WORDS ARE HARD

Back in the day, barbershops used to be run by grumpy old men in pale blue smocks and signet rings, and not by top-knotted hipsters in $100 flannel shirts. One thing you’d be sure to find, among the ashtrays and the paneling and the copies of Playboy hidden under the Sports Illustrateds, was a tall glass container filled with a blue liquid, in which a number of combs would be soaking like little black plastic embryos in the laboratory of a hygiene-obsessed mad scientist. It was called Barbicide. Today, as I walked through town, the Town Hall clock was chiming the nine o’clock hour at 9:06, as it does. A hole in the clouds opened up and revealed a patch of blue sky, so suddenly that it actually startled me. It’s been so grey and dreary for so many days that an unexpected patch of clear blue sky was almost a shock to the system, albeit a pleasant one. The writer in me always likes to think about moments like those while they are happening, dreaming up ways of describing what I am seeing so that the reader can see what I see. Describing colors is hard. I mean, how do you describe yellow, or make the reader visualize the exact shade of red that you’re thinking of? So I looked up at that island of blue in the midst of a sea of clouds the color of grimy snow, and tried to think of how I would describe it. I’ve used up all the low-hanging fruit already when it comes to blue references: faded denim, Tiffany gift boxes, the newly opened eyes of a kitten. I thought of comparing it to the blue of the Virgin’s robes in a medieval fresco, but that would be 100% derivative of Christopher Moore’s “Sacre Bleu”. The only other thing I could think of as I stared into that blotch of glorious blue, was Barbicide. At that moment I began to feel like a jeweler who has been handed an uncut stone, say a 3-carat Burmese ruby with a huge flaw which renders it unusable. Such wasted potential. But how do you use a Barbicide reference in any readable way? “The sky revealed a brilliant patch of Barbicide blue?” No, it sounds way too toxic, or else like a crime of some kind. “The clouds parted, and the sky showed itself in a defiant blue the color of that blue liquid at the barbershop with the combs in it.” No- just, no. “I saw the patch of blue sky, and immediately I was transported to the smells of shaving cream and Winstons, to out-of-date calendars and baseball on the TV set.” No, just sounds like I’m having an acid flashback. So, I guess I’ll just take that 3-carat ruby and stick it up on the shelf for now. Pretty but useless.

14 SOULS

Today I visited one of the saddest places on Earth. I’ve been there once or twice before, and every time I am struck by the melancholy which hangs in the air the way Spanish moss hangs from the branches of old oaks. Most people in Provincetown have no idea that it is even there.
Starting in 1801, Provincetown was afflicted by a number of smallpox epidemics. Around 1848, a “Pest House” was built outside of town to contain and isolate people stricken by the disease, across what is now Route 6 in the woods of the National Seashore. Between 1855 and 1873, around 14 people died and were buried there in numbered and nameless graves. It’s not the sort of place you might stumble across as you walk the trails in the forest. You have to know it’s there and how to find it. It’s quite a way off the beaten path, overgrown with catbriar and patrolled by armies of mosquitos and horseflies in the summer months.
You will see the cellar hole of the Pest House, a place so decrepit and miserable that by the 1870s, nurses could not be found who were willing to stay in it. And not far away, a tidy row of small limestone grave markers, carved only with numbers. 
No. 5 
No. 9
No. 10
Only three or four of the small markers remain intact, others broken or consumed by the underbrush.
Forgotten people, forgotten lives, in this sad, hushed forgotten corner of the woods.
And the mind whirls with thought, with questions. Who were these people? What were their days and nights like: cast out, banished to this lonely place, wondering if they will live to see another sunrise, left to die alone.
I try to absolve the town and its people. They did what they did from fear, from a need for self-preservation, not out of malice or hatred. But then I wonder why- who decided that these people should lose their names, that 22 year-old Antone Domingo should be diminished forever, known only to the world
as No. 6?
I couldn’t escape the parallels, between this world of a century and a half ago and my own. People shunned and feared and despised because they got sick. Lives, full ordinary lives built out of work and sex and Christmases and mistakes and first kisses, ending alone and untouched. Beautiful bodies made ugly. A two-inch by four-inch limestone stake, a three-foot by six-foot panel in a quilt.

There are places in the world which are haunted, not by poltergeists or restless spirits, but by regret and sadness and the memory of how unkind one human being can be to another. I imagine that there are ruins of camps in Poland where joy dissipates like morning mist. I felt it at Ground Zero in New York, back when it was just a big hole in the ground filled with the anguish of an entire nation, a palpable, almost sacred sorrow. And here, in a small, unmarked, unbounded area in the middle of the woods, I felt the despair of someone who slept for the first night in a strange bed in a frightening and isolated house. There was a moment in that person’s life when they realized they had been put where they had been put to be forgotten. And for at least 14 people, a moment when they knew that they would never go home again.

We walked far enough that the only footprints in the day-old snow were pawprints. Eventually even they disappeared.
The trunks of trees and the branches of thorn bushes threw grey-blue shadows, the austere color of a gun that has never been fired. The morning sun, still tethered low to the horizon, turned stalwart blades of grass into a thousand little sundials, faithfully witnessing the passing of another day on Earth. 
For anyone who took the time to look, the snow could be a field of stars, or diamonds, or the sequined train of the Ice Queen's gown.
The kind of beauty, I thought, that can never be touched

TEMPEST

Today I stood at the top of a hill and watched the snow fall around me from left to right. The wind, which blew from all directions wasn't wind, but a sound effect. And I felt like Shakespeare's Prospero.

Walking among the stones and monuments of graves where no one has laid flowers in a hundred years. An urn. A weeping angel. A lamb. A sleeping child. I do the math in my head. 26 years old. 86. 2 months. My age. I try to read the stories, distilled to names and dates, chiseled into crumbling granite and slate. The man who remarried, the second wife, the second chance. The spinster daughter. The war. I try to imagine their world. A world where they had a king. A world where they had slavery. Reading books by kerosene lantern. Cold, cold winters and storms with no warning. Hot summers and long, homespun dresses. I see a headstone with a beginning and no end, an unfinished account. 1881- . What happened? Where did he go? Lost at sea? Died in prison? Took his last breath somewhere where no one knew that he already had a spot reserved where he could spend eternity. Buried his wife at 40 and then just moved on. I pause and read the words, the brief lines lifted from Psalms, from poems, from the Book of Common Prayer. Some grieving wife, or son or brother, or mom or dad, through contemplation and tears that I can only speculate about, decided that these were the words which this soul should carry with it forever. The tiny grave of an infant, on the very furthest edge of the cemetery. Our Baby. Why there, on the edge? No money? No baptism? A little soul in Limbo, even now, after all this time? How absurd. I consider the memento mori: skulls with wings. Remember, Man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. And it doesn’t make me feel sad or scared. It makes me glad to be there, to read the names and do the math, and remember the people that no one brings flowers for. Because one day, no matter how kind or cruel I am during my lifetime, my own long story will be abridged- a name, some dates, an epitaph. Will anyone hear me as they walk by, calling out from a silent stone? Speak my name! Remember me! I was here! I lived!

WALKING BETWEEN ARMIES

I often say that people who walk dogs are like the Post Office. Wind, rain, snow or sunshine, we’re out there, no matter what. In fact, there are a number of days in any year when it’s so inhospitable that the only people that are out and about are people who are walking their dogs. We wave and nod to one another behind hoods and scarves, strain to juggle a leash and a useless, upturned umbrella, and struggle to pick up poop in the midst of a blinding snowstorm or a torrential downpour. Like it or not, we realize that with any dog, there is a minimum amount of Dog Energy which must be burned up every single day, and failure to do so can only end in dire circumstances. And believe me, after more than 20 years of dog ownership on Cape Cod, I have been out in just about every kind of weather imaginable, with the possible exceptions of a tornado or a plague of frogs.

And so it was today. Nothing catastrophic, just a cold, wet winter day. The kind of day which, were it not for the dogs, would have been spent entirely indoors, warm and dry, with a bathrobe, hot beverages, and lots of foods containing sugar.

But like every other day, we pulled on the long johns and the blue jeans, the multiple sweatshirts and the gloves and the jacket and everything else, grabbed the leash and went out to walk the dog.

And today, in some small way, I am glad that I sometimes have to do things that I don’t really want to do, because today I not only went for a dog walk, but for a few minutes I was transported.

We walked over to the far side of Route 6, to the woods where I could let the dog off his leash to let him run around like a maniac for a while. (See previous remarks regarding Dog Energy.) We walked along a little-used corner of the bike trails near Bennett Pond, an area which doesn’t see much traffic at the height of Season, much less at this time of year. A thick carpet of fallen pine needles the color of old leather books covered most of the paved path, and that in turn was almost entirely covered by a thin layer of wet, slushy snow. The overall effect was that of a hastily frosted cake. There were no footprints in the snow at all, save mine and the dog’s, not even those of rabbits or squirrels and that was the first thing I noticed.

The weather had chased all the birds away except for the occasional hungry gull, so the only sound was the persistent typewriter rhythm of the rain. The patches of sky which were visible through the sparse, impotent winter canopy were devoid of color, a kind of grey-white which was nearly indistinguishable from the wet snow on the ground.

At times I thought of Sherwood Forest.

At other times I thought of Narnia.

After a while we stopped and turned around, and as we made our way home the mossy side of all the trees was facing us, so that they seemed clad in a flimsy, decaying armor of pale verdigris. At one point, I noticed that on one side of the path were all scrub pines, their skinny trunks bare but still green at the very top. On the other side were all beech and birch and other deciduous varieties, branches gnarled and exposed as they reached toward the sunlight. I imagined for a moment that I was walking between two mighty tree armies frozen in time as they stared one another down, waiting for the trumpet call to begin the battle, wooden swords against wooden shields.

Then I thought that they weren’t even frozen in time, it’s just that trees move so much slower than we do.

The branches of the two warring armies arched harmoniously and touched fingers above the path where I was walking, which made me feel as if I were approaching a grand country house, but the ghostly green-grey of the world around me and the sad silhouettes of the sleeping trees let me know that if there were a house around the bend, it was more likely either a ruin or a mirage.

Following your own footprints can only get you to one place though, so eventually we found ourselves right back where we started. The sound of traffic overtook the absence of birdsong. The wet snow became wet sand that kept getting stuck in the bottom of my shoe.

MOTHER'S DAY 2017

It’s not easy for someone like me to sit down and write something about Mom. I mean, think about it: “Mother.” That’s the kind of prompt that has writers like Hemingway and Gertrude Stein grabbing bottles of absinthe and penning 400-page volumes stuffed full of words like “remembrance” and “lavender-scented.” I’ve been thinking about it all morning long, always vaguely aware of the thunder of distant hoofbeats, plagued by the Four Horsemen of Literature (which coincidentally also happen to be the Four Horsemen of Madness): Memory, Gratitude, Regret and Love. Before I knew it I had a 400-page volume of my own going inside my head.

So I decided to simplify, to pare it down to just one thing. One memory, one moment.

We were living on Buckingham Road at the time. I’m not sure exactly how old I was, but I was still in grade school so I figure I was about 9 or so. I was asleep, in my room at the top of the stairs. I was dreaming about popcorn. Masses of popcorn being popped all around me, just sort of materializing from thin air. I woke up, and I realized why I had been having such an odd dream: I could still hear that sound, that strange, rapid-fire popping noise. It was coming from downstairs. I got out of bed, opened my bedroom door and went down to see what it was.

And there was Mom. She was sitting at the dining room table, which we normally only used on Easter and Thanksgiving and when Dad was writing out the bills every month. She had a stack of white paper, a Chesterfield burning in the ashtray, and she was pounding away at the old Remington typewriter which Dad must have pulled out from the crawlspace for her. She was writing, and I could tell right away that she was totally in the “zone.”

That’s it. That’s the memory.

So why do you suppose that this particular memory, which isn’t even so much a memory as a moment in time, almost a tableau, stands out in my mind; why has it stayed with me over my entire lifetime; and why, when I think about my mother, do I remember her typing a room full of popcorn when I was 9 years old? Because I knew even then that what I was seeing was my Mom, happy. And not the kind of happiness that depends on another person, not the happiness of a wedding day or a firstborn. It was the happiness that is felt by someone who is doing something that only they can do, someone who is saying something that only they can say, even if it’s only for an hour or two between folding the laundry and another doctor’s appointment.

I don’t even think my mom knew I was standing there that day. But of all the lessons in life that my mother taught me, I learned at least two of them in those few brief moments. One of them was “tell your story.” No matter what it is, no matter even who wants to hear it- make your husband dig out the Remington and then start typing until you’ve reached “The End.”

The other lesson was that sometimes the best present we can give to anyone is actually our own happiness.

Thanks, Mom. I hope in some way that I am returning the gift.

"OCD" by Neil Hilborn

ACTION de GRÂCE

PROMPTS: a color - blue

a city - Paris

a holiday - Thanksgiving

a pet - cat

a woman's name - Maria

    It was a little disorienting at first, waking up on the plane. It took me a second just to figure out where the hell I was. Most of the other passengers were still sleeping; it was pretty dark and the only sounds were the constant hum of the engines and the soft murmur of the flight attendants in the galley, drinking coffee and talking about the passengers in hushed French. It had been dark outside when I’d fallen asleep, so it was a bit of a shock when the daylight started flooding in as I raised the window shade. The light was so out of place that it almost seemed to have a sound as it bullied and shouted its way into the darkened cabin. I quickly closed the window shade and looked around me to see if anyone had been woken by this cacophony of light, but no one had.

    The video monitor in the front of the cabin showed a map. There was a dotted line to show the miles we had already covered, the virtual vapor trail of an animated airplane icon, which was currently flying due east somewhere over the Atlantic. It was hard to tell exactly where in the Atlantic though, because the animated airplane icon was so out of scale with the rest of the map that it appeared to be about three times the size of Bermuda. The distance remaining for our journey was listed. It was in the thousands, but it was in kilometers so I had absolutely no idea, really, of how far we had to go. I gave up wondering about it. It looked like the nose of our gargantuan airship was closer to Paris than the tail was to New York, and that seemed good enough for me.

    I found myself thinking about the last time I had been to Paris. Pushing my seat back a little and staring up at the ceiling, I noticed other passengers stirring one by one, their window shades being raised, the light inside the airplane slowly getting lighter and lighter, our own little artificial dawn. I thought about the small two-star hotel I had stayed at in the Marais, L'hôtel du Chat Blanc. The room was suffocatingly small. There was practically no view, hardly any air, and the mattress was lumpy and uncomfortable. And I had been the happiest there that I had ever been in my life. The smell of croissants and fruit tarts being baked every morning from the pâtisserie on the ground floor, or of crêpes and Nutella from the kiosk on the corner. The look on the old man’s face who sat for hours every morning, regardless of the weather, smoking cigarettes and nursing a single café au lait at the restaurant across the street. The music of Paris. The traffic, the sirens, the almost sing-song way people greet one another Bonjour! And Maria.

    I was jolted from my reverie as the lights in the cabin were suddenly turned on, and I could smell the aroma of strong French coffee as the flight attendants began to make their way up the aisles. Apparently it was Air France’s opinion that it was time to wake up. The man in the seat next to mine raised his head with a snort, turned and looked at me with bleary, unfocused eyes and gave me a weak smile.

    I took this as permission to raise the window shade. Even though I knew that the sun had come up, it was still a little disorienting when I looked out, like walking out of a darkened movie theater in the middle of the day. The sky, which had been endless, inky black the last time I’d looked out, was now bright and unblemished, the healthy, prosperous, somewhat friendly blue of a Tiffany’s box. We were flying above the clouds, so the blue seemed limitless at first, without a ceiling, until I looked down and saw the clouds beneath us. For a while I imagined us as a ship, sailing across a frothy cumulus ocean, all alone and surrounded by nothing but Tiffany-blue skies.

    I still couldn’t quite believe I was doing this. I had just returned to America a few weeks earlier after a four-month trip through Europe which had culminated with those two blissful weeks in Paris. I figured I’d get back to school, get a job somewhere, maybe get a girlfriend. But none of that seemed to be happening. I just found myself laying around the house, thinking about how much I wanted to be just about anywhere else, and of course thinking about Maria. The smell of crêpes and Nutella had been replaced by the smell of the neighbor’s kids smoking cheap homegrown weed under my bedroom window at night, and to be honest, I wasn’t very happy about it. But, I told myself, a lot of life is dealing with things that we’re not very happy about, and I was pretty close to just accepting my fate, a fate which had very little to do with Paris or crêpes or anything much beyond car payments and, if I’m lucky, a house in the ‘burbs.

    Until Thanksgiving.

    The holidays usually aren’t too bad with my family. Over the years, everyone has accepted a role, a set of responsibilities and a sort of loose script as to how things are going to play out and what everyone is going to talk about. It was easy and we all seemed content to play along, either because it was simpler that way or because none of us was imaginative enough to do anything differently. The usual list of people was there, Mom and Dad and me, my older sister Teresa and her current boyfriend (or did she use the word fiancé?), and my younger brother Tod, who is gay. Tod’s boyfriend was supposed to be joining us but so far he was a no-show. I couldn’t tell exactly what was going on because Tod hadn’t looked up from his phone for the past twenty minutes.

    “How was Paris?” Brandon 5 was looking at me, one eyebrow raised, his fork frozen midway between his plate and his mouth. He was actually called Butler or Cooper or some other occupationally-inspired millennial name, but my sister’s first two boyfriends had both been named Brandon, and it was easier in my mind to just think of them all as a series after that. They were practically indistinguishable anyway, from their black European sedans to their Brooks Brothers suits and their ambitious and ultimately meaningless careers. Brandon 5 was an “actuarial consultant”, whatever the hell that was, and annoyingly referred to his job as “the Firm.”

    I stared at him blankly. “Paris?”

    “Paris, France? Europe? Weren’t you just there?”

    “Oh! Paris France!” I stalled for a moment by pretending to impale a pea on my fork. How do I tell Brandon 5 that Paris was amazing, magical, transcendent, the last place I had felt alive…?

    “It was good.”

    I was spared having to find any more words as Mom wafted into the dining room at that very moment, bearing a Corningware baking dish piled high with mashed potatoes, despite the fact that nobody had touched the mashed potatoes that were already on their plates. Mom had never been that fond of cooking, and it showed. The bulk of her efforts on Thanksgiving were put into the fine art of camouflage, making a variety of store-bought, frozen, canned or powdered ingredients appear to actually be homemade. The mashed potatoes she now placed with great ceremony in the center of the table had undoubtedly just come out of the microwave; and I suspected that the real reason she had gone in to the kitchen in the first place was to have some of the cream sherry which I knew she kept hidden in the cupboard behind the Karo Syrup.

    “You’ve outdone yourself, Margaret,” said Dad, without looking up. He said this every year. “The butternut squash is delicious.”
    “I didn’t make butternut squash, Earl.”
    Dad finally looked up from his plate. “You what? Well then, what the hell is that?” He pointed his fork towards one of the serving dishes. A glob of gravy landed onto the tablecloth with a thud.

    “It’s sweet potatoes, Earl.”
   “Well, whatever it is, Margaret, it’s delicious.” He was already looking down at his plate again.  “Helluva meal.”

    “He’s not coming!” Tod chimed in out of nowhere. For the first time all morning, he put his phone face down on the table.

    “Who’s not coming?” said Teresa.

    “Alejandro.”  We all looked at the empty place setting next to Tod and acted surprised and dismayed, as if we were just noticing that there was nobody there. “He just texted me and said he can’t get away from his family,” he whined, pronouncing the word ‘family’ as if it tasted like spoiled milk. He was just about to take a bite of Mom’s Stove Top stuffing and turkey from the ovens at Price Chopper when something buzzed or beeped on his phone, and Tod was gone again.

    “That’s too bad,” my sister chirped, shooting a look at Brandon 5 which clearly said oh thank God. “We were so looking forward to meeting him!” Brandon 5 snorted as he slathered a dinner roll with Country Crock.

    I looked over at my mother. She was spinning an ice cube around in the bottom of her empty glass. She gave me a weak smile. “I’ll be right back! I have to get… something. In the kitchen.” She grabbed her glass and stood up.

    My father looked up at my mother. His plate was empty, except for one piece of turkey bone and an uneaten pile of sweet potatoes pushed to one side. I watched my father as he watched his wife, impassive, his expression impossible to decipher. How did he see her on that day? At what point did life with my mother go from perfume and the feeling of silk stockings wrapping around his back to a future of falling asleep with the TV on? He watched her as she turned away and disappeared into the kitchen. I saw his eyes. They searched the empty space for a lingering shadow of her, the way an eager lover might sniff the air, searching for a trace of her scent. He reached for the Corningware dish of mashed potatoes and proceeded to fill his plate up once again.

    “Did you see the Taj Mahal?” Brandon 5 blurted out.

    “What?” I regarded him with my head tilted slightly, like a confused puppy.

    “While you were in Paris? Did you see the Taj Mahal?”

    So I had heard him correctly. I’m not sure if I actually rolled my eyes in real life or if I only thought about it. “Well, no…”

    “That’s in India,” Tod interjected without looking up from his phone.

    “India – Paris… What’s the difference? All those little European countries are the same anyway.”

    I looked over at Tod. He still hadn’t looked up from his phone, but I could see that he had his eyes closed and he appeared to be counting to ten, very slowly. I looked at Brandon 5. He had a tiny glob of Country Crock stuck in the corner of his mouth and at that moment all I wanted to do was smash him in the face with something, anything. I stood up fast, and the chair made a scraping noise against the floor as I pushed it back. It was the same noise the chair made in school when you were called on to solve a problem on the blackboard, or the sound your defense lawyer makes as he stands to deliver his closing argument and a plea for clemency. It was the sound of drawing unwanted attention.

    “I need some air,” I said, and I made my way toward the back door. Everyone at the table, even my father and Tod, froze and watched me as I walked out, in flagrant violation of the accepted Script. I heard my mother as she drifted back in from the kitchen, her voice thick with holiday benevolence and Harvey’s Bristol Cream.

    “Well now,” she was saying, “who wants more carrots?”

     I heard the screen door slam behind me as I stepped out into the crisp November air. I took a few steps away from the house and reached into my pocket to retrieve the lighter and the joint that I had stashed away earlier. I stood there for a while, but after about the twelfth futile attempt to light the joint in the Long Island breeze, I gave up and decided to go into the garage through the side door.

    Once inside, I finally got it lit and took a long, grateful drag. I leaned up against an old piece of furniture. It was the chest of drawers that had been in my room when I was growing up. It had been so big when I was a kid, big enough to hold all my clothes plus some toys and pieces of the world around me, like the skull of an opossum, some rocks and a piece of charred wood from the house around the corner that I had watched burn down to the ground. But now it just looked small and flimsy. I took another hit off the joint and felt myself start to relax as I looked around the garage, the sweet smell of cannabis slowly overtaking the lingering scents of motor oil, cigarette smoke and Old Spice, the pervasive aroma of my father. Most of the space in the garage was taken up by my old man’s 1968 Mustang. He had bought it new, a two-door beauty in Royal Maroon. He loved that car and the way he looked when he was inside it. He loved the way it made him feel, young and cool and ready to hit almost any road. But it wasn’t long before Tod was born and by then Teresa and I were already too big for the back seat. Dad decided it was time to trade in the Mustang for a station wagon, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually get rid of the Mustang, so he moved it into the garage, figuring that he’d take it back out again after the kids had all grown, when he no longer needed a station wagon and two doors would once again be enough. I took another hit from the joint, breathing in deep and struggling to keep myself from coughing. It occurred to me that the Mustang was kind of like my dad’s life: shelved, put aside while he attended to other things, to other people, always meaning to get back to it but somehow never quite getting there, until it wound up forgotten, blanketed in dust, corroded, mildewed and going nowhere.

    I breathed deep, the harsh marijuana smoke filling my lungs as my mind began to race. Is my own life going to play out any differently? Am I going to find myself on the other side, after the Career and the Wife and Kids, the pediatricians and the graduations, the skinned knees and “Dad can I borrow the car?”, wondering what the hell ever happened to my life, to my dreams, to my Royal Maroon two-door dream machine?

    No, I answered myself. That is not how things are going to play out for me.

    I finished the rest of the joint quickly, inhaling deep and holding each drag in as long as I could. My mind was spinning, now that I knew what I had to do. I had to finish this joint. Then I had to go back inside and kiss my mom, and possibly have a slice of pumpkin pie. I had to say goodbye to my family and I had to go back to Paris. And I had to find Maria.

    When I walked back into the dining room, everyone suddenly stopped talking, trying to act natural, the awkward silence broken only by the sound of silverware clanging against the good china. Mom finally broke in with one of her famous the-weight-of-the-world-is-upon-me sighs.

    “Where did you go?” Tod asked me.

    “For a walk.”
    “You smell like a bong,” said Brandon 5.

    “Fuck you, Cooper,” I said. Mom let out a little shriek like she had just stepped on a sharp piece of glass, but when I looked over at her I could see she was attempting to hide a little grin behind her napkin. “Great supper, Mom,” I said. “Is there any pie?”

    It wasn’t much later that I was getting ready to head out the door. “I just don’t understand why you have to leave so early,” Mom was saying as she handed me my jacket.

    “Things to do, Mom. I just realized that I have a lot to do.” I looked at her square in the eye and said, “I’ve got to go.” She just smiled weakly and picked an invisible piece of lint off of my jacket. I turned one more time to face my family, who were now gathered in the den, warmed by the numbing glow of the television set. “I’ve got to go,” I said one more time. “Goodbye.”

    “Bye,” said Tod. He had apparently gotten over Alejandro because he was now texting someone named Kevin and was arranging an Über to one of the clubs downtown. Brandon 5 flipped me the bird without looking away from the TV set. My sister looked at me and rolled her eyes conspiratorially. “Knock it off,” she said to Brandon 5 and she called him as asshole under her breath, but at the same time she was draping her arm around him and pulling him in closer.  Mom had already gone back into the kitchen and her bottle in the cupboard. I turned and made my way out of my family’s house, into the brisk and windy world outside.

    As the door closed behind me, I heard my father. “Goodbye, Tod.”

    He never realized his mistake.

    As I drove home that evening, I allowed my mind to fill with thoughts of Maria. I had been fighting that since I had gotten home. Up until then, the merest image of her flashing through my mind, the random memory of her smell, the icy blueness of her eyes, was always accompanied by the feeling of a dull ache in my stomach, or was it my heart. But now, now that I had decided to return to Paris, to find her again, I could run through the memories of her with feelings of anticipation instead of despair.

    I allowed myself to remember long afternoons, spent sleeping on the lumpy mattress in my stifling hotel room, Maria wrapped up in my arms, her breathing soft and comforting. I let my skin remember her softness. I remembered how I loved to watch her eat, how she seemed to relish and enjoy every meal with abandon, like everyone in Paris, I guess. And that night, on the drive to my apartment, those thoughts made me happy instead of inexpressibly sad.

    I once asked the proprietors of the hotel why she was named Maria, instead of the more common Marie in Paris. My French is pretty weak, so the best that I could get from their response was that she was de Perse, from Persia. So, she was Persian. No matter. Even though she didn’t speak English and I certainly don’t speak her language, we said more to one another with our eyes and with our soft breath than volumes of lyrical Persian poetry.

    The plane landed in Paris and I made my way to French immigration, my heart beating a little fast and ready to find my way to the Marais. The official behind the counter was straight out of central casting: the archetypal Snooty French Waiter. His obsidian-colored hair was slicked down with a severe part just to the left of center. His face was long and narrow, with a pointed chin and an Errol Flynn mustache. His long, aquiline nose looked as if it could only be happy sniffing an impertinent Bordeaux. He eyed me suspiciously, one eyebrow arched almost comically. “What brings you to Paris, monsieur?” he said.

    “I am here to find happiness,” I grinned back.

    The official stood there, motionless for a few seconds, regarding me. He opened his mouth just a little, as if he were about to ask me something, but then he seemed to think better of it before he grabbed his stamp and imprinted my passport without even looking at it. He waved me through. “Welcome to Paris, monsieur,” he said.

    I wonder if anyone can ever really get used to the taxi ride from the deGaulle airport into Paris, particularly during the morning rush hour. For me it’s a hair-raising, white-knuckled 30-minute dance with Death, full of too-tight turns, too-tight spaces and angry drivers shaking their fists and shouting unheard behind rolled-up windows. I found myself staring at the back of the driver’s head. He seemed nearly unperturbed by the chaos and peril all around him, occasionally muttering under his breath as his unlit cigarette nodded in agreement from between his thin lips. I thought about my future here in Paris. Would I one day reach the point where a drive like this becomes unremarkable, everyday, just another morning stuck in traffic? At what point does Paris itself stop being the City of Light, the Eiffel Tower and the Palace of Versailles, and just become Paris, that city that you have to get through every night on your way home from work?

    Eventually and despite all the odds, we made it into the city, and to the Fourth Arrondissement. I began to recognize the narrow streets, the modest yet gracious buildings. Now that it was December, the acrid smell of roasting chestnuts filled the air. Then I recognized him, the old man at the café across the street, with his café au lait and his pained Parisian expression.  “Chat Blanc,” said the driver, turning to face me, one hand extended towards me as I fumbled with the fare, his other hand already lighting the cigarette on his lips.  

    The next thing I knew I was standing in front of the hotel, everything I had in the world stuffed into two suitcases and a knapsack at my feet. I pressed the button on the outer door for entry, and within a few moments I was being buzzed in. I stepped inside the old hotel. Like many buildings in the Marais, its austere façade pushed right up to the sidewalk, and as I stepped inside at first it seemed cool and dark compared to the morning glare of the street. The air inside smelled of tarragon and Gauloises, and the sound of water dripping somewhere at first made me think of a vast, underground cave. A single shaft of nearly-tangible light shone down from the skylight above to the central courtyard below, tiny flecks of dust tumbling and glinting in its light as they resisted gravity’s inexorable pull downward.

    Out of the shadows emerged the diminutive frame of Madame Michaud, the proprietress, easily as wide as she was tall. She was wiping her hands on her apron, and her eyes lit up with recognition when she saw me. “Oh, notre ami!” she said, opening her arms for a hug. “Bonjour! Welcome back to Paris.”

    I returned her embrace, kissing her on both cheeks in the French fashion. I instantly remembered her smell, a curious blend of perfume, fresh baked bread and disinfectant. I breathed it in deep. “Bonjour, Madame Michaud,” I said.

    She stood back and regarded me at arm’s length. “Maria?” she said.

    My breathing stopped for a moment. I was smiling but my eyes still felt as if they were about to cry. “Maria…” was the only response I could muster.

    Madame Michaud turned, and her gaze indicated a small table, off in the far corner of the courtyard. On it sat a folded newspaper and a coffee cup, empty, smudged with lipstick the color of a Cardinal’s robes. Next to it a small chair had been pushed back, and on it I saw a beautiful white Persian cat, fast asleep, the tip of one paw still basking in the shifting beam of sun from the skylight above.

    Maria.

    I ran over to her and scooped her up into my arms, throwing her over my shoulder and holding her as tightly as I dared. My sweet Maria, my beloved, beautiful cat. She purred and dug her claws into my shoulder as she recognized me; and I breathed her in and reveled in her softness. Her long white fur tickled my nose and I began to laugh.

    I was laughing because I was here. I was laughing because I was home. And I was laughing because against all the odds I had found my way to a place where I might, finally, be happy. 

THE NOISE OF QUIET

Sometimes

when we think it's quiet

it's not.

A cup of warm tea next to a window

filled with pale blue light 

and the thought:

It's so quiet this morning

But listen

the hum of the refrigerator

there's water running 

and somewhere nearby a neighbor fell asleep with the TV on

A walk through the woods

a canopy of green above and a carpet of leaves below

the fertility of generations

thinking:

I love these woods, so peaceful and quiet

But listen

the birds above call to one another

a morningsong of joy and the labor of living another day

the dog as he pads and pants joyfully

the leaves of the trees rustle 

petticoats in a Viennese waltz.

And so it is with life.

When we think it's quiet

it isn't

When we think we're alone

we are not

When we cry out and think there's no one there

to hear us

or to answer us

We only need to open our ears

This morning I knelt on wet grass

the long shadow of a house of God behind me.

Before me were flowers

a few days old

and flags

rainbows and equal signs

and notes

written to people who will never read them

and again I wept.

UNTOLD

Orlando, 6/12/2016

On the screen in my living room

the newsman sits

calm

benevolent

groomed

Over his shoulder

a name

a number

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

             (21!)

maybe a selfie

or a picture from his little sister's quinceañera

"He lit up a room" they'll say, or

"He'd give you the shirt off his back"

and we might learn that

he was a pre-med student

or worked in his father's bakery.

But that's not the whole story

The whole story is how

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

called his grandmother every Sunday

even though she had dementia

or how the roast caught fire at his first dinner party

and they ordered Domino's instead

and everyone said it was the best dinner party they had ever been to.

The whole story is how

Alejandro Barrios Martinez

21

spent the last moments of his life

afraid

bloody

crying

and lying on a dirty nightclub floor.

The story of Alejandro Barrios Martinez

took 21 years to tell

multiplied by forty-nine

plus fifty-three

plus the lives of everyone at that dinner party

and one grandmother 

On the screen in my living room

a name

a number

And I can't bear to look

but I can't look away

because

on the screen in my living room

the name

and the number 

are mine

It was the mother who told Thelma she was a "born storyteller." This was false. She had a phenomenal recollection of detail- what any true writer could have done with that!- but no sense of what made a story worth telling. As they waded through baked trout, artichoke hearts, and a not-bad Chablis, Thelma rambled through a childhood recorded but not really taken in. Listening to her was like viewing someone's vacation slides. Of course, Thelma had a story- everyone has a story- but she did not seem to know what it was, and didn't know she didn't know. Knowing what your story is, Amy was fond of telling her classes, was what separated writers from everybody else.

-from Amy Falls Down
by Jincy Willett

First-World Problems

Here's how it plays out: The end of any typical day, perhaps spent working or cleaning house or stuck in traffic. A decent meal, the dog's been walked, and the endless, pointless, mindless drone of "Murder, She Wrote" or "The Good Wife" flickers from the TV set. Dishes are mostly taken care of, except for the odd glass or dessert plate which sit in the sink. Your limbs seem to fill with wet sand. It becomes physically impossible to hold your eyes open as some neurochemical courses through your veins shutting off the proverbial lights and drawing the curtains. You fall into a fitful drowse, despite the fact that you are sitting upright and your jeans are cutting into your waistline and in the back of your mind you keep telling yourself that you have to rinse off that fork in the sink. For an hour or so, you drift in and out of consciousness as your spouse tiptoes off to bed, as you wake yourself up snoring, or as Jessica Fletcher finds yet another dead body in her living room. Each time, for that brief moment before drifting off again, you think to yourself that you need to get to bed and you remember that stupid fork in the sink and it's all so overwhelming that you have to just rest here for a minute longer...

Eventually, your Iron Will as an autonomous human being vanquishes the melatonin and seratonin which have been marinating your brain, and you manage to lift yourself off of your chair or your couch or futon. Eyes half-closed, you blearily rinse the goddam fork. You stumble into the bathroom and take care of your teeth. Leaving a trail of clothing which makes it look like you've been on a drunken honeymoon for one, you shuffle into the bedroom, where the husband and the dog are already blissfully sleeping. You fall, practically face-first, into the bed.

And you are wide, wide awake.

I want a President...

Zoe Leonard,1992

TRUTH IN ADVERTISING

My mom watched the CBS Evening News as far back as I can remember, back to the days when you wouldn't be shocked to see one of the newscasters light up a Lucky on camera. She never called it "the news", though. It was always "Walter Cronkite", as in, "Jack! Turn the TV on! I want to watch Walter Cronkite." Even after it was Dan Rather, it was still "Walter Cronkite."
I wish I could say that I inherited that habit from my mother, but in truth I can't say that I did. I grew up in the 60s and 70s, so for me at least part of the 6:00 news every night included body counts and stories about places named Quảng Trị and Khe Sanh, and Walter Cronkite had me so filled with pre-teen angst about actually reaching adulthood that the news was the last thing I was interested in. That all changed in September of 2001. One of the countless changes, big and small, which took place in our world on that morning was that I suddenly started to pay attention. But, even if I didn't inherit my mother's interest in "the news", I did at least inherit her preference for which of the Big 3 networks to sit down and watch every evening. I can see her now, smoking away on her Chesterfields and picking loose tobacco from her teeth, often snuggled into a fluffy bathrobe because she was always cold. I think she would have liked Scott Pelley, although she still would have called the program "Walter Cronkite."
Now, many would argue that network TV news is pablum for the masses; and some would say even worse, that we are being manipulated by a small number of shadowy entities who control what information we are given and how it is presented. And I would agree 100% with nearly all of those arguments. Luckily, I also inherited my mother's ability to consider many sides to a story, her curiosity, and her ability to read books. Plus, I know that if a news story is truly important or truly momentous in history, I will be hearing about every possible side of the story and every ridiculous argument, every morning for months when I turn on my laptop and scroll through my Facebook news feed.
But I digress.
My observation here has actually nothing to do with the news, but rather the commercials which are being shown to those of us who watch the news.
I have long been interested in a concept called "target demographics". This is where a particular product, or service, or advertisement, whatever, is being directed to a specific portion of the population, for example, white men aged 18-25. This is a very important concept in the modern marketplace, because if a company is spending millions of dollars on a commercial campaign, they want to be sure that the commercial is being seen by the right people, that is, by potential customers. You don't make a commercial for Chick-Fil-A and then buy airtime during "RuPaul's Drag Race". 
So, anyway, what I have decided is that the only people, apparently, who watch "Walter Cronkite" are the aged and the infirm, because 99% of the commercials shown during that half hour are for Buicks and prescription drugs.
I read somewhere that, when non-Americans are asked to list things about America which they find strange, the fact that we have commercials for prescription drugs is right up there with "portion sizes". And it is odd that millions of dollars are being spent marketing a product to us which we can't even actually buy. Think about that for a minute. How many people actually walk into the doctor's office and say, "Hey, Doc, I'd really like to get some Xarelto!" ?
It's even odder when you look at how these medicines are marketed to us. Disease and treatment have been reduced to a sort of silly cartoon, or like "Candy Crush". We see people portrayed as little origami paper-fold-people, as copper plumbing pipe-people, or as inflatable balloon-people. We see happy diabetics tossing a Frisbee to one another as we hear about "Multiple Endocrine Neoplasia Syndrome Type II". In one commercial, a woman is being bullied by her little animated bladder, who won't even let her ride the bus or go bowling in peace; then we see the little bladder sitting in the doctor's office, listening attentively while they discuss overactive bladder. It's all just too surreal, when you think about it.
They've all been topped, though, by the latest campaign for a drug called "Xifaxan". Xifaxan is an antibiotic. An antibiotic! Anyway, it's supposed to be useful in treating IBS: Irritable Bowel Syndrome. The commercial? You guessed it: a little, pink, animated colon. In the first commercial, we first see him? it?... a non-threatening little anthropomorphic ball of intestine, as he runs off, presumably to the bathroom with a case of "urgent" diarrhea. Later, presumably after treatment with Xifaxan®, we see the little bucket of guts admiring fish in an aquarium, and finally able to enjoy a meal in a nice restaurant, albeit all alone. See what being an irritable bowel will get you?
Well, it gets even worse. They actually released a new Xifaxan ad for Super Bowl Sunday, and the little pink bowel has even been given a name; "GutGuy." Well, in this one, we see "GutGuy" at The Big Game, tailgating, high-fiving (gross), even being searched by one of those hand-held wand metal detectors. I mean, really? Think about everything that that implies. At the end of the commercial, GutGuy, a little, pink, animated bundle of intestines, ends up on the JumboTron, his little colon-mouth hanging open and waving at the crowd like the Pope.
Can I really be the only person who sees this stuff and just thinks to himself, "What the fuck.....?"

PERSPECTIVE

You Matter :)

Remember, you're one of a kind. :) <3 #LoveWhatMattersVideo courtesy of Cobi Sewell

Posted by Love What Matters on Monday, February 8, 2016

I Am NOT Black, You are NOT White.

Humble and Kind
This song is so special to me. I really wanted a video that showed the universality of the message of Humble and Kind. Thanks to Wes Edwards for executing this vision and to Oprah Winfrey for lending us scenes of Belief from all over the world. I hope you like it as much as I do.
Posted by Tim McGraw on Thursday, January 21, 2016

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