| Music Appreciation 101 |
| My Grandmother’s Heaven |
| After the Ultrasound, Week 12 |
| Deadline |
My dad fell for my mother because she looked like Joni Mitchell. Nine shared rent checks and one pregnancy later, my mom came home from the hospital to him going ga ga over the new Steely Dan album. I don’t blame him, a self made orphan, he cut down his family tree to build a bridge from Kokomo to San Francisco that is still burning. And there’s a reason that before he taught me to ride a bike or throw a left hook, my dad showed me how to hold a record without touching its face; without leaving fingerprints, scratches, evidence. My dad is proof that ghosts exist. They come back for birthdays and Christmas. From a distance, he watched me grow into shoes, corsages, suitcases and Greyhound buses. And there’s a reason why a record reads like a cross section of a fallen tree; when my father pulls that album out of its cover, a whole year of his life is right there circling like kids on bikes in cull de sacs, waiting for him to turn on the turntable, place the needle on the groove, and call them back.
No more VCR light blinking the same sad midnight hour. No more falling asleep to the lullaby of AM talk-radio hosts promising rapture in the form of alien abduction or just plain old Armageddon. No more arguing with ghosts and browning the roast alone. No more filling the kettle with just enough water for one cup of tea. No more hope or love or joy or obligation to put the flag up in time for the fourth of July. No more shadows with their abstract sorrows, or long Decembers spent feeding the hungry black woodstove of memory. No more doctors or agile smiles, no more shiny tools licking arteries clean. No more wincing stars, no more, now where did I put that? She’s built herself a cabin on the outskirts of the Milky Way, and she sits on the porch in her rocking chair, dressed in her red flannel nightgown and slippers, a shotgun across her lap as she listens to the nearby creek, a prayer, running steady and clear.
You should know your big sister is prone to stomping small things. Not yet two inches long, you’re safe-- for now. Still, before your first breath, I’d like to say I’m sorry for yelling, for forgetting to pick you up from school, for the coca-cola Slurpee you can’t have, for FM radio, split atoms, American cheese and the ozone hanging over you like a sieve. Sorry for the 5, 6 and 10 O’clock news, and for fattening you up with Disney. I’m sorry for 13, Yellow #5 and mandatory Pep Rallies. I’m sorry for your first French kiss for laugh tracks, Improvised Explosive Devices and Standard Aptitude Tests. Sorry for footnotes, specifically, Ulysses, for Depleted Uranium, Sunday nights and Eleanor Rigby playing on Musak, in Applebee’s. Someday you will come across pictures of this ultrasound and of Saturn’s rings. I’d hoped more of this world would be left to your imagining.
You oil the muses jaw with ink. The page stays clean, unforgiving. You sell your daughter’s first word, and slip truth serum in your prayers, try to get God drunk so the blueprints will roll off his tongue. You wake with nothing. You have no choice but to begin digging up your father’s grave, gluing his bones back together with your saliva, inflating his lungs with your own breath. You sink to the bottom of the page, dressed in chains. You’re no Houdini. You have no business sitting in this glass box full of water, fumbling with the padlock.
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