that whenever she told me not to do something, it only made me want to do it more. But it wasn’t easy slipping upstairs when no one was looking, getting into my winter clothes by myself, or buckling the last toggle on my black rubber boots, but I did it.

   Outside, snow was falling everywhere. The world was covered in white. The woods and the ground were one in color. Traipsing through the drifts by the fence, working my body against their weight, my body got so hot I felt as if I were inside a sauna.

   Yes, I said to myself, go ahead and pull off the gloves, the scarf, the cap! Go on and catch flakes with your tongue, flick bits of snow off dangling leaves, and rub your hands across your face! Out here, I can do all the touching I want.

   But, oh, how quickly I got cold again. Maybe the truth was I didn’t want to be outside as much as I just didn’t want to be inside.  

~   NATURES   ~ 

   With one succinct snap of his fingers, we all gathered around Dad and listened in.  

   “Okay,” he said, holding a Budweiser in hand. “Your mother and I think it’s time for a change. We’ve decided we’re all gonna loosen up a little, unwind out in wild nature. We’re going camping this weekend.”

   “Where, Dad?” I said.

   “Out at Crow’s Nest Lodge in western Maryland. Since you’re nine now, you’re going, too, Michael.” 

   He had all four of us kids in the palm of his hand, excited, thrilled, and anxious to go. But Dad, as he often did whenever he actually chose to speak, especially when drinking his Budweiser, had a knack for overdoing things, or “stretching the damn truth” as Mom called it, and he was doing it again. “Long, flowing streams, stars galore, and views of the mountains as far as the eye can see.”

   If he’d been smart, he would’ve kept it short because the more he expanded on how fantastic the views were going to be, the more I doubted whether our family, especially one with three teens would want to spend a weekend on one spot of dirt, let alone cramped together in any spot. The more Dad failed to keep it short, the more I wondered if it was going to be a really long weekend.  

   The moment we got to our sunny campsite at Crow’s Nest on Friday afternoon, the entire family went right to work: I collected firewood; Cathy set up the kitchen with Mom; Dad rigged up a big plastic tarp over the kitchen with rope in case it rained; and Don and Doug assembled the big, green box tent. But after all the chores had been completed, everybody went right back to who they were before we got here: Dad sat in a folding chair and read the newspaper; Cathy sat on the picnic table and listened to her transistor radio; Don and Doug disappeared into thin air; and Mom burned our hot dogs until they looked like Tiparillo cigars. Meanwhile, by evening, Crow's Nest campground had completely changed, becoming filled to capacity with people, their cars and trailers crammed with so much stuff it was as if they’d never left home at all. 

   Even nature changed. It rained during dinner. Lightning flashed nearby. Wind kept blowing the gas stove out. I got cold and wet. Everyone snarled and bickered. Then, as we sat around the campfire roasting marshmallows on sticks, wet wood made the campfire smokey. Eventually, only the stick ends that poked around in the coals spoke. Orange embers faded out. Some crackled upon their last breath. One ember popped so loud Mom jumped right out of her seat. And after the fire was done, Dad completely exploded when the kitchen tarp fell down. 

   Living in nature was supposed to be fun, but this wasn’t anything like the mild and cloudless outdoor Westerns I’d seen in Sugarfoot, Wagon Train, and Daniel Boone. I felt stuck in no man’s land somewhere between real nature and television’s portrayal of it. After I wriggled into my sleeping bag Friday night, positioned by Mom and Dad directly between theirs, I grew more and more restless, dreaming of lying on my bed at home, not a musty canvas floor on top of rocky ground. It might take hours to get to sleep tonight. 

   By the time I woke in the morning, everyone had left the tent. When I tried to wiggle out of my bag, I couldn’t. It was strapped all around with rope. Mom, Dad, or some boogeyman had wrapped me up during the night. Don and Doug used to sleepwalk when they were young, but I never had.

   A bit wobbly, I walked out of the tent. Was it because of the twisting and squirming trying to get out from the bound bag that I felt so numb, or was I in some kind of shock? 

   As I sat alone in the drizzle, staring into a new campfire, I waited for an explanation from someone why rope had been wrapped around me. After no one spoke about the lassoing issue as if it never existed, I threw the rope in the fire when everyone’s backs were turned. As it burned, I marveled at how fascinating flames were, solid and powerful one minute and gone the next. If fire wasn’t solid, could it be I wasn’t solid either? Was the log I sat on solid? Did this weekend even happen? Did the crashing waves on the Delaware shore we visited last summer ever exist? All I knew was that campfires, waves, and even drizzle were the best things on earth. But I also understood how the raw outdoors brought out the true nature in everyone, for better and for worse. It’s just the way it was, the way people were. Maybe that’s why Saturday and Sunday were no different than Friday. 

   As we drove back late Sunday afternoon, I thought back on the weekend. I learned that too many people in nature wasn’t a good thing. It even made some people turn into Sasquatch overnight. And once we got home, it felt like there were too many people in the house, too – a crowd around the refrigerator, a rush to the radio, a line for the toilet. Once I made it into the bathroom and cleaned my face and hands with soap, something Mom demanded I do, I got that dreamy, fiery, beachy feeling again. There in the mirror, a big bubble rested peacefully on my forehead, reflecting all kinds of colors on its soapy exterior, projecting beautiful scenes of nature and loving people. But then, just like a dying, fading ember, it popped.     

~   FAMILY LIFE   ~

   Did birds love? Could birds love? Was such a thing possible? In time, I thought the question stupid and stopped asking it.

   For weeks, I’d been keeping a keen eye on the finches who’d built a nest in our backyard oak, how the mother sat so devotedly atop her blue speckled eggs, how the red-headed father risked all life and limb chasing birds away who flew too close to the nest. It seemed the parent’s work might never be over, that is, until today when the newborn’s chirps and peeps put me into a kind of trance listening from below the nest. The mother’s care had paid off and the father’s war against potential invaders had been won. 

   “Michael,” Mom shouted from the porch door. “Come inside and join the family.”

   I walked down into the basement where Don, Doug, and Cathy were already flocked around Dad.

   “Okay, Michael, gather round us here. Look how beautiful this cabinet is. Feel that grain. All ash. And I know a lot about wood, kids.”

   Even though my siblings rolled their eyes, I enjoyed how Dad stood nearer, how his eye contact with us was longer than usual, that he was so excited, excited about anything, this time, to show off our new Motorola Quasar color TV. As I walked with Dad closer to the set to feel the smooth texture of the its shiny, shellacked cabinet, Mom stepped in between me and the beloved, glowing Quasar.

   “Eric, put another beer can down on that set without a coaster and I’m going to brain you,” she said, hovering around the Quasar like a hawk. 

   “Dad,” Don said, “the picture’s rolling.”  

   “What? Not again,” he said, pounding one side of the Quasar with his open fist.

   “Eric! Don’t you dare.”

   “I can take care of this.”

   “What, by pummeling the set? That’s what happened to the last TV you broke.”

   “Yeah, Dad, what happened to the old Silvertone anyway?” Doug said.

   “You kids watch too much TV. When I was a boy your age growing up in Maine as a dirt poor immigrant from Finland –”

   “Oh, Eric, please. When my great grandparents immigrated to America, they had to live in ice cold caves in Minnesota where Indians taught them how to hunt and forage for food. While the women reared the young and did all the cooking, the men were busy all day hunting and collecting firewood and protecting the area from invaders. It’s a system that worked, Eric, one that’s worked forever because they all worked together. You would’ve clubbed the natives to death with a nine iron. And failed.”

   When he drubbed the set again, I tried to stand in his way. 

   “Michael – out,” Dad said.

   “That’s it, Eric. I will not let this mechanical box of wires and damn fool technology get in the way of our family again. You three, upstairs and finish your homework. Michael, go up to your room. No more TV. I swear someday you are going to pay for being glued to a screen all day long!” 

   On her squawk, Don, Doug, and Cathy scattered. Mom angrily turned off the set and Dad went straight to the band saw to cut wood. Cathy yelled from atop the stairs that Cookie’s neck looked hurt whereupon Mom, still hot under the collar, thumped up to the kitchen. Left alone, I realized this was just part of the system that existed here. 

   I stayed in the basement and pondered how Mom, like the finch, was just doing all the work she was supposed to as a mother. The finch, however, unlike Mom, always seemed so peaceful and calm after she’d birthed her young, basking in the sun and chirping away on sunny days. So did the father finch. Maybe they really did love each other.   

   “Michael! What did I tell you? Get up to your room this very instant,” Mom hollered from atop the stairs. 

   “Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.” 

   As I entered the first-floor hallway from the basement, Mom was doing her usual routine to blow off steam by standing in front of the bathroom mirror and doling out gobs of cream from the blue Noxzema bottle, then slathering the goop all over her face. 

   As I turned the corner, Dad had gone to a bottle of beer to blow off his steam. There, nestled in the living room chair was an outstretched newspaper, a pair of legs straightened upon an ottoman, and one hand holding a Budweiser. No head, no body, just the face of Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, spread across the sports page.   

   With every claw dug into the rug, repeatedly clutching, then releasing fabric as if kneading bread, Dexter sat like a sphinx below Frick’s face, just waiting to attack. At the exact moment Frick's head moved, Dexter, our cat, thrust his spring-loaded body up onto Dad’s lap. 

   Not one for cats, Dad swept Dexter off his lap.

   Not one for rejection, Dexter jumped back.

   Not one to be thrown off balance – ever, Dad swiped back.  

   Not one for Dad, Dexter leapt back.

   “Goddam cat,” he said, sweeping Dexter away so smoothly the newspaper barely moved an inch. What control Dad exhibited, done with such Fred Astaire flair. I, too, barely moved an inch, standing so still in the corner of the room that Dad never spotted me or my four-inch-wide smirk.

   The undisputed king of the castle – that’s how Dad saw himself. But poor Dexter. He still had so much more to learn about Dad, that in being the man of the house, no way he was ever going to surrender his aloof time, his man-being-a-man time. Today was just one example how he shielded himself from a world so chockfull of personal difficulties, not to mention a universe of technological booby traps such as those that lurked behind the Quasar’s glittering screen. That’s what Dad was good at, protecting himself, and, I suppose, the family in general. But, upon understanding Dad’s nature better today, I felt Dexter was lucky he hadn’t been strangled to death or clubbed senseless by a nine iron. After all, a wild and unpredictable predator, this time our house pet, had been acting up. That was just part of the system in our house for Dad and, from time to time, his showing us the beauty of things like the nature of different kinds of wood.

~   BEHIND EVERY CORNER A ROSE   ~

   With one look at my red, watery eyes, Mom slapped the eyeliner pencil down on her vanity.

   “You’re still crying over him? Do you know how convoluted this makes my day to miss work and stay home because you’re still upset? Well, no, I won’t. You’ll stay home from school on the stipulation that Rose will keep an eye on you while I’m gone.”

   I was only ten. How was I supposed to know what “convoluted” and “stipulation” meant?

   As I headed upstairs to my bedroom, thinking about Rose made me feel better. She’d always taken the time to answer my questions. When I’d once asked why there weren’t more colored people around our neighborhood, she replied, “Your street filled with hard-working, colored cleaning ladies, jes that nobody sees ‘em.” When I’d asked why that was, she said, “We come here after y’all leave in the mornin’ and we’re gone before y’all get back. We got the four o’clock bus to catch back into DC.” But when I’d queried why cleaning ladies were always colored, and why colored ladies were cleaners and not something else, she didn’t respond. It was the only time Rose failed to answer one of my questions.

   Despite being here only on Mondays to clean the house, Rose seemed to know everything that went on in our home, as if she was with you wherever you walked, her dark skin a calming shadow looming around every corner. She knew what to do and what not to do, like avoid vacuuming in the basement when I was there minding every word of an I Love Lucy rerun. 

   Finally, after Mom had departed for work and Rose entered the house, I left my room and flopped on the braided carpet below the dining room table where Dexter and I used to loaf after school. Whenever I’d played with him, it stopped my knee knocking straight away, a fidgeting habit I had that irritated Mom. Tossing one of her big, colorful yarn balls ball at Dexter had always made me laugh out loud – how quickly he unraveled her skintight sphere into smithereens. But Dexter was no longer here and my mind wandered back to Saturday’s visit to the vet clinic with Mom.

   “More than likely your cat died from septicaemia,” the vet had said, a tall man dressed in a lab coat that turned blinding white set against the sickly, pea-green-painted walls behind him. “Either that or an infection from acute bladder cystitis or bacterial kidney pyelonephritis.”

   “What? Why’d it get infected then?” I asked. 

   “We don’t know, Michael,” Mom said. 

   “We do know, from too much sand grit. Friskies are a killer to urinary tracts, ma’am. Flat out poisons the animal.” 

   From that moment on I cried, and I cried most of the weekend, and I cried this morning until my eyes became noticeably red again.

  Under the table, without Dexter today, my knees started knocking. As I smoothed away some cat hairs from the rug, I wondered if Mom had mentioned anything to Rose about Dexter’s death. I drew in closer, investigating her face as never before. Had Rose always had such dark brown eyes?

   After she pulled out the vacuum cleaner cord from the outlet, a rhythm arose between the beat of my knocking knees and her wrapping the cord around the beastly machine. Being a long cord, it made for a long song, and when that was done, there was a long silence before Rose spoke.  

   “So quiet today, Michael. A weight like the Empire State Building top ‘a your head down there. You all right?”

   I picked away at stray threads that held the carpet’s braids together when her shoes stepped in closer.

   “What?” I said.

   “If you’re sad, then you just gotta keep the pot boilin’ any way you can.”

   “No, things are fine.”

   “What, stickin’ yourself down in that hole? Leave that string yarn alone an’ come on outta there, ’cuz your show’s on. Go on downstairs an’ watch. Smile again.”

   “I don’t wanna watch Amos ‘n Andy now.”

   “What? You wanna miss George and Sapphire goin’ at it again? Why, that George such a stupid and bullheaded man. If only he stopped shoutin’ an’ hollerin’, he’d be better off – Amos, Andy, Lightnin’, all those men. Jes little boys, really.”

   As she picked up the heavy cleaning machine extra-carefully with both arms and rose to standing position, I could tell it was hard on her back to do so. 

   “Do you like cleaning our house?” 

   “I most certainly do. An’ time to clean the basement now. Comin’?”

   “No.”

   She placed the vacuum cleaner gently back down on the floor. Leaning in toward me, she said, almost in a whisper, “He was such a good cat. I miss him, too. Need someone to talk to?”

   “Mom’s always busy. Dad’s never home.”

   “I mean me.”

   “Oh.”

   “It’s okay, Michael. When you’re ready.”

   “Why did Dexter have to die?”

   “Well, it’s a very sad thing, very sad, but I think it’s good it happened now, while you’re young, a lesson that’ll remind you the rest of your life what’s important.”

   “Like what?” 

   “Like how change is inevitable and valuable. How loving all people and creatures is important. I see that in you, Michael, an’ I think you knew Dexter had a spirit. Most people won’t, never will. I see how you take the outdoors as your own, how you’re in touch with things, an’ you’re not afraid of silence. Keep these traits. Remember them all your days, ‘cuz one day when you’re as old as I am, you’re gonna need ‘em. We all need ‘em, if we ever had ‘em, now more than ever.”

   Cradling the gigantic, bullet-shaped machine in her arms like a baby, Rose cautiously walked toward the basement stairs. 

   “I think I wanna watch Amos n Andy now,” I said.

   “Well, all right then. Let’s go on down.”

   With each step descending the stairs, I thought more about Dexter and how my world had felt far less complicated with him in it: it was only when people got involved with things that life felt out of control. But not when Rose was around. She used short words, was easy to understand, and used a simple bow to tie her red apron. Other than that, there were never any strings attached to Rose.     

~   HUMORESQUE   ~

   Saturdays in our household were Family Night, and the hub of our domestic universe was the Silvertone, beaming out Hollywood family sitcoms across the basement. As Cathy customarily took to one chair and I sat with Mom and Dad on the center sofa, Don and Doug slouched on the other couch, spinning in their own personal orbit over in the dark space of the basement’s corner. As if the corny theme song to The Donna Reed Show hadn’t already been enough for Don and Doug to endure earlier tonight, I couldn’t help but notice them rolling their eyes now at the flittering violins, choppy piano, and sappy harmonica during the beginning of My Three Sons that had just oozed out from the set’s speakers.

   I, on the other hand, zeroed intently in on popcorn and what sounded like the muffled grand finale of fireworks exploding somewhere far off in the distance. There, over on the counter, such life existed in that rattling, aluminum Redi-Pop machine, and I just had to find it. 

   After dashing across to the counter, I jumped up and down in anticipation of hearing the last kernel explode inside the popper. 

   “You are such a little spaz,” Doug said. 

   “It’s just popcorn,” Don said.    

   There was something about their body language, their snarl that could make any homemade snack taste less appealing, the sitcoms we watched less hopeful. In a mopey mood now, I felt sorry for the un-popped kernels left in the bottom of my bowl. How pitiful I was, thinking those husks could actually feel abandoned down there, sorry they hadn’t been able to explode into who they were fully born to be, even if it meant being eaten the very moment they’d come into existence.

   After having finished eating, my mind wandered back to The Donna Reed Show and the scene when little Jeff’s teenage sister had boyfriend problems and decided to give up on boys all together. I wondered what I would have said to her if I’d been Jeff. And now, focusing on My Three Sons, I imagined myself as the youngest son, Chip, and what I’d do after he'd just found out his older brother had eloped with his girlfriend.

   “How fake,” Doug blurted out. “None of that stuff in My Three Sons ever happens in real life. What a bunch of bull!”

   “Douglas – hush,” Mom said.

   “And Donna Reed was too corny to believe. I’m going upstairs,” Don said, whereupon both my brothers took to the stairs.

   I supposed they were right. After all, it was pretty unrealistic how every son on these shows had girlfriends and all the daughters had great hair. It was pretty fake how every kid got good grades, boys were in sports, and girls were class presidents. Don and Doug were ready to take on the real world now. They’d done everything Mom and Dad had asked and kept their noses to the grindstone to get good grades for college. All throughout their time in school, they’d steered themselves free of distraction from community and neighborhood events, not to mention extra-curricular school activities and athletics. Aside from being in Boy Scouts, they had very few friends to divert themselves from studying, and the last thing they had time for were girlfriends.

   The next day, the casual stroll I took around our neighborhood turned into a family sitcom all its own, as if experiencing my very own episode of Leave it to Beaver on Whitney Street: little kids playing in the yards, teens washing cars, fathers mowing lawns, and that love-smitten Mason boy hanging around the oldest Gesford girl like glue. 

   Before re-entering our house, I gazed up at our two dormer windows, seated like bookends atop the slippery slope of the roof. Each window framed a silhouette – one of Don and his shoulders slumped over a textbook on the left, and the same for Doug on the right. Such unreal, black shapes my brothers were. If they headed off for college right now, would they leave the house with nothing but good grades?

   Minutes later, holding on to one of Dad’s familiar luggage cases, I burst into their room. From their separate desks, the twins eyed me as if a total stranger had entered. 

   “Good day, sirs. I see you are doing homework, but this will only take a moment.”

   “What’s with the act?” Doug said.

   “Beat it,” Don said.

   “Lemme take just a minute to open your eyes up to the fine bargains I have here in my –”

   “Out – ” 

   I laid the opened suitcase on Don’s desk. “Just feel the fine weave of these slacks, that texture, that wool,” I said, gliding the suitcase toward Don for closer inspection. “All handcrafted by an Amish family, made in old-fashioned and traditional ways that will one day be gone. You need that.”

   “Need what?” 

   “Old, traditional ways.” Don’s old, traditional eye roll returned. “Okay, okay, then how about these fine pressed and starched shirts?”

   “Those’re Dad’s –”

   “What, you guys don’t think any of these’ll impress the girls? Love works in mysterious ways, fellas, and with these finely pressed shirts and a little candlelight music, maybe throw in a bouquet of flowers, you’ll have girls at your feet –”

   “Go away!” Doug said.

   Leaning in closer to Don, I whispered, “Hey, no need for him to know. I could send these out special COD just for you. I can even get them free for you at half price.”

   “Wha-a-a?” he said, going eye-to-eye with me.

   Then, to my total amazement, I saw not the roll of Don’s dry, barren eyes but a tiny, little smile blossoming on his moist lips, a grin he failed to contain. 

   Suddenly, from just outside the closed bedroom door, Mom’s laundry basket clunked on the floor. I tried to curb my laugh, but couldn’t. Then, as the three of us turned our heads and listened in, we anticipated the exact order of sounds we’d been hearing every Sunday and Wednesday night at exactly this time for years: the familiar squeak of the hamper lid opening, Mom’s throaty groan, the hamper lid banging shut, her feet thumping down the stairs.

   “My goodness, fellas. Who was that? What’s with your family, anyway?” I said.

   “That’s Mom and you know it –” 

   “No, my mother lives in Burbank. Scout’s honor, Sam.”

   “You’re worse than television. You are television.”  

   “Guaranteed to make girls flip.”

   “Out,” Doug yelled.

   “Love is in the air –” 

   “Out,” Don said.

   It was that smile, that little grin on Don’s face when I whispered, “I can even get them free for you at half price,” that compelled me to stay longer. I just had to hear some kind of pop, see some sort of bloom, or smell some hint of fireworks or perfume in the air before they ever left this house. They wanted to flower, I just knew it, but I guessed the dirt was just too dry here to bear any fruit. Next time, I’d pack a watering can in the suitcase. 

~   THIN SKINNED   ~

   Perhaps there was splendid fortune in this after all, how the little kitchen window by the back door, the one with tomatoes ripening on the sill, had been left unlocked. I was determined today’s story would end differently from how it had three times last year when I’d lost my house key and had to wait outside until someone in the family finally came home to let me in.

   In my haste to enter the house and not be caught, especially by Mom or Dad, I slid the window up so fast the tomatoes fell, splitting them open, splattering their guts everywhere all over the kitchen counter. 

   As I crawled through the tight window space, my T-shirt and pants became covered in red glop – Brandywine goop, Tumbling Tom goo, Amish Paste ooze – all bloody, foul-tasting heirloom varieties Mom had specially selected for their juicy nature and thinner skins. Yet, here I stood, my hide covered in a sauce of screaming red fruit from something Mom called the nightshade family of plants whose tart liquid stung my skin and seemed to penetrate it as easily as water through a Kleenex.

   Once inside, after slamming the window shut, there were no more sounds of crows squawking, hum of neighbor’s lawnmowers, and kids playing in the street. Such a stark stillness existed in the room. Yes, our tiny kitchen had always been a quiet, peaceful place, but too quiet, almost dead. After all that work to get in here, I realized now that I actually preferred to be outside again. 

   The living room door slammed shut. Mom – she’d come home early. My heart – she must have heard it pounding all the way from there. The holiday – how could I have forgotten it was Good Friday, that not only businesses had let out early but schools just like mine, and that the whole family could be home any minute now. 

   I’d no sooner swiped all the tomatoes from the counter into the trash can when there she was, gasping in horror at the sight of her son covered in precious heirlooms. Mom’s posture was so uptight, her facial expression so scornful, it actually came as a relief to hear her speak.

   “You’ve ruined our Good Friday dinner,” she said, overplaying her part even further. “And you lost it again, didn’t you?”  

   Unable to face her, I twisted my torso from her gaze, and that’s when I let it out, a word I was never allowed to speak in our house – “That damned house key!”

   A moment of silence filled the dead air, followed by the knocks of Dad’s hard footsteps approaching, and finally the most forceful squeeze on the back of my neck that I’d ever experienced. If Mom regularly used words and expressions to kill, Dad’s method of murder was a vice grip so strong it practically brought me to my knees every time. Being the Big Beef of our nightshade family, Dad could destroy you – without blows, without blood oozing – by mere use of his specialized version of pressure to retain dominance over the entire crop of his family. 

   When Dad finally loosened his grasp, I turned around. The whole family had assembled, watching, wondering what was to follow. There stood Don and Doug, biting their fingernails even more than usual; Cathy leaned against the sink, folding her arms tighter than ever; and Mom and Dad stood next to each other but, as always, made sure not to touch the other’s skin. An air of expectation ignited the room – what would Dad do next? All around the room, faces looked sour, even worse than the apostle’s expressions in DaVinci’s “The Last Supper.” After all, today was Good Friday, although not for me. Even when Spanky, our new Siamese cat, walked in and meowed, his adorable little trill couldn’t disarm their armor or cut the tension. For that he’d need a blowtorch.  

   Dad said nothing. Nobody did, only Mom, demanding that our holiday ham dinner, one destined to be without tomatoes this year, would start at six o’clock on the dot. 

   Crouched over our dinner plates and silverware sets, we lent our ears to Mom’s tepid version of grace. Afterward, despite our continued reticence to speak, there was nevertheless considerable communication going on across the table. For so carelessly losing the house key again, Mom gave me the most royal silent treatment and set of stink eyes ever. She gave an equal dose of them to Dad, but that had been going on for weeks ever since he demanded they pay for Don and Doug’s college tuition and she said they would not. Cathy gave the silent treatment to Don and Doug, but that game had been going on even longer because, as she explained it to me, she hated being the middle child sandwiched between all boys, and that if it wasn’t for them, she’d have been born first. And because Don gave the silent treatment to Doug – why I didn’t know – it didn’t take a genius to see how Doug was giving it right back to Don, probably for no other reason than they were twins. No one wanted to say anything for fear of being bruised in return, or maybe it was just me who didn’t want to get split open like a smashed tomato. I’d always appreciated silence, but this variety was lethal. 

   All of the sudden, Mom’s chair slid backwards with such a hideous screech that I grabbed the table in fright!

   “Jesus, Michael – relax,” Mom said. “I’m just going to the kitchen to get something.”

   I’d barely caught my breath before she spoke again.

   “Oh, no, Michael, get in here. Spanky threw up near the refrigerator.”

   “What?” 

   “Who?” Dad said. “You mean that cat’s not –” 

   “Eric –”

   “He’s not Dexter?”

   “Dad, Dexter died weeks ago. That’s Spanky.” 

   “Michael,” Mom said, “I told you if we got another one, he was your responsibility, so get in here and clean it up.”

   “What, you mean I’m excused from the table?” 

   Oh, the splendor of it all. I’d been freed from dinner all because of puke! Yes, I’d be thrilled to clean his barf! Yes, how gratified I’d been to have chosen another Siamese cat that looked just like Dexter to confuse Dad at every turn – he hated cats. In fact, I was so elated by everything that I got down on the linoleum floor and kissed Spanky right on the lips.

   “What are you doing?!” Mom said. “He just threw up, for God’s sake. Get away from him. No telling what he’s got.”

   “Okay. But why’d he up-chuck?”

   “Who knows? He needed to get something out of him that was bad. So, he threw up. End of story.”

 
I guess he just couldn’t keep all those red chunks and thin, stringy skins of heirloom tomatoes inside him any longer.



~    KINSHIPS   ~

   Standing in line at the pool’s edge, linked shoulder to shoulder with eight other wet-headed boys, my body shook while waiting for the instructor to arrive. The air inside the Silver Spring YMCA indoor pool was nauseating and thick, and breathing was like inhaling a bread loaf made with flour, Clorox, with just a pinch of Tide. For seven weeks, we’d been meeting every Tuesday morning in hopes of mastering the crawl stroke, something I’d envisioned being some technique performed on all fours. But during the first few lessons, I’d come to realize it really meant being held afloat in cold water by a hairy man with fat fingers who gripped my wrist far too hard while trying to physically beat a concept into me how my arms should rotate like this and not like that. I’d never had a man for a teacher before, and I’d never had a swimming test either, but both were meeting head on today whether I liked it or not.

   Finally, the instructor waddled out from the pool office, complete with clipboard in his chubby hand, whistle around his thick neck, and abdominal scar on the part of his belly that bulged over his swim trunks like a wave about to break.

   “Andberg, what’re you shivering for? You look about to croak.”

   “The shower, sir.”

   “That was ten minutes ago. It’s hot as Hades in here. No, Stefanski, don’t give him a towel. And is that you laughing over there, Johnson? Let’s see you pass before you laugh. Okay, you yoofs. You know what today is. To pass the course, it’s proper crawl stroke to the other side and back. And after all this time, if you can’t do that, you deserve to drown. Anyone wanna volunteer to go first? I didn’t think so. Alphabetical order then. Andberg. You’re up. Go.”

   My dive off from the pool’s edge was smooth and powerful. No thought, just action. As I held my breath underwater, I imagined I was in the ocean, teaming with fish and mammals, all sharing the water together, and that I could swim as far away from the class and my instructor as I wanted.

   When I surfaced and began the crawl stroke, churning my arms around like a wobbly windmill, he yelled, “Leg kick, side breaths, arm motion.” Too many words, too many instructions, too many motions to put together. Chaos. Stinging eyes. Chlorine-covered tongue. Liquid around me getting thicker and thicker. Was I swimming in water or Valvoline?

   By the time I finished and reached the pool’s edge, my cough rivaled an old Studebaker backfiring smoke.

   “Andberg, what was that?” the instructor said, leaning over toward me.

   “I … swallowed … swallowed water.”

   It was less an opportunity as punishment when he made me do it again.

   After my second attempt, all he uttered was, “Andberg, that was not the crawl stroke. See you back here next summer.”

   Next summer. An entire year. Three-hundred and sixty-five nights in which I’d see this cold-blooded, small fry of a man in my dreams.

   Walking out of the facility, I headed toward the grassy hillside next to the outdoor pool. Mom, Don, Doug, and Cathy were in the water swimming, so I spread my shivering body out on the family beach blanket. The grass permeated a strong earthy odor from the sun and heat. I knew this is where I belonged.

   Within the wispy clouds above, the premonition of Mom’s face appeared, the angry one she’d use once she learned I’d flunked my Tadpoles test. But soon, as warmth took over my entire frame, her scowl dissolved into the sunny disposition of Mrs. Clark, last year’s fourth-grade teacher who’d taught oceanography and geography so well they became my favorite subjects. How could I forget what she said? “Although the geography and oceanography worlds are vastly different, there exists a certain kinship between them that is crucial for life on earth. Yes, they have so very much in common for their own survival.” Then she went on to use the example of the boys in class, how even though they were all different as individuals, by virtue of being males, boys – and men – were inseparably linked and always would be.

   I was inextricably linked to my swimming instructor, Khrushchev, and Hitler? I was related to Eddie Haskell and all the other male delinquents who roamed the earth? When people met me for the first time, would they always wonder “is he one of the good ones or bad ones?” all because I was a boy and not a girl?

   I dashed to the deep end of the pool and dove in. It did me good. Sometimes change was necessary, even when it felt harsh and cold. After allowing myself to slowly sink to the bottom, I played with the little rocks that weren’t supposed to be there. I basked in the silence of deep water. It was only the surface world that bothered me, the place where people dwelled. Why couldn’t I love all people? I knew that once up there, I’d be instantly bothered by the bossy lifeguard, the spazzy kids splashing about, and Don and Doug showing off their athletic swimming and diving skills. And after having crawled onto land, I’d be the only creature alive who’d flunked his beginner Tadpole course. How could I sink so low? Would I be the kind of person destined to swim upstream the rest of his life?

   It was time to hold my breath and crawl my arms through the thick water across to the shallow end of the pool.

   How wonderful to feel the water’s sun-drenched warmth here, to sense other swimmer’s skins touching mine. I found a kind of soft spot in me, a place I was more curious than afraid. It was hard to explain why the mere brush of their skin against my flesh was so satisfying and exciting. And some of them were even boys.   

~   WHAT GOT US HERE   ~

   The deeply set roots I’d pushed my shoes off from, the thick tree trunk I’d wrapped my arms around, the tree’s system of strong branches I’d grasped many times for dear life – without them, I couldn’t have achieved my goal of climbing halfway up our backyard oak today, just as I’d been doing for years.

   Anchored on my most favored branch fifteen feet up, I no sooner got comfortable when I heard banging sounds coming from inside the house. Curious, I backed down the oak and entered through the kitchen door.

   The whole family was standing there, but where was Mom?

   Her after-work slacks and black canvas sneakers practically eye-to-eye with me, and now those fierce, dark pupils glaring down at my blues. Mom was standing on the stove, taking down the spice rack!

   “It’s about time you all arrived. Now hear this. No more home-cooked meals. From today on, salt, pepper, and Shake ‘n Bake are plenty of seasoning for this family. And this?” she added, tossing her mother’s ancient, dog-eared Joy of Cooking book on the floor. “Only recipe to remember now is ‘Preheat to 375 and cook for forty-five minutes’ because frozen TV dinners and pot pies are here to stay. It’s the twentieth century, people, the one with Swanson’s, Chef Boy-ar-dee, and Chun King, so get used to it.”

    Was Mom chucking all she knew about healthy, homemade meals for packaged, salty, and sugary food substitutes? Cool! Rose had always said change was a good thing, and she was so right.

   “Peg,” Dad uttered, “Look, I need to get back to the office –”

   “Eric? Whatever. Just go. Go.”

   Turning her back to us kids, prying nails out from the wall with a hammer, she grumbled, “Ever since we moved here, all I do is work to help pay bills, then come home to cook and clean and never get any help.”

   Eyes rolled and heads shook slowly side to side.

   “Michael, you could be a man every once in a while and help bring in the heavy bags of groceries instead of watching that idiot box all day or going outside alone doing who knows what. You think too much, you know that? And, you twins, no appreciation of where the money’s coming from to pay for college, as if it grows on trees.”

   Cathy was going to get it next. I could just hear witchy Mom blast into her with, “And as for you, my little pretty, I’ll get you, too!” but ripped out with, “Just like your father, I bet you all won’t even turn the oven on to cook dinner. What planet does that man come from, the one with the bowling alley, Kiwanis Club, and golf course to escape to every night –”

   “Mom –”

   “So, hear me out, you four. It’s the modern sixties now –”

   “Mom –”

   “No more of my planning camping trips, shopping for the freshest vegetables, attending those blasted PTA meetings and community events. I’m not doing ‘em anymore, people, I’m not –”

   “Mom. Mom –”

   “What?!”

   “It’s just me. They all left. Like, a long time ago.”

   Turning fully around, she mumbled, “Well – I never. Leave me alone.”

   “But I don’t want you to fall –”

   “Go. Just go.”    

   After that, I went outside and climbed the oak again.
          

   This time, the view provided a spectacular panorama of our street as I’d never seen it before. There, off in the distance, not just ordinary, dark silhouetted crows flapping their wings against the silvery sky, but ones like the creepy, flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz that swept down to the ground and picked off defenseless people. Why was it I always remembered the cruelest scenes and meanest characters from the black and white movies I watched? Even so, I believed only shades of meanness existed in people, that there was hope within everyone, and because of that, whenever Mom turned wretched, I’d continue to seek out whatever qualities of Glinda, the Good Witch of the South, existed in her. I’d continue to pretend I was Superman with powers capable of peering through that thick, brick wall below me to observe Mom sitting in the den just behind it and discover that she was actually much nicer in private. But magical things like that only happened in cartoons and movies, not real life.

   Spanky wandered from the bushes over to the tree trunk. Stopping to scratch it a while, he plopped down with a most satisfied look on his face.

   “Spanky,” I said, gazing out into space, “remember the scene when Dorothy woke from her dream in Oz after the terrible twister? And then how all her loved ones surrounded the bed to help her, and they seemed to her to have been in the dream, but only as strange characters that looked like them? Well, today I wanted to see Mom as Auntie Em, and the rest of our family as Hunk, Hickory, and Zeke, but they were really more like people who tried to say loving things and couldn’t, or maybe they just didn’t know how to show love anymore. I dunno. But the moment when Auntie Em reached out and touched Dorothy? That moment got to me. That was real. But Mom’s not Auntie Em. She’s just not. Forget it.”

   Spanky had begun a snooze. I noted the tree trunk and all the footholds and branches above him, the foundations I’d used to climb higher, and wondered: what had my foundations been, the most important things that had gotten me here?

   Quickly, the movie of myself began playing – just out there, memories of lounging with Mom and Dexter on the lawn after we’d moved here, being bowled over by the scent of June honeysuckle the following summer, the change of seasons seen in the yard every year. The entire movie’s cast and location also came into view – the neighbors who were never mean because they had no reason to be, the mysterious Blazek family who rarely came outside, the old man with his creaky cart who loudly hawked his fresh-picked strawberries every Thursday, and elderly Mrs. Bennett and her backyard garden, filled with rows of vegetables, such fresh food of the unboxed variety. These were the things that had gotten me here, and Mom here as well. They were our root, our bedrock. But now, she seemed to be completely abandoning them, separating herself from her own community, people, family, and nature, and for what? – more money, bigger job, nicer house, fancy appliances, and a new world that was forever quicker and easier? But Rose had said change was necessary. Now I was confused.

   Truth was, TV dinners tasted like cardboard and I wanted my other mother back, the one who burned her homemade meals to a crisp on a crappy stove. I yearned for the Mom I loved who I thought loved me, and the keystone foundations we held.

Someday, when I was in my forties like she was now, would I do the same thing?

I saw how Mom’s movie was playing out. I didn’t want to be a sequel to that.



                                                                       ~   HOLES, FINGERS, HANDS, PLASTER   ~    

   The rain outside somehow made the hush in the house feel even more pronounced. How calming. Barely any noise. So little dialogue. Not an echo in the place.

   In time, however, I became edgy, as if some hole in me needed to be filled. Normally, whenever I felt this way, a voice would say, “Go outside and let the forest tell you what to do.” And even with today’s rain, I still heard the voice, this time uttering, “Be hands-on, Michael, be hands-on.”

   “Mom, I need something to do.”

   “What? Do what?”

   “That’s just it. I dunno.” 

   She kept looking away. 

   “Mom.” 

   Now she was getting up to leave. 

   “Mom.”

   “You’ll figure it out,” she said, walking out of the kitchen. 

   I wanted to scream, absolutely scream, but didn’t. No one in our family ever screamed. I remembered how Cathy complained so hard one day she nearly screamed and got grounded for it. But when Don and Doug did that once, they were barely scolded. Boys got treated so differently. Poor Cathy. Just as she might not know what to do with herself if the urge to scream came upon her one day, I was lost now as to what to do with my twitchy fingers. I guess that’s why I heard the forest whisper, “Go to wood, Michael. Wood.”

   So, I did it, something I’d feared doing for years. I finally passed through the dark corridor below the basement stairs that led from the hallway into Dad’s carpentry cave, the workroom where wood was everywhere. My hands could get busy. I’d work closely with Dad. I might even discover we had something in common.

   As I entered the threshold, Dad was crouched over his workbench holding a saw. A pine two-by-four was smooshed so tightly in a vice that I expected tears of sap to ooze from its pores.

   “Hi, Dad. Cutting wood today?” He cleared his throat and kept sawing. “Sawdust in the air?” I faked a cough. “Need help?”

   “No.”

   But his workroom was crawling with so many hands-on things to play with, like the power saw.  

   “Hey!”

   “Oh,” I yipped, jumping backwards.

   “Machines are dangerous. Hands off that band saw. You’re lucky it wasn’t on.”

   “Why’s it in here then?”

   “Machines make work easier, life simpler.”

   “Yeah? How?”

   “One day when you’re older you’ll know how important machines and technology are.”

   How could that be? Dad’s car engine always stalled. Mom’s electric meat grinder always ground to a halt whenever it got backed up – “Our old hand-cranked one worked far better, Eric,” she often yelled, angered at receiving such a lousy Christmas gift from him in the first place.

   “Dad? Why do you come down here so much?”

   “I like carpentry.”

   “But you work as an architect.”

   “This isn’t work. I like working with wood in my free time.”

   “Why? I mean … why?”

   Dad loosened the vice a little. His voice softened.

   “We wouldn’t be where we are without wood, wood for shelter, fires for heat, all throughout the centuries.” But his whisper turned to a roar with, “Look, I’m busy, so go on up and –”

   “Eric,” Mom yelled from atop of the stairs. “Your bowling partner’s here.”

   “Quick. Put the hammer and awl back for me,” he said, slapping both tools in my hand.

   “The owl?”

   “Awl. Quickly,” he ordered, standing right behind me now.

    That huge wall of tools. Scores of them nailed skintight alongside the other. I couldn’t focus. Where was the hammer supposed to go? What space did the awl thing live in? Dad’s hot breath on the back of my neck. My bladder constricting. My breakfast juice squeezing up. My mouth belching the words, “But, but where does it go – ?”

   “You wanna know where a hammer goes? In the place that looks like where a hammer should go, for crissakes – there! And now what?”

   “What?”

   “That bald spot on the back of your head.”

   “Wadda’ya mean?”

   “That spot there, that empty patch in your scalp … have you been pulling hairs out?”

   “No.”

   “Yes, you have –”

   “No, I haven’t.”

   “Why would you pull your hair out? You’re only eleven.” 

   “Twelve.”

   “What?”

   I wanted Dad out of my hair so bad I ran upstairs to my room and slammed the door on my way in.

   A minute later, standing near my desk, still breathing hard, a soft tap came upon the door. Cathy opened it and poked her head inside. 

   “You okay? That big noise a second ago. What was it?”

   “I slammed the door.”

   “No, the other noise.” 

   “What noise?”

   “The thud. What was it? Come on, tell me.”

   Leaning in, opening the door completely, Cathy couldn’t miss the dark, shotput-sized cavity in the wall and specks of white plaster dotting the floor beneath it.

   “Why’d you do that?”

   “I dunno. Just did. Funny, my hand doesn’t hurt a bit.” 

   She drew in closer.

   “I like it.”

   “What?”

   “The hole. That’s the best thing you’ve ever done.”

   “What?”

   “Good for you,” she added, smiling on her way out, gently closing the door behind her, leaving me in a most reflective mood. 

   From now on, I would assume that when push came to shove, when the pressure got too intense, girls would always scream and guys would always pound things. There again, as far as I knew, Dad had never pounded anything except a few nails his whole life. And Cathy had never really screamed anything that I’d heard. I didn’t know what girls did when they couldn’t scream, and I also had no idea what I’d do if I had no hands in which to pound stuff, but in our case, it seemed to always have something to do with the unwanted silences in our lives. I knew hitting someone or something was despicable, but not as despicable as not being heard. Whenever that happened, I felt squeezed down to nothing, nothing at all.

   Knowing I had the delicate job of a hole to patch, I thought to tiptoe down to Dad’s workroom when no one was looking and swipe some putty to resolve the problem. But I didn’t. With such fidgety hands, I’d only mess things up trying to fix another hole I couldn’t fill. So, I remained in my room and wondered even more things: what would Dad have done without his precious vice to crush things with; why did he need to crank it so tight in the first place; and how it might be best from now on to just be “hands-off” with him. 

   I think it was the forest that whispered that last thought to me.  

~   DEATH AND LEVITY   ~ 

   I’d have bet an entire week of lunch money there wasn’t one other kid in all of Montgomery County, Maryland, that had a collection of newspaper articles like mine, and that’s why I hid them.

   It was just yesterday morning I pinned my little cork bulletin board of newspaper clippings inside a shirt on a hanger in my bedroom closet and, to be doubly safe, buried both inside the heavy Sunday suit I rarely wore. Mom would never know it was there, especially being so busy with all her regular chores and the extra choir rehearsal at St. Luke’s in preparation for tomorrow’s Easter Sunday services. All she could talk about this morning was how it was Holy Saturday, the day between the violent crucifixion and spiritual resurrection of Jesus Christ.

   While she attended rehearsal and went shopping in town, I mowed the backyard grass. Afterward, I rested against the oak and watched the neighborhood kids play in the street. The restless eight-year-old girl who had hung around me before one day made her way over.

   This time, the jumpy girl offered up a haircut game by dumping small clumps of freshly mown grass onto my head. When I told her to stop, she continued. As if holding scissors, she crisscrossed her fingers in a clipping motion and flicked bits of grass off my scalp. As her busy arms and fingers kept stirring wildly about, the bits trickled slowly down my skin. Each blade that brushed across my bare neck and arms made my entire body tingle, and the lightest touch caused my hair to literally stand on end. I’d never experienced such a warm feeling, such a weightless sensation, as if my whole body had lifted off the ground. Why hadn’t I ever felt this good before?

   “Michael,” Mom yelled from the kitchen door, startling me from my trance, “I’m back, and you better get in here right now because you’ve got a lot of explaining to do.”

   I no sooner opened the door when Mom held up my bulletin board and read the newspaper article headlines aloud.
       

   “‘Backhoe Operator Falls Backward, Crushed in Pool.’ ‘Man Creates Raft; Only Remains Found on Shore.’ What is this?”

   I couldn’t hold back the smile forming on my lips upon hearing such disgusting captions come from Mom’s incorruptible mouth.
  

   “But they’re real articles printed in the Evening Star, Mom.”

   “So? You think these kinds of hideous deaths are funny?”  

   “Well ….”

   “‘Woman Found Dead Upside Down in Rain Barrel’? Why are you collecting these grisly reports?”

   “I dunno.”

   “This is sick. I want an answer as to why you would –”

   “I dunno, I dunno. I just –”

   “You’re such a sensitive boy. Why’s death so funny all the sudden? ‘Cape Cod Fisherman Mauled by Sting Ray, Other Fishes’? How’d you like to be mauled to death?”

   “It’s not like I wanted them to die.”

   “You’re turning out just like all the other ruthless boys your age, and you’re doing this just to spite me.”

   “No, I’m not.”

   “‘Tornado Shreds Big Top; Carnies Missing.’ I’m shocked one of my own children thinks ungodly accidents are just so hilarious that –”

   “But, Mom, come on, when you think about it, it’s kind of funny, a bunch of surviving carnies running around town trying to find the circus tent.”

   I could tell she thought that was about as funny as having nails being driven into your hands.

   “I’m ashamed of you.”

   “Mom, don’t say that –”  

   “Yes, I will, because think if your sister Cathy had been one of those carnies –”

   “Mom –”

   “Or Donald, or Douglas that got killed? You think about that for a while.”

   During the long, lethal moment of silence that followed, why couldn’t I just tell her I was curious? Why couldn’t I explain I wanted to know something beyond Jesus’s demise, the one too invisible and too fantastical to believe how someone could die and rise from the dead? What were real deaths like? Was death really all that bad? It couldn’t be as fatal as being chopped to bits by guilt.

   “Is this what you do up there in your room all by yourself?”

   “Jesus, Mom.”

   “You need to get out more, find a friend, a wholesome and well-mannered boy to play with.”

   She reached around the corner and handed me my Sunday suit, now covered in a clean, clear One Hour Martinizing bag with new, pink receipt stapled to the top.

   “Here it is, just picked up and all ready for Easter tomorrow. You’ve got a lot of atoning to God to do, young man.”

   Finally, Mom was done. She’d had her say. She’d ripped me up, buried me in shreds below. Talk about violence. Normally I would have started crying if it weren’t for how funny I still thought everything was. Maybe I was going to hell. And maybe not. After all, change was good. All things had to die. In fact, after having heard about Jesus’s death a million times already, I felt quite resurrected now.      

~   AIRS   ~

   School recess was sweet mayhem.
  

   Sitting along the sideline of my elementary school playground, I was floating on perfumed air watching girls delicately hop in and out of the hopscotch boxes they’d drawn in chalk on the pavement. I had no interest in girl’s nonmaterial thoughts and actions anymore, more a growing fascination in their physical, fleshy side. What exactly was the difference between the words, “masculine” and “feminine” that we’d learned in school recently? In fact, my curiosity was so aroused that I dreamed of getting close enough to discover the closest of all aspects – girl's scent, if I dared.

   As for playground boys, I already knew who they were and what they smelled like. Their dodgeball games had produced skinned knees and bloody elbows, badges of honor for the roughest boys who rejoiced at the violence of their high-octane, ball-hurling war. Two from my sixth-grade class, Jay Barden and Bobby Bonecutter, were particularly good at this heated competition – you could smell it all over their twelve-going-on-thirteen-year-old bodies if you crossed by them too close.

   Bobby Bonecutter, his actual last name, had broken no one’s bones that I had heard of, but his boots alone could break someone’s ankle in half. And after I walked with Jay Barden to his house one day after school, I suspected he was another roughneck upon witnessing his four-year-old sister eat charcoal and like it. Only the sibling of a real roughneck would do that. Sisters of normal brothers wouldn’t have charcoal-covered lips and teeth, or revel in the crusty texture of their wild kin’s knee scabs. Regular girls, I’d always assumed, would smell clean or have no scent at all.

   When the games were over, Marion, Jay’s girlfriend of the month – also eye of the sixth-grade rumor cyclone – told me that a girl in our class named Reni liked me. No sooner had the sun set on our playground and come up again when Jay set up a double date for the four of us after school in the woods.

   As we strolled through the trees, a sweet aura filled my nostrils again. Was it smells of early fall and left-over flowers from summer, or perhaps a perfume coming from Reni’s own nature of scents?

   When Jay sat down with Marion under a huge sycamore tree, Reni and I crouched catty-corner to them. Once seated, Jay made his move on Marion – so quick, so easy, so soft their lips joined together. What should my first move on Reni be?

   Perhaps I should wait instead. I mustn’t look too anxious. But if I hesitate and she moves first, I’ll be seen as weak. If I make the first move too strongly, I’ll get known in school as a masher. Worse yet, if I do nothing, I’ll continue to be regarded worldwide as the sensitive boy who’s too fragile to act upon anything.

   Quickly, I turned toward Reni, took in a deep breath, and placed my mouth firmly upon hers. Finally – we were touching, lip to lip, boy to girl. Once again, I was floating on air!

   Reni no sooner jerked away when she swiped her shirtsleeve across her mouth from the saliva-soaked smacker I’d drowned her lips with. She’d never want to see my face again.

   But the very next day at school, she met me at the school doors as I walked in, waited in line behind me at the water cooler, and sat at my lunch table asking if I was going to Peggy Harkness’s party Saturday night. Word had already flown around school it was going to be some kind of make-out party of the century. Might it be a chance to redeem myself, if I dared?

   Anxious, I showed up to Peggy’s basement party fifteen minutes early. Not knowing what to do with her fluttery guest, she gave me a tour of the entire dark, dank basement and then told me to make myself at home in her family’s new “mod, white, beanbag love seat made with real polystyrene beads that’s the coolest thing ever.”

   Collapsed in the bag, grounded in beans, I watched arriving kids descend the basement stairs. My view of bodies was obscured until the third step down when girls gave themselves away with the presence of bare legs. By the fourth or fifth step, depending on how high their mothers allowed hemlines to go, dresses appeared. And by the tenth step, faces emerged, adorned by pretty heads of combed hair never seen before in school. Boys, on the other hand, didn’t have to announce themselves – their English Leather cologne did, practically by the first step, if not from the front door.

   At eight o’clock, Peggy closed the stairway door from light and turned the radio’s Top 40 music down real low, creating the perfect breeding ground for kids to roam hands, fingers and lips all around. Sure enough, couples quickly began disappearing into the furnace room, bathroom, laundry room, or any place that was dark and private. All these twosomes, Peggy and her boyfriend included, getting it going, picking up experience and carnal techniques, one after the other. Surely, they had seen me sitting here, sunk deep as a dump truck in the bright, white love seat all by myself, probably laughing hysterically at the irony.

   The stairway door opened. Light flooded in. God, no – it might be Reni, but no, only Peggy’s mother yelling, “Reni’s mother just called. Reni has the flu and won’t make it tonight.”

   I was floating on air! Could such a sublime feeling be possible? People had said this sensation of lightness I was feeling right now was what being in love felt like, and here I was feeling light as a feather from avoiding it.

   Come Monday, back on the playground sidelines, sniffing the warm breeze while watching kids romp about, I understood the aspect of things better, how boys had a certain air about them, girls had a certain air about them, and how even air had an air. Treading lightly with rough boys as friends might be one dangerous thing to do, but befriending a girl trying to be her boyfriend was another.  I was a twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy far more interested in clumping around in boots than delicately performing some dance within hopscotch boxes.  

   Mom was right. I needed a good buddy to hang with. Not a wholesome one as she’d said, but a boy with corruption included. I wanted someone made of sweet mayhem without an air of anything wholesome to smell.  

~   PARADISE ON EARTH   ~

   Peddling uphill, approaching the crest of Whitney Street, I could barely make out his unmistakable head of kinky hair. Before long, Paul’s olive skin came into view, followed by his dark, brown eyes. Approaching me out by the curb, the Jewish kid who sat in front of me in my sixth-grade class, chatted with me for the first time outside of Oakview Elementary. He surprised me how much he had to say about school, especially how ugly our teacher, Mrs. Slumpff, was.

   When I volleyed back by comparing her face to a horrible car accident, Paul laughed out loud. Just then, a click went off in my head, how I could invite him over to the house and watch the Quasar. But Mom had always said, “In life, always think twice before you speak to people.” I thought about that, but not twice and invited him anyway.

   After sneaking him in through the back basement door, we dashed straight for the Quasar whereupon a minute later, sitting on the floor together, our faces couldn’t have been more than twelve inches from the screen.

   “Oh, no,” Paul said. "Another Chiffon commercial.”

"I hate that Chiffon ad."

   “Shitton's more like it."

    "Yeah," I said, cranking the channel dial around.

   “No, wait, go back a channel - that sci-fi flick."

   “The what?”

   “There, look – a monster!”

   "Oh, yeah, cool, Paul."

   “But is that a zipper going down his back?”

   “Yeah, I saw that, too -”

   “It’s really a rubber suit he’s got on!”

   “No way!”

   “Kids are laughing at it all over the world right now.”

   “Oh, and look, now the alien’s picking some innocent sucker up –”

   “Yeah, and twirling him around –”

   “Like he’s gonna heave him.”

   “But, Michael, now they’re just showing the guy’s shadow on the wall –”

    "Just what I saw -“

"Instead of seeing his real body -"



"Getting crushed in half –”

   “And smashed to pieces –”

   “What a gyp.”

   “You said it.”

   “That’s so sad, Michael.”

   “What, you mean the poor guy getting hurt?”

   “No, not showing the guy getting mauled.”

   “Yeah ….”

   “And letting the zipper show.”

   “Yeah ….”

   “Wanna do something else?”

   “Yeah. This stinks, Paul. Wanna ride bikes?”

   Ten minutes later, racing across grassy hills near the school ball field, standing on the pedals of my bike like Steve McQueen did on his motorcycle in The Great Race, I stopped atop a ridge. There, the click in my head went off again.

   “Hey, Paul – watch this.”

   Releasing the brakes, I fancied myself a downhill, thrill-seeking daredevil on wheels. As my spokes revved like a motor against the baseball card I’d clipped to my fender, I jumped off my bike half way down. Lying motionless in the grass, I peeked at Paul at the top of the hill.

   “Oh, please help me,” I whined loudly. “Sir, I’m a grandmother, and I just fell off that Ferris wheel!”

   Paul pedaled his Schwinn toward me and dove off his high-speed machine just like I had.

   “Oh, I just robbed that bank, officer,” he said, “and I only have one leg, so please help me, would you?”

   “Hell no, sucker.”

   Even though this made me laugh out loud, I wondered if pretending to be such pitiful people in pitiful situations should be so funny, yet Paul seemed to share my weird humor about suffering and violence.

After we cycled back to his house, I not only felt the sting of blood oozing out of my cut left elbow from my crash landing off the bike but heard a hiss of escaping air coming from its front tire. When I told Paul it was as flat as a pancake now, and asked if he had a spare tire kit inside, he said, “Hell no, sucker,” to which I laughed and began walking the heavy Raleigh three-speed back home.

   Trying to guide the heavy metal machine forced me to slow down. Everything seemed to go quiet, too, as if allowing me to take in the activity going on around me all the more.  

   Just up the street came the familiar jingle from the white Mister Softee ice cream truck making its regular afternoon rounds. The gleeful man inside, always donned in his white Good Humor cap, waved and pulled the string to make the bell jingle again.

   Then I spotted a squad car ahead, the one that slowly cruised through our neighborhood from time to time. It had taken me a couple years to realize the policeman was here more as protection than to throw me in jail for bad thoughts about my teachers.

   Closer to the house, pleasing strains from Cathy’s transistor radio trickled out. As she sat on the front steps listening. Mr. Taylor, our amiable mailman, walking his big bag of letters around one tilted shoulder, handed her a letter. Though the four of us kids rarely got mail, he knew our names and said hello whenever our paths crossed his. His smile was rivalled only by the kind wink and a nod from the happy-go-lucky, Negro milkman whose 7:05 morning milk deliveries to our doorstep every weekday one could set their watch to.

   Walking up our sidewalk, the soft breeze drifted across such a heavenly scent from the two blossoming crabapple trees in our yard, making my brain feel delightfully woozy. It only took the radio to play a Chad and Jeremy pop song to nearly finish me off.

   I don't care what they say

   I won't stay in a world without love 

   No, I don't care what they say 

   I won't stay in a world without love   

   I took one glance down at the badly split tire to bring me back to full senses. Though we had ridden so roughly, I had no regrets. It was inherent to be so virile, even reckless for boys to joyride like that. The only unnatural thing experienced all day was the man-made Quasar, and what it beamed out, Paul and I just laughed at. I didn’t need that electronic set or the radio. Perhaps the mystery, the magic, and the music were already in me; it just took someone like Paul to uncover it. After all, who else had such a strange, otherworldly talent for knowing what I was going to say before I did?

~   THE WISDOM OF LIONS   ~

   It was as if the old, wooden bridge neatly parted the whole world in two for me that day.

   On one side of our neighborhood creek was Eastern Junior High, otherwise known as my community’s training facility for bullies and misfits. Having spent only a month at my new school so far, I hadn’t yet learned how to navigate away from bullies, the guys they called “hoods,” the leather boys who seemed to crawl out of the shadows whenever you weren’t looking. It was only last week Michael Bertron threatened to stuff me in my gym locker with my lunch bag and banana peel if I didn’t do what he said. Surprised by his charge, my eyes must have bulged right out of my skull. That’s what animal’s eyes did upon seeing an attacker, something I’d recently learned from my biology teacher. Actually, lions were nonviolent creatures who only attacked when they were out for food, and no way Bertron was hungry because he’d already stolen a million kid’s lunches so far this year. It was my opinion Bertron was just a pussy cat deep down who was merely starved for attention and power, but no way I was going to be the susceptible wildebeest to tell him that.

   On the other side of the old, green bridge was an open field and woods through which a peaceful creek meandered all the way to the Long Branch neighborhood. I’d played in this area many times before, a calm and shady place where a preponderance of squirrels made their home, different kinds of plants grew along the brook’s edge, and a curious group of girls dabbled in the water in their knee-high, rubber boots. The only way to get from Eastern Junior High to the other side was by crossing the bridge over the creek.

   Coming home from school one day, the customary stroll Paul and I took across the footbridge became more like a walk out onto a creaky wood plank over the ocean. Bertron and his pimply underlings had made harbor upon it, warning us we best blow off, or anchor down entirely. I let the wind make my move, and it blew me and Paul right toward them.

   “Hey. Amberg. Or is it Hamburger?” Bertron said. “I see at lunch how you and your bullshit friend there like to play stupid practical jokes on people like putting ice cream and banana peels on the floor so they'll slip. Somebody could get hurt, or maybe me, or one of my buddies, or my girl.”

   Bertron moved in closer. All the other kids stepped back.

   “So, Amberg, you gonna stop or am I gonna have to beat the living shit out of you right now? So wadda ‘ya gonna do?”

   “What?”

   “You heard me.”

   “What?”

   “Louder.”

   “What?”

   “I said I’m gonna beat the shit outta you –”

   “Uh-h –”

   “Uh-h what?”

   “Uh-h –”

   “Uh-h what!”

   “It’s gotta come outta me sooner or later.”

   The place went quiet. Even the brook stopped babbling.

   And just like that, the nervous laughter over my absurd response floated harmlessly away. During the edgy moment, it was as if I thought nothing and took no side at all. Bertron become mysteriously disarmed, perhaps having convinced himself his friends weren’t laughing at him but with him. For now, he was satisfied to rest on his past laurels of middle school hellraising.

   “This guy's crazy," he said. "Let’s get outta here,” he said. “Smells like shit around here now.”

   Paul and I stood our ground on the bridge as the ruffians walked off.

   “Wow,” Paul whispered. “Why’s he picking on you?”

   “Who knows. Why do all guys pick on people?”

   “And how’d you think of saying that?”

   “I didn’t.”

   “What?”

   “It just popped out.”

   “Popped out?”

   “Well, yeah.”

   “No way, but it was perfect. So bizarre. He didn’t know what to say. He dropped his guns, and his buddies, too. Saved our asses.”
   

   The green bridge didn’t just part the world into two geographical parts for me that day. It divided living being into halves, the non-human and the humane. The non-human half consisted of only men, or most of the men in the world, whereas the humane side included women, animals, and plants. This made far more sense than simply grouping the world into men versus women, good versus bad, animals versus people. I now saw myself defined by a new universe, the one with girls and pets and daffodils in it and,  however, by preferring inclusion into this group, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d get crushed by some guy because of it, crushed like a bug, a daffodil, or a prone squirrel would. Just when I thought Paul and I were the opposite of wholesome, these guys made us look like mice.

   But such was life. The best thing to do was not think about it. Presumedly, my instinct in conflict situations would be to act just like an animal after getting wounded, to lie down in the shadow of a tree and do nothing, nothing at all, and just rest. Maybe that wasn’t such a bad response because, as my teacher had said, it was nature’s way, the best way to heal. 

~   GRAY, BLACK, AND WHITE CHRISTMAS   ~

   How wonderfully we all treated each other this time of year, and this Christmas was no exception. Even presents and traditions from past yuletides spun freshly in my mind today – Cathy’s Gordon Lightfoot album rotating on the stereo yet again, and Don and Doug’s Lionel train set cycling around the tracks. These gifts had kept on giving, even long after the kind treatment rolled away.
 

   Playing with the Lionel set, I made the jet-black engine blow smoke and toot its whistle whenever it rolled past the mock train station. I rooted the train on as it chugged it’s eight cars around the fake rubber shrubbery and pines, and whirred past the little blue streams and lake Dad painted on the big green plywood board he’d constructed just for the train set. I especially liked operating the watchman, the two-inch-tall, Negro man, permanently placed on the switching track piece. Whenever I commanded the train to switch direction, the nameless little man with white-painted smile spun his arm around and pointed the other way. He reminded me of the watchman a few blocks over from our house, the two-foot tall, metal figure dressed in similar fancy white coat and red cap. I felt sorry for him standing out in the cold, extending a glass box out in his hand pretending the white candlelight inside wasn’t really an electrified bulb. Perhaps it was thoughts of both watchmen’s lonely predicament that made me appear sullen to Mom when I stopped playing with the train.

   “What’s with the mopey face?”

   “No, it’s not.”

   “Yes, it is. So, what’s it this time?”

   I’d already stopped trying to tell Mom why I was sad or confused these days. I’d hoped she’d have already known and would sympathize with my plight, but I guess she couldn’t be a mind reader. However, had she stopped to feel the temperature in the house now and how cool it was, she might have sensed just how quiet we all were. Everyone knew today was Don and Doug’s last day of vacation, that they were to return to Virginia Polytechnic Institute tomorrow morning and the Army ROTC program they were enrolled in.

  The entire family drove down to icy-cold Union Station in Washington DC at nine o’clock to see them off. A line of people had already assembled on the outdoor platform along the tracks, hard, concrete slabs of gray, surrounded above by filthy white train steam and dirty, smoggy sky and clouds everywhere else. And with Don and Doug dressed in their tight, gray military uniforms, they practically dissolved into the pale surroundings of the station’s colorless environment. However, proof of life flashed watching their fleshy, pink lips, jabber on about the strict hours of military training, being stuffed into their ROTC straight-jackets every day, sitting stiff as a board while eating meals, lifting forks like a robot, and having to wear tight military hats around their ugly crew cuts. My fraternal twin brothers now looked identical, and weren’t the siblings I knew before.

   A strange, babbling man stood alone at the far edge of the platform. Not only did his dark clothes disappear against the sooty concrete walls, it was as if he himself was invisible to everything around him.

   “Who you lookin’ at, boy?”

   “Stop staring,” Mom said tersely, quietly, fearfully, without moving her lips.

   “What you lookin’ at?”

   “I mean it. Now. Just stop listening.” How could I not hear his mumbling, begging, and babbling?

   I peeked over at him again. Such anger in his eyes. What would Rose have said about this old man, dressed in such filthy clothes? I’d never met Rose’s husband, Frank, and wondered what he looked like. She’d told me that when he was young, he’d been in jail once. The picture in my mind of Rose’s husband as a prisoner was no more believable than how this man wasn’t a happy-go-lucky kid at one time.  

   The train doors opened. Rising from their bench, Don and Doug stood tall and stiff. Briefly waving good-bye to us, then turning away, their gray backsides turned black as they vanished into the shadows of the Pullman car.

   “Don’t cry,” I whispered to myself. “Think of other things. Whatever you do, don’t cry.” So, I pondered the Empire State building; a recent newspaper story about the man who clung desperately to the end of tree branch before falling safely into the river; the free bus passes Mom had bought Rose for Christmas; that thing Rose’d said to me that I didn’t understand, “Remember, we should hold our badge of humanity close to us always,” the one I wondered whether I suddenly understood now.

   The stifled urge to cry turned to anger, anger about this dismal place, how real trains were a mechanical monster traveling on a river of track going in the wrong direction. I was even angry how I’d been clutching so tightly to Don and Doug that everything else was passing me by, how I’d been ignoring Cathy standing right here and that I needed her just as much. And I was upset about that old colored man, separated from his environment, family, friends, nature, and love.

   As the train slowly rode off into the distance, I realized the colored man was not a watchman. He was not dead metal. He was human, and no human could be separated from his environment. Ever. It was impossible. And why would anyone want to be, or animals, or any living thing on earth? It was meant to be this way. Right? One day, I believed the colored man would return to all that was natural, where he came from, the place that held everything he needed. Or was I riding the rails of self-deception?  

   Cathy’s Lightfoot’s album played in my head again, rolling around like a locomotive run wild. The power of the melody and words of the song, “Sixteen Lakes (To Seven Lakes),” so overtook me that I cried. I finally let it go. Maybe this is what Rose meant by humanity. I would never forget that, or this moment, or this song.      

Seven lonely Pullmans

Speeding down the line

Taking me away

From an old love of mine

Sixteen miles to Seven Lakes

Way up among the pines

In some hidden valley

Where the twirling river twines   

~   SLIPPING INTO HER SHOES   ~

   If only I knew what Mrs. Marcotte knew. Just think if everything she taught in our eighth-grade English class was lodged in my brain – I’d ace everything. Just think how after reading her assigned books of classics, each filled with deep thoughts and millions of strange characters, I’d finally be able to answer her questions about what was symbolic in the book about this and who was symbolic for that.

   If only I could erase the bevy of comments she’d already scribbled on my papers, ones like, “Michael, have you thought of a tutor?” “Please be aware of no extra credit opportunities in my course,” and “It’s Huck Finn, not Hack.” If only today’s test grade hadn’t been streamlined down to that single, dreaded letter of “F.”

   And if only I knew what she really thought of me. There again, did I want to dare myself by truly understanding her and her situation better?

   However, once she asked to meet me after school for a deep, person-to-person discussion about my grades, I knew I had no option. It would be just me and her in her room today, starting at three-fifteen.

   As I entered the classroom and sat down next to her desk, Mrs. Marcotte swiveled her chair toward me and took off her ugly, black-framed glasses for the first time all semester. “You’re not reading enough, Michael,” she said, holding up my test. “It seems you haven’t read the book at all.”

   “But I have. The CliffsNotes, too.”

   “Oh, never substitute them for reading the book.”

   “Yeah, ‘cuz they were more complicated than the book. I needed CliffsNotes for the CliffsNotes.”

   “Michael, you really didn’t read Flowers for Algernon, did you?”

   “Yes, I did, or some of it, but I still didn’t understand, so I went to see the movie yesterday, only it wasn’t called Flowers for Algernon, Mrs. Marcotte, but Charly, with Cliff Robertson, Claire Bloom, Dick Van Patten, and –”

   “Never watch the movie instead of reading the book!”

   “It’s quicker.”

   “Michael, do you watch a lot of television at home?” I nodded. “I thought so. That’s quite a bit of time inside by yourself.”

   “Not as much as sitting inside trying to read, believe me.”

   “But time much better spent.”

   “What?”

   “Whether one prefers a book or a film doesn’t matter as much as your setting out to see the world not just from your own experience but through the eyes of another, like Charlie’s, or Phineas’ in A Separate Peace. You see, at your age, reading about other’s journeys inspires us to take our own.”

   “What other people?”

   “Anyone’s. Stories of the good people, the not so good people, they’re all part of the world.”

   “Including cruel and angry men’s, too?”

   “Especially them, because in looking at their lives, we learn about the choices we make in life,  how it’s the anger we allow to come to the surface in us that makes civility happen or not.”

   “What?”

   “We’re social creatures. Just like animals, humans have a built-in, fundamental need for social relationships. Without them, we’d die.”

   If only I knew what she was talking about.

   “Being a sensitive boy, I can see you slipping very easily into the shoes of another. It’ll not only open you up to an entirely different view, but it’s what makes us stronger individuals.”  

   “Look, I’m sorry, but I hate reading. TV’s easier.”

   “Michael, imagine you could look down on yourself and what you saw was a boy who spent year after year in front of a television that pumped information into you that you passively believed was the truth when in the end was just lightweight entertainment and advertising. Or you could have witnessed a boy who experienced truly heroic journeys from the great literature he read, where he not only saw the world from someone else’s perspective but learned a lot about himself in the process.”

   “What? I’d rather take my own journeys than read all day.”

   “Okay then, fine. Take on your own odysseys. I encourage that. But do your assignments, too. Read. Try harder. Then, when you live your own journeys, you’ll also experience how others see the world with you. You see, being communal, sharing the world together is our survival.”

   “What?”

   Mrs. Marcotte smiled.

   “What?” I repeated.

~   AS MRS. BENNETT SAW THE FIRE   ~

   Occasionally, through links in the backyard fence eighty-year-old Mrs. Bennett and I shared, I’d see her exit her house through the back stoop and walk out into her yard. Even during all the times I’d hurled baseballs against our porch steps that created a thwacking racket for hours on end, she rarely looked over. What started years ago as just a game to catch the balls that bounced back at me from the steps – some as blistering grounders, others as fastballs heading straight for my head – eventually evolved into my insatiable need to field every one in spectacular fashion. It was when I didn’t, however, and threw my glove onto the ground and stomped on it in frustration, that’s when she looked over. I had never felt any embarrassment or self-consciousness over the glove dismemberment until then, nor had I ever sensed how angry I was. Even after countless stomps, I couldn’t figure out where the fiery anger came from. Mrs. Bennett didn’t know either, but she kept staring, as if she somehow saw things over here differently. What was she thinking?

   A certain incident occurred one day in the backyard with Paul, one that Mrs. Bennett witnessed from her stoop. I’d already formed my opinions about the event, how for being such a skinny kid with no pectorals or bulging abs to speak of, I’d puffed my chest out pretty big to save the day. But what did Mrs. Bennett make of the events? If a cop had shown up later, what would she have said to him? Wouldn’t she have made lots of stuff up just to make me look bad?  

   “Well, let me tell you, Officer, this can’t happen again. That Michael is reckless. He could have blown up the house and that other boy with him. The two were playing with matches when the other kid lit a GI Joe army man on fire. I heard every word Michael said – ‘Is this cool or what? Look, his head’s on fire! And listen to that sound – it’s crackling,’ or some such nonsense.”

   What I’d actually said was, “Oh, goddamn, yeah, it’s crackling,” to which Paul added, “Holy shit! Best sound ever,” but maybe Mrs. Bennett wouldn’t have wanted to repeat such swear words in front of a policeman.

   “Then, Officer, my heart almost stopped when Michael practically leapt at the opportunity to grab the nearby gas can and pour gas on the grass. Lord, why didn’t I call you then? Flaming army men dripping straight onto gasoline!”

   But in telling the story, I knew Mrs. Bennett would choose her words carefully and never admit that watching GI Joe’s flaming head drip to the ground was the coolest thing she’d ever seen, too.

   “It gets worse, Officer. Do you believe Michael made a volcano out of dirt and filled it with gas, and that the can was only a couple feet away, and that I even heard that other boy say, ‘Fill ‘er up with high-test, sir. Mount Vesuvius, here we come.’”  
 

   Actually, at that point, I had been getting a little nervous, but wasn’t going to show it in front of Paul.

   “Then – whoosh! A burst of flame that erupted from the volcano went straight to the can. It was covered in ripples of flame, so how it didn’t blow, God only knows. And then Michael grabbed a rag to hold the can’s handle and ran it all the way over to the spigot just five feet from my house, yelling something like, ‘Gonna blow your house down, lady.’”

   I’d never said that.

   “And, ‘Geronimo!’”

   And I’d never said that. Or maybe I had.

   “So, here I was, Officer, an eighty-year-old woman, standing out on her stoop in a robe and curlers, so dumbfounded that all I could do was shake my head and yell across the fence at him.”

   That part had definitely been true. It didn’t take a lip reader to decipher, “You fucking idiot.”

   I never found out if Mrs. Bennett ever talked to real police after the incident, and I never talked to her about it either. Silence was golden. In the end, I figured running that gas can the way I did to the spigot was an act of manly bravery to save property and lives.
 

   The next day when I spotted Mrs. Bennett walking out from her stoop, I ran inside the house. What was it that made me flee her presence so quickly? Was I afraid of what she’d really seen, what I feared to be true now, how anger festered so bad in me and I’d allowed my usual good nature to be taken over by macho action just to impress a best friend? And wouldn’t Mrs. Bennett have been the only one in the neighborhood to call an ambulance, the fire department, the police? I’d have figured Mrs. Bennett as the last person in the community to help, when in fact she might have been the only one to save us. That would have also been part of her story, the part to save us, regardless.

   In that case, I guess silence wouldn’t have been so golden.  

~   THE PIANO ASKED ME TO PLAY   ~

   Roger was a skinny kid with wild, curly red hair and pale skin who sat next to me in Mr. Lesneski’s American History class. When our mundane little curmudgeon of a teacher, a man who nonetheless ruled his pupils with a firm hand, began lecturing one day about Nanyehi, a female battlefield hero and leader of the Cherokee Wolf Clan known to her people as “She who walks among the spirits,” I rolled my eyes. Roger saw that and poked me in the shoulder with his index finger, suggesting I listen. Why? He’d never paid attention to the General Custer and Robert E. Lee lectures, so why Nanyehi? In the end, I was glad he did because I might not have learned how the warrior-turned-leader boldly advocated for peaceful coexistence with American Europeans that both could live together in the environment harmoniously.

   Living just two streets away, Roger and I got to know each other during the coming weeks. He visited my house, and I his, all by casual invitation. One day, about to walk downtown for my weekly guitar lesson, I dared myself to skip it and head over to Roger’s house unannounced.    

   After ringing the doorbell and waiting, the only thing stepping forward was the late September heat. The hot air permeated my dense body like it was nothing. How could things I couldn’t see pass into my human form so effortlessly, or was I really not solid at all, just a bunch of atoms strung together by some higher power, all calling themselves “Michael?”

   Hesitating to knock on the hard door frame, sensing it might disturb the peace existing within the living room seen just beyond the screen door, I softly spoke “Hello” through the transparent, wire mesh instead.

   Roger’s mother, Grace, soon appeared with a smile to say Roger wasn’t home but to come inside and play their finely-tuned piano as I’d done during previous visits.

   From the times I’d met Grace, she was always a soft-spoken woman. Yet, Roger – comparing her to a modern day Nanyehi – called her, “A two-legged tornado of a mother,” explaining how it was she and not his father who ran the house, doing everything from settling arguments between the kids to taking care of the family finances down to the last cent. I thought only men ruled the modern household. There again, Dad didn’t. He wouldn’t admit it, but Mom ran ours. Grace’s story boosted me: I’d never heard of a mother who was both head of a household and nice about it all at the same time.  

   Sitting on the piano bench, my mind wandered. Before long, both hands piddled around the keys. I fancied Roger’s living room, so uncluttered, quiet, and dim, softened by a warm breeze drifting across my face and arms from the open windows. It was like playing a duet with nature.

   The thin, gauzy window curtains swayed in a slow, circular rhythm. In time, their cycles of movement swept me off my bench to another place, conjuring memory of a melody I’d encountered sometime before. As the string of notes trickled out my fingers, my hard, bony digits struck the keys. They’d have had nothing to play without my brain directing them, so what was directing my brain?
 

   The theme built, becoming more intense, then softer, then intense again, as if the piano was asking whether I should play the melody in a strong, masculine way or a soft, feminine one.

   Grace walked into the living room, wearing a kitchen apron wrapped tidily around her waist.

   “I’ve overheard you playing. That’s lovely, Michael. How long have you been taking lessons?”

   “I haven’t.”

   “Wasn’t that the opening to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata?”

   “Who’s what? Oh, then I guess I heard it someplace.”

   “Quite mesmerizing. You captured the spirituality in it very well.”

   “Who was Beethoven?”

   “One of the world’s most famous composers.”

   “He must have been rich and well-liked then.”

   “Actually, he had difficulties dealing with people, both professionally and personally. And, like Brahms and Mahler, he wrote his best music while alone out in nature. It inspired them all. They wrote more creatively in the mountains, the forests, under the open sky.”

   “Huh.”

   Across the piano’s closed, shiny black lid, Grace gently slid a stack of Roger’s sheet music books toward me.  

   “Ah, no ….”

   “What?”

   “Don’t.”

   “I just wanted to say I know a good piano teacher who –”

   “No. See, I can’t read music. Mom’s tried. Dad’s tried. Piano, guitar, organ lessons. It’s all the same. I hate it, sheet music just filled with hundreds of dots of right notes and wrong notes. What I want is to let the notes and music go into me and pass through. When I do that, it feels good. I’m not afraid anymore, just curious.”

   “I see. But, remember that some of the greatest music wouldn’t have been recorded and passed down without sheet music, like the Moonlight -”

   “But what I wanna know is how’d he know to write it in the first place? That’s so mysterious, but sheet music is just hard and physical and complicated and technical.”

   “Sometimes, things that are complicated, or technical as you call it, are good things for mankind. Such as how Telstar makes relaying phone calls and TV pictures possible, how heart pacemakers save lives, how calculators help compute numbers to save us work. Where would we be without science and technology to help make great machines possible?”

   “I’m not interested in inventions like sheet music and how to make H-bombs.”

   “Well, what I think you should do then is go right on playing your piano.”

   As she leaned against the hulking instrument and stayed to listen, I played, then stopped.

   “I dunno. This piece is kinda sad. And now I feel sad.”

   “Think of it this way. Sadness is inherent in all of us, did you know that? It’s a birthright. And nothing to be afraid of. So just go on.”

   This time, as the music played through me, Grace quietly disappeared somewhere off in the distance. She had enough sense to know when it was no longer time to speak about concrete things and spinning metal cogs of industry.

   Anyway, music had already spoken.