In my dream, it is hot and damp, summer in Pittsburgh… I see the old green couch, broken down by years of roughhousing children, and there is Joe, 9 years old in a set of red and black stripped footie pajamas, cereal bowl in his lap, a bit of garishly colored milk still in the bottom. He is intent on a Yosemite Sam. I walk up from behind, lean over and kiss the top of his sleep rumpled head. The smell, a bit of summer sweat, sweet remnant of shampoo, and that earthen honey that was his alone.
I marvel at the orange, polka-dotted skin of the salamander who suns on the river’s pebbled edge. He never goes too far from the water that gave him birth. His pale belly carefully hugs the rocks; his thin skin all that separates his moist heart from disaster. His dear, damp, thrilling heart.
The Interview - after Vanity Fair - The Proust Questionnaire
She asks, “What trait do you most deplore in yourself?” All I have are these dried roses and this lump of stolen amber. “On what occasion do you lie?” These black Ariat boots are the last thing he bought me. “What do you most value in your friends?” There’s a passport picture that makes me look like a petty French criminal. “What is your motto?” I display all my marksmanship awards on the mantle. “What is your current state of mind?” Sea glass is hard to find on Saint Ninian’s Isle. “What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” I have more than 8000 songs on shuffle in the car and you expect me to have a favorite?
At last, she asks, “How would you like to die?” What can I do? I show her the 40-year-old photo: I could really pull off that short shorts look.
I haven’t smoked in more than 15 years though some days, suddenly… I stop, wish for a drag, that first catch of smoke in my lungs and the rising hum of nicotine in my blood that brought words cascading from my brain.
At 64, I’ve begun to miss those mornings, wearing my grandmother’s pale blue bathrobe in the smoke saturated kitchen, writing madly as I tried to navigate my thoughts and dam up my raging brain.
I wrote so many words then. Words bounced off other words the way an unskilled kayaker bounces off boulders. Sentence after sentence, plunging down the page. Blue-black ink showing the telltale warning V of submerged rocks among the raging white water. I prayed the way I used to paddle. Wildly on a wild river. Until the water washed over me and I drowned, again and again.
I’ve learned my lesson and keep to calmer waters now. But still I write to pray to the gods of that river.
We have swallows in our barn. A week ago I found three broken egg shells underneath one of the nests. My birthday was two days ago. All I can remember from my phone call with Joe is the silences.
This morning, I heard the call of nestlings begging for food. The sound is a single note taken from their parents’ song. I noticed that the smell of the grass mown yesterday doesn’t have the same nostalgic pull as that of grass mown this morning. The heat of yesterday’s afternoon drew the chewy, greenness out of the smell. I always panic when Joe goes quiet. Have we been cut off?
I wonder if the swallow nestlings adds notes to their song one at a time as they get older, or does the full song come on all at once? This afternoon, the sweat on the glass cooled us as much as the bitter-sweet taste of tonic cut with lime. Eventually Joe speaks again. Something in his voice has changed.
I am up late. The air is so clear that the stars shine steadily without a single flicker. The gleaming quarter moon has a line of three planets trailing after it. Silence on cellphone calls is always disconcerting. The background hum of the old analog phones was a reassurance. I remember being able to stay on the line, saying nothing, listening to the universe whisper and Joe breathe.
