Too Much Sun

The older he got, the scruffier—whiskers, paint stains—he was so goddamed sick of everything. He must have been a tree all his life that obligations burrowed into. He must have stood in place so long, now he was going to wander all over in his mind. Or checking-the-mail, table-tapping retirement…Whatever it was he couldn't hold still for staying in place, like someone more-or-less on fire.

She, on the other hand, was inside-out in the tunnel of her own shadow. If she got to feeling happy, normal, etc. he'd put her in her place. Smacked of a rolling number that never landed right or she never called it right because she never even called it. You have to be inside yourself (and the right "yourself") to have that nice, that very nice luck.

Sad how miserable he himself must have been to deny someone else. Now every spring she gets sick and depressed, or at least that's the pattern, I think, that wants to grub around in her backstoop trash. Now, whenever she has a bad thought, she tells herself cancel. She says scram, bad news, go fly. But I say give it a ticket and see what it wants.

If we could just sound even slightly like ourselves, now why is that so hard.

One time I saved three dollars and he drove me over to the TG&Y. I could have whatever I wanted, he said, and the thing I wanted, gazing up the store shelves to something very high, higher even than him,

was a miraculous drum. And that’s what I got. And I thank him for that.

And for showing me how to be as distant and free and lost

in thought as he was, being distant and free and lost, and impossible therefore to converse with, Period.

And for making my best friends laugh. "Your dad's funny."

And for lifting me indoors once, on the very edge of sleep, from the backyard lounge in too much sun.

What damage have men and women NOT inflicted on themselves and each other? In the fifties they really must have needed some outlandish strength, over-water and out-to-sea fortitude. Or maybe there's some small urge that survives, the one that says we're never what any brittle Law can decide. A spin, a glint. A whirling dime saying call, call, you have a call waiting, dear heart, and it's yourself on the line.