here lies a man who felt compelled to visit time and time again the house where he’d spent the majority of his childhood; a house that his parents had built above the intersection of two creeks in a shadowy cove they’d purchased upon moving to a small mountain town; a house made of wood and stone with a sixteen-windowed room on one side that let in the sun and overlooked a rhododendron thicket; a house that smelled often of oranges and baking bread and the deceased’s mother’s perfume; a house whose three unfolding bathroom mirrors opened a corridor into infinity; a house whose vents the deceased inspected for lost toys, staring down the oblivion-dark holes as metallic-smelling wind stung his eyes; a house that figured in one of the deceased’s recurring dreams, in which he rose from a manger (less delusions of grandeur than an obsession with nativity scenes) and watched as a 16mm movie of his home was projected onto a screen, a magical window through which he then vaulted himself, landing upon the mossy, mole-rutted front yard, which he climbed, then up the concrete the stairs and through the house with its dark wood banister and upside-down yellow wallpaper and through the kitchen, and onto the back porch, where he found his mother dancing in a wedding dress; a house which, after his parents had procured a larger and wilder swathe of land in a more remote location, they’d sold to an older woman and her husband (a scientist who had at one time worked for NASA), though it turned out that this man was abusive and the woman herself believed the house to be haunted, a claim that the deceased found beguiling, as he could recall zero instances of actual phantasmagoric activity, though the deceased and his sister had, as kids, engineered their own makeshift haunted houses, hanging tarps from the ceilings to create passageways, lighting candles, smearing their faces with a mixture of bananas and food coloring, tying semitransparent dental floss to old coolers and pulling the strings when visitors walked by, thus revealing the decapitated bodies of dolls, or throwing a wig out of the dark space beneath the stairs, which was supposedly a cave where a crazy woman scalped people, and of course none of this was nearly as scary as the deceased liked to think, and their house was not really haunted—at least that’s what they thought, because the current owner was insisting that there must be a spirit or two in the house and that she had heard cupboards opening and closing and doors opening and closing, had heard something walking on the floor above her when she knew no one was there, a series of events that had lead the woman to decide to contact whatever it was that had been making these noises, so, one night, when she was alone, she’d turned out the lights and lit candles and incense and laid herself down on the couch and said, “Okay, whatever or whoever you are, make yourself known,” after which the door to the attic, which was a place the deceased had been uncomfortable to enter and whose pink insulation and old mothballed clothes and big hefty trunks had remained very clear in his memory, opened and closed several times, an activity that had scared the woman, and so she said, “Stop!” and the door stopped and she felt exhilarated and also quite frightened but now knew for sure there was a spirit living there and somehow she figured out that this particular spirit was a Native American girl who had been buried on the same site as the house and that she had never been given an adequate funeral, so the woman performed some sort of ritual and things have been good ever since, except for the fact that her husband had moved out and away and now the woman lived in the house all by herself and once a year the deceased would go back and take a tour of the place where he’d lived and think how small this house is and how different it looks now that the wallpaper has been torn off and how different the basement looks now that it’s been finished, and how lonely the house seems without all the stuff that the deceased remembers had once been here, and which he superimposes onto the rooms with his mind, and why is he drawn here again and again, and could he be said to be a kind of ghost himself, an entity who haunts a house that is no longer his but always will be, a place that no longer recognizes him, a home that has died and comes to life only in dreams

I saw my penis lying on a blanket
Next to a broken toaster oven.
Some guy was selling it.
I had to buy it off him.
He wanted twenty-two bucks, but I talked him down to seventeen.
I took it home, washed it off,
And put it back on. I was happy again. Complete.

–Detachable Penis by King Missile

I dreamt that it was morning and you said, as if it was no big thing, “Hey, kid, why don’t you take the penis today?  I’ve got a lot to do, so I won’t even really notice it’s gone, and it might be fun for you.”

“This is what I love about you,” my dream self said to the you in my dream.  “Nobody else would ever think to be that generous.”  And I meant it, as both my selves.  Ultimately, this is a dream about your generosity.

“Okay, then.  Let me keep it till after my shower, so I can give it to you clean,” you said, stepping out of the plaid pajama pants that I love that you wear, because there is something serious about a man who wears actual pajamas.  “Then I’ll show you a little bit about how it works, and you should be good to go.”

And then I was in your Montero, instead of my Volvo, driving downtown in a pair of old jeans, a flannel shirt and work boots.  I could feel the seam of the jeans sort of crushing my (or are they still your?) testicles—not painfully, just in a way that was clearly a change from how they had felt when I’d been standing up—as I sat in the driver’s seat.  Moving from gas pedal to brake was different with a cock and balls, much in the way it’s different when wearing heels.  I found myself constantly reaching down to readjust their positioning.

I had no clear destination.  The road was oddly consistent for a dream road, everything where it really is.  I pulled into the parking lot behind Great Wall restaurant to decide what to do.  Calling a friend seemed wrong. What would I say?  “Hey, Patyon lent me his dick.  Can I come over and fuck you?”  Even my dream self found that appalling.  Maybe it would have been all right if I was still twenty, but my friends are all, like me, middle-aged women long since over the excitement of novelty sex.

I got out of the truck and walked toward the adult bookstore.  I thought, Penises like pornography, right? But as I walked down the block, it occurred to me that I was still mostly myself and that someone I knew might see me going into the shop, so I went to Blue Moose for a cup of coffee instead.  I felt different, more masculine, and caught myself flirting with the tattooed, dreadlocked barista.  But I’m in there all the time, usually friendly, and she didn’t seem to notice when I stared alternately at her hips and breasts.  I tipped her well and took my dream latte to a table in the back corner of the coffeehouse, ashamed of myself.

I weighed the options. I could hire a prostitute but, in this small West Virginia college town, it wasn’t immediately obvious how I’d do that.  Also, it’s not like this was a disposable penis.  This was your penis and I wasn’t certain that I’d feel as positively inclined toward it afterward.  There are, I’m certain, prostitutes here, but probably not the storied sort who are well-groomed and erudite and command prices upwards of a few hundred dollars an hour.  The idea of putting your penis into a woman who seemed unclean, or even just a little dumb with bad teeth and a desperate air about her, wasn’t exciting.  It was disgusting.  So I ruled that out.

I thought about waiting until later and going to the local gay bar to see if I could find some game young man who’d find the whole thing entertaining enough to indulge me.  This seemed more likely and less awful than finding a prostitute.  Young men are the opposite of middle-aged women in this way, aren’t they?  Sexually adventurous, still excited by the idea of the transgressive?  But this is your penis, and since you don’t use it to have sex with boys, I’m not sure that I should.  Also, Vice Versa wouldn’t open for hours, long after we’d normally be in for the evening.  And I’d rather be at home than out trolling the bars, even on such an exceptional day.

I got back in the Montero. Before starting the engine, I reached down and cupped the crotch of my jeans, feeling the heft. Halfway down the dream road home, I awoke.  You were standing beside the bed in your solid-citizen pajamas, just getting up for the day.  Rolling toward you, I pulled the covers over my shoulders although it was summer and the house was already warm.

“I had the strangest dream,” I said, and told you what I had dreamt.

You said, “Only you, kid, would have that dream and end up too ethically conflicted to ever actually use the penis for anything.”  You shook your head and changed out of your pajamas into a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt.  Your daytime solid-citizen attire.

“But that’s why it’s interesting,” I said, sitting up in bed in a ratty old purple nightshirt I probably shouldn’t be wearing so early in our relationship.  “Is that what it’s like, having a penis?  Do you spend a lot of time thinking about opportunities to use it, and then dismissing most of them?”

“No.   There aren’t that many opportunities for using your penis.  If you used your penis two to four hours a week, that would be a lot.  There are 168 hours in a week, so you’re talking about a small percentage.  But 99.9% of your relationships have nothing to do with the penis.  You can be a man, but being a man’s got nothing to do with having a penis.  The penis is the last item on the menu.  A woman doesn’t want a penis, she wants a person.”

Which, of course, is true, but not at all what I was trying to understand.

My mother is a roving secretary and my father sees her in an office across the hall and that was that. He searches for her, floor by floor, because she never stays in one place too long, you see. And then, there she is in the lunchroom and their eyes meet and my father just knows. This is my father’s story.

My father is tall and handsome, a wave of dark hair, tanned skin. An Olympic javelin thrower, Tokyo ‘64.  Muscular, powerful, the body of a hero. My father is used to winning.

My mother, oh she’s pretty, but her teeth are like this: bent and gray, a little like a rodent’s. She doesn’t have, how do we say it: the va-voom of Southern California—the glamour of year-round sun, the melodrama of the beach. She grew up in a one-lane Mormon town, watching movies in the church house, stocking shelves at the General Store, which always smelled of cows. Of course she hides her hands in her lap. Of course she presses her lips together in a thin, pink line.  Of course she falls in love.

Their first date is in his living room; imagine what happens in the dark: maybe she presses her toes against the side of his thigh.  Maybe he caresses her calves. Maybe his hands roam across the angles of her hips, her other furtive places. Maybe her body is the first thing—the puzzle, the lock, the Gordian knot. What brilliant design! The writing on the wall. Yes it’s true, God knows a thing or two about desire. Even what my mother hides, like precious jewels in paper boxes.

Then my father is baptized a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and they are married for time and all eternity and there is nothing she won’t give to him. There is nothing he can’t take. Then she is carrying his suitcase to the car and he is flying off to Europe. Then she is making eggs with milk gravy and he is selling her electric-blue Mustang for his fishing boat. Then she is sitting on a towel and I am standing ankle-deep in surf and my father is always somewhere else.

*        *         *

That I had found myself a resident of the Lone Star State, much less attending a rally for its secession, was never part of the plan. Like many of the strange, unexpected turns we take, it all started with the pursuit of another – in my case, Duvall. We had met the year prior in Mississippi. She was finishing graduate school and I, after an extended Colorado hiatus, had returned to my home state to take a newspaper job. Then, two months into our seeing each other she got the call.  A job offer in Austin. A good job. Would I follow? In truth, I offered little resistance. Texas had long intrigued me. Admittedly influenced by old westerns and visions of honky-tonks and especially by Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, I associated the place with adventure and possibility and free-spirited souls. Only in Texas could the likes of Janis Joplin and Townes Van Zandt and Bonnie and Clyde emerge. Only in Texas could a man still own a ranch the size of Rhode Island or spend a Sunday afternoon playing chickenshit bingo at Ginny’s Little Longhorn Saloon.

But along with these romantic notions, I also had real concerns. Mainly, I wasn’t a “native.” Nor did I want to be. As a proud Mississippian, I did harbor a bit of a grudge against Texans – their undeserved swagger; their “bigger and better” clichés and shameless self-love. I may go, I told myself, but no way will I buy into it. What I realized upon my arrival was that even I had underestimated the state of things. The first sign came after I accepted a reporting job with a small paper near Austin and was sent to cover a public school board meeting. There, I stood slack-jawed as the board opened with a prayer worthy of Jerry Falwell, then proceeded to offer a pledge of allegiance – to the Texas flag. “Honor the Texas flag,” said every stern face in the room, their hands over their hearts. “I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state under God, one and indivisible.” I kept my hands at my side, wondering if this was for real. Afterwards I started noticing “Yes We Can Secede” and “Secede Now” bumper stickers all over the highways. I also read about a secession-tinged comment from Texas Gov. Rick Perry that had recently turned the heads of pundits nationwide.

“We’ve got a great union,” the governor had declared during an April 15 Tea Party rally at Austin City Hall. “There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, who knows what may come of that.”

In Perry’s wake, Texas Congressman Ron Paul had also chimed in, calling the right to break away from the union a “very legitimate issue to debate” and dutifully reminding the country that Francis Bellamy, author of the Pledge of Allegiance, happened to be a socialist.

As I struggled to get my head around what appeared to be mainstream secession sympathies, a press release landed in my email inbox one morning from a group called the Texas Nationalist Movement. The coming spring they would hold a convention in San Antonio, the release said. Thousands would be there making the case for secession. I had never heard of the TNM but immediately googled them, discovering a well-designed web page full of articles, podcast messages, and YouTube videos discussing why Texas must stand alone. One of the videos showed an interview between Glenn Beck and Daniel Miller, the TNM president. Beck was hammering away for parallels with the Tea Party, but Miller wasn’t having it, insisting his only concern was returning Texas to its rightful place as a republic. Funny stuff, I thought. Then I learned more, most notably that Miller descended from the Republic of Texas, an ultra right-wing secession movement that in 1997, under the direction of one Rick McLaren, engaged in a week-long hostage standoff with Texas Rangers in the West Texas, Davis Mountains. Things had ended badly, with one of the members dying in a gunfight and McLaren being sentenced to life in prison. Miller had escaped such a fate though. Before the debacle, he had organized his own followers and split from McLaren’s more violent faction. A series of power struggles took place within the surviving Republic of Texas, but Miller’s faction prevailed and by the late 2000s, was known as the TNM.

I decided this was interesting stuff, possibly the seed of a magazine article, and made my plans to attend the conference.  By the time March rolled around, however, the conference had been cancelled. In its place a rally would be held in Gonzales, a little town on the Guadalupe River known as the Birthplace of Texas Freedom. Furthermore, it would coincide with Gonzales’s annual Come and Take It Festival. This event, I learned to my delight, would take place on October 2 and mark the 175th anniversary of the Texas Revolution’s opening battle. Prior to Texas winning its independence for a decade, prior to the Alamo and Goliad, it had been at the Battle of Gonzales where Texas settlers fired the first shot against Mexico. I marked my calendar and made plans to attend. When Duvall found out, she was game too. I warned her things might get strange, but she didn’t seem concerned. “It will be fun,” she said. “You should wear your Wranglers and cowboy boots though.”

*        *        *

“Here’s how you solve this,” my father said over Christmas dinner, not five minutes after watching a report on “The Underwear Bomber.” “Keep all the sand-niggers off the planes. Don’t let them fly, and they can’t kill Americans.”

“He was black, Dad,” I added, masking contempt with a tilted glass of wine.

“Bet a thousand dollars he had a sand-niggerish name, right?”

“You mean like Muhammed Ali?”

“Fuck you.”

“And a holly jolly Christmas to you.”

“All of them should die,” he ranted. “Terrorists are just the start. I’ve always said: murderers, rapists, and child molesters. None of those people deserve to live. And don’t house them either. Don’t feed them. Ten cents on a bullet and the problem is solved.”

Top half in red with white text that reads, “Hey mental midget!” The economically-sound bottom half reads in blue font to white background, “Iraq is your Waterloo.”

I choked down the rest of my cheap wine and inhaled. “Blanket an entire race with unwarranted discrimination and you’ll bring the fight to your soil, to your backyard, not some lightning rod of a hellhole you can’t even find on a map. The peaceful people will rise up and kill those that treat them as less than human. They’ll come at you with pitchforks if they have to, and I will show them where you sleep.

“Rapists, murderers, child molesters. You can slap a couple words on a bumper sticker and magically the problem is solved, right? They need to make a bumper sticker that says, ‘If you can fit your entire religious or political debate in this space, you’ve raped the first amendment.’”

I took that too far. My father is really a good man. Neither of us were fair.

I was just so sick of talking points. Exhausted with right and left. Sound bytes, puns, selective perception and fear-inspiring propaganda. Blind hatred. Boiling every issue down to a snappy snippet of rhetoric. I’d realized that we lived in a country of simple solutions to complex problems, quick fixes, and only caring about something for as long as it was being reported. Everything had become black and white, even myself and my own father.

You can’t swim in my river, because it’s polluted and full of glass and detritus from the railroad tracks that run alongside it.  It used to be an ecologically-sound superhighway, part of the annual New England Native American migration pattern thousands of years ago, but then came the railroad and then came the automobiles and then came the mill that dammed the river and broke its path.  It’s strange to look out the window and see, parallel to one another: street, river, railroad; arranged anachronistically, but nevertheless, it is history laid out.  When I was young and trying to fall asleep, I would isolate each travel-sound and hold them apart, but I think they put new engines in the trains since I moved away to Minnesota.  They used to rumble and hum but now, when I visit, they roar, the aural equivalent of a stroboscopic lamp instead of the familiar roam of headlights on dark bedroom walls.  Now, stop me if you’ve heard this one: things used to be better.


The first river I ever swam in was in Quebec, with my little sister and a young boy who appeared at our campsite out of nowhere and to whom my father spoke in halting French. Where are your parents? my father asked, and then timed how long we could hold our breath underwater.  This was right after we had moved out of the city and into the suburbs of Boston, and I still had the vague notion that every river was an extension of the grey, clouded Charles, always smelling of city boats and something left to rot.  But the river in Quebec had a taste like healthy stones and I stayed under for the longest, open-eyed through the clear water at my body distorted and pale-green like I’d begun to turn fish.

The man found in the river did not turn into a fish.  He was there for a long while before anyone found him, and the water had time to erase his history from the face and body.  No one knows who he is.  No one has reported him missing.  It could have been me: not the body, but the kids who found him.  The papers say that they were teenagers walking on the railroad tracks that stretch along the bank, and I walked those railroad tracks almost every day, before my friends got cars and our lives grew bigger.  I’ve found a lot of non-native species in that river—soccer balls, sleds, sealed bottles of Grey Goose vodka—but I never considered finding a corpse.  Now I can’t help it, imagining how it might have been.  What is that thing, that down there, what is that, caught up by a tree branch, tattered red cloth straining against the current?

Though the newspapers didn’t say, I imagine he was discovered where the neck of the river chokes tight and things get trapped, down by the old mill.  If you’ve ever used a pencil, you may thank my river and this mill for bringing it to your hand.  Acton resident Ebenezer Wood automated the pencil-making process in 1812 and ensured the quick and cheap production of hexagonal or octagonal pencils, which are the yellow kind you probably used to learn how to write.  We owe a lot to both of them: to Ebenezer, and to my hometown of Acton, Massachusetts.

The train approached Meridian, Mississippi, at midnight. The train was half empty and quiet, but my mind raced, heavy and conflicted, contemplating the events to come. Who are they, these racists pulling you from trains and cars and homes in the night to shoot you and bury you in concrete? I was 18 and on my way to volunteer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the second Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1965. Was I scared? Yes, certainly; but also excited at the prospect of adventure, of acting on principle and the belief that my actions might make a difference.

My trip had lasted twenty-one hours. Departing Union Station in Washington D.C., I traveled south through Virginia into North Carolina, across the northeastern tip of South Carolina, through Georgia, bisected Alabama, and entered Mississippi from the east at Meridian. I had never been to the Deep South before, but the names, especially in Mississippi, had become familiar like flames on a map – Natchez, McComb, Decatur, The Delta.

As the train slowed, the town emerged from the night, shadowy and ominous. A year earlier James Chaney, a young black man from Meridian, was murdered with two young men from New York. The Ku Klux Klan targeted and killed them on June 21, 1964, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, one day after they had arrived with their idealism and one-week training in voter registration.

No one else was on the platform as we rolled to a stop and my early morning train for Jackson, the capitol, did not leave for five hours. Outside the waiting room, the water fountains said “White” and “Colored.” I was subdued by the presence of these signs and oppressed by the silence. Alone and hesitant, I clutched my grandfather’s old carpetbag, carelessly selected for packing before leaving home. Regretting the obtuseness of this choice, I sidled into the waiting room, struggling to be inconspicuous.

Musty from too much humidity and sweaty from too many people, the room was quiet because everyone was asleep or trying to sleep. I was surprised at the number of passengers waiting at that hour. Advancing carefully in the dim light, I worried about tripping over someone’s legs and the attention that would generate. I slipped with relief into the first empty spot I saw.

As I began to relax, the room trembled awake. Tension rippled through the stillness. Had some secret hand signal identified me as a civil rights worker? I wore a faded madras shirt with the top button undone and blue jeans; my hair was short and I hadn’t talked to anyone. I thought I looked like all the other teenagers I’d seen on the platforms of the small southern towns we’d passed. Would my trip end here, suddenly and badly? Unsure of what I had done, I didn’t know what I could do to make things right again.

An old black man near me on the bench murmured to me. I could not understand him; his words were too soft, too strange and too southern for me. Then he whispered again. I heard his gentle warning: “White folks, you can’t be sittin’ heah; this be the color section.”

I looked at him with desperate gratitude, suddenly realizing that everyone, white and black, who I thought had been sleeping, were actually studying me intently through half-shuttered eyes. Carefully, I rose and shuffled over to the section where white people were and slid into a bench. I hadn’t seen any signs, designating who could be where, earlier when I sat down, but with my eyes accustomed to the dark, I realized that all the whites were sitting where I now was, and all the blacks were in the area I had left. Perhaps I only imagined a collective sigh as the world slowly returned to normal.

No one made a sound after that. And I waited, without sleeping, for the train to Jackson.

New Haven, WV

I had just turned ten. The first day back from our summer break, our PE teacher asked us where we had vacationed. While waiting to be called on, I was holding the name Wayne National Forest in my mind and getting nervous about telling the class we went camping, yet again, about thirty minutes away from home; we never had enough money to go farther. On my turn, I blurted out “Yellowstone!” It was too late to go back.

A bulletin board of the United States was displayed outside our classroom door, showing little threads of different lengths radiating from our state, West Virginia, to our vacation destinations. My thread was one of the two longest; the other being Billy Graham’s, whose real vacation to Yellowstone was sullied and less impressive because I had seemingly taken the exact same trip.

Every day I had to face my lie at the class entrance – when coming in to the classroom in the morning, when coming back from the bathroom, the water fountain, the cafeteria, recess, and when coming back from PE. I hoped no one would find out. (They didn’t.) Still that red thread is seared into my mind.

Actual Trip, embarrassing because the short distance embodied our poverty:

Fake Trip, embarrassing because it was a physical embodiment of my lie:

Letart, WV

I still dream of my grandma’s house. I was shuffled back and forth between cheap apartments, run-down houses, and her house as a child. It was my first home, my favorite house, my entire childhood. My grandma’s house is the only place where I feel completely comfortable. It’s the only house from my childhood that I can still visit. It’s always there. Always waiting for me to come back. The phone number to the house is still the same after twenty-seven years. Although renovations have changed the house’s innards, the living room still has the sliding glass back door. When I was four and five and six and so on, I would play records and dance, while looking at my reflection in the door. I would dance without embarrassment. I was young.

I have only lived in this particular house for a year. I never thought much about the wind in the other places I have lived. The constant wind here reminds me of my grandmother, a woman who liked the wind, perhaps not liked so much as she felt the wind cradled her in a familiarity. I know she seemed to like nothing very much. My grandmother was a native of the Appalachian foothills of east Tennessee, but she lived seventy years or more on the prairie. When I was a boy we lived in the deep hill country. When she would visit, I would listen to her complain of not being able to see the horizon, of being closed in by the hills pressing against Spring Creek valley, a place all the more isolated by its thirty mile distance from the Mother Road, Route 66.

The wind in this place is still new to me, even after a year, a thing both understood and surprising. I first began to notice it because the room in which I write looks to the east, and there is a point in that direction where the land slopes downward in a dramatic fashion. The marrying of terrain and prevailing winds means a consistent updraft works its invisible magic outside my window nearly every day, a magic lifting and cradling of two birds common in this part of the world, red-tail hawks and vultures. Each day there is a festival of birds riding the wind, sometimes at eye level with my window, lingering, always lingering a hundred feet or more above the ground as they ride the updrafts.

I watch the hawks and vultures, soaring far above the meadowlarks and above the swallows whose insect prey lives at ground level. And here is the thing that comes to me as I watch, a thing that seems to have some meaning to it: the same wind carries both the predator and the scavenger. The killer and the cleaner of messes, both are lifted aloft by the same breeze. Simple physics, yes; simple biology, obviously; but yet it seems to mean something to me that I cannot verbalize. There’s a philosophical point in that duality, but I cannot think through to the meaning beneath its symbolism, if there is such a thing.

Or maybe it means nothing.

The ridge upon which my family’s home was built gives a view far beyond the normal horizon. Seven miles away, by road rather than sight, at a bearing slightly south of east, there is the town of Pleasant Hope. Beyond Pleasant Hope there are two flat-top ridges close together, ridges that rise at least two hundred feet above the surrounding seemingly level terrain, ridges that I want to think should be called North View, but I think that cannot be so, for North View should be thirty miles southeast by my reckoning. Those ridges are old landmarks, by the standards of these hills, marking gateways along the Old Wire Road, the trail from St. Louis to Fort Smith, a link made by the telegraph, by the Butterfield Stage route, and now traced in concrete. I think North View is too far for the eye to see, even from my ridge. But then I remember the stories of the purple Rocky Mountains, and the pioneers who walked toward them for days upon days.

This place I live is called the Ozark Mountains, although it is not very Ozarkian nor very mountainous. The word Ozarks is said by some to be a corruption of bois d’arc, the French name for the Osage orange tree, the tree used by native peoples to make bows. But some cannot say “Ozarks” without adding “hillbilly.”

Truly, though, there are only a few pockets of true hillbillies left, and the country they ruled until the end of the Second World War and the federal highway system is now given over to tourist destinations and Wal-Mart associates. Hillbillies are even more scarce than bois d’arc trees, which the hillbillies found made superior fence posts. They are rot-resistant. The classic hillbilly image of the crooked-post fence, an apparently sloppily made fence cobbled together by a man who preferred making moonshine to farming, is deceiving. The bois d’arc tree is strikingly crooked in trunk and limb, but it will stay secure and solid in the ground for decades. It was a practical thing, a sensible thing, a green thing, an all-natural long-lasting post free from chemical preservatives.

I am going away, again, I am excited, and he is going back, but we are going, and this is what matters.  I like going, leaving, moving.  Only yesterday, I returned from abroad, returned to the empty apartment and abandoned college town.  The roommates were still at parents’ places, in slippers, feasting on holiday leftovers, on fatty ham sandwiches and twice-baked potatoes.  Nick picked me up at the airport in Manchester, and we drove the two hours back to Durham in near silence.  We were groggy and disoriented from the sudden evaporation of distance, of the two months spent apart, unlearning the body.  But it was not an uncomfortable silence, and I watched cows mill around the mud-slicked barns outside the window and he occasionally played with my hair.  I stuck my finger in his ear and twice shoved a hand down his pants.

At the bottom of the steps, I hear the shuffling of the caged raccoon.  He is tucked beneath the porch and looks out at us with raging yellow eyes, neon blinkers from deep in a black hole.  His warm body heaves steadily inside the metal cage.  A shackled creature, those terrible eyes like portals to some ghostly landscape where we might all quietly go mad, where I could placidly shed my clothes and roll in shit and chew on the cheeks of rodents.

The trap was rigged up this morning by Animal Services and baited with chicken bones. The raccoon had been spotted several times in daylight and the neighbors feared rabies. Six traps were set up around my block, under eaves and in the dusty forgotten corners of garages.

Somehow, I knew he would end up with me, rattling all day.  I listened from the kitchen window, afraid to go outside.

“I’m putting him in the car,” Nick says.  “We’ll drop him off somewhere far away.”  He tugs his gloves on tighter, like a man in a boxing ring.  He looks excited, skittish, like he has an urge to wrestle the wild forces of nature.  This look makes me nervous, for the raccoon and for myself.

“The hell you are.  Animal Services is coming to get him in the morning.  They’ll do the dropping.”  The raccoon begins to scramble inside his cage.  The rickety contraption begins to rock violently.  I fear it is going to topple over and set him free.  “Please,” I say, “can we just go?”  I toss my bag inside the trunk and wait.  Nick hesitates, watching the raccoon struggle.  It hurts him to see any animal committed like that, the mental head-beating, the stunning confusion, that pure-white and splitting fear.  Nick grew up in Maine and as a kid spent too much time alone in the woods.  I suspect that this is part of the reason he is so sensitive with animals, and entirely distrusting of other human beings.  When we go fishing, he does not let me keep any of the fat bass that we collect in the bucket, instead insisting we return them to the lake at the end of the day.  I watch them longingly while I can, wishing I could fillet each one down its pretty bones, and cook the pearly flesh with lemon and sea grass.

Nick is not an only child, but his half-brother is nine years older, and was married and out of the house by the time Nick was eight.  The nearest potential playmate lived seven miles away.  Nick built himself a little cabin just beyond the brush at the edge of his parents’ property where he stuffed his Highlights magazines into the makeshift mailbox at night.  He was invariably delighted to find them there in the morning.  He occupied himself with long solitary walks, tipping over dead or dying trees, and fishing at David Pond where his parents own a cabin only slightly sturdier than the pine construct Nick made himself.  The cabin is twenty miles north of the family home and they spent every summer there since the year Nick turned six.  His parents bought two used kayaks and taught both sons how to paddle, and then to glide silently into the lily pads and cast their fishing lines into the shade.  They didn’t see Nick much after that.  He left early in the mornings and only returned after dark, every fish carefully released back into the pond.

Nobody goes to the cabin much anymore, but Nick wants to take me there on our way up north into moose country.  We are going to journey from New Hampshire to northern Maine, where I will see my first moose.  He has assured me of this.  It was a great surprise and he told me quickly and in whispers as we lay on the floor, my unpacked bags tossed in a heap in the living room.  I am all smiles, my body jittery with anticipation. He made plans for us to stay at a little bed-and-breakfast in Oquossoc, Maine.  But first to the cabin, which is on our way, where there’s a broken window that needs fixing, and Nick can finally clean out the gutters.  He can’t stop talking about it.

The first time Nick took me home to the house he grew up in, I was shocked by the desolation of the town. I felt safe, though, and out of the way, as if I were stepping outside the current of time and watching my real life speed by without me – free to fall, free to smash into rocks.  However it pleased.  By August the pastures are cleared, the hills rusted orange at their edges, as if by the proximity to the sun.  The only neighbors are a family of farmers who live across the street.  They raise turkeys that wander into his parents’ yard, poking their prehistoric faces into the bathroom window, which is low to the ground.  Turkeys are very curious, unlike the chickens that huddle in tight congregations and squawk obscenities when I pass, no doubt sensing my urban beginnings – the particularly hurried gait.   No, I am not interested in chickens, nor in raccoons.  What I really want to see is a moose, to feel dwarfed by its immensity, to feel powerless and inconsequential, like Nick when he first came to Philadelphia and spent an entire afternoon gazing up at the skyscrapers.

I remember once reading a Cree legend about a grandmother who is also a moose.  She gives her own two shinbones to her human grandson to use as ice picks during his travels, so that he can climb mountains.  I think Nick would hand over his shin bones, too, but I’ll never ask.  And maybe that is why I’ve come so far from home, from the scarred cement streets of Philadelphia, to this quiet university in New Hampshire.  Because the people I love keep dying, or else they are drowning in grief, and there is too much responsibility in all that grieving.  It is selfish, I know, but I am learning to forgive myself.  I left the place where people need me, and I need them, and I’m climbing mountains in this new relationship with a solid, healthy man from Maine.  We are only a year old together, all animal instinct, and he still handles me like I am of a rare and reckless breed, like something that might take off running with the next rustle in the trees.  And, truly, I might.  This new consistency can be unnerving.

“Yeah, we can go,” Nick says, still staring at the raccoon.

Distinguishing each character from another were behavioral or physical qualities—Mister H’s Horrible Hair, for example—which defined a letter’s identity solely by words beginning with its letter, all presented to the viewer in catchy songs.  Every letter but X seemed easy enough to characterize in this fashion, but what begins with X?  For this reason, Mister X, who wasn’t introduced until forty-five episodes into the show, is a bizarre composite of appendages, hands and feet askew, and dismissed as “all miXed up” or, as his Zappa-esque song announces repeatedly, ALL WRONG.

Generally speaking, I got along well enough in kindergarten.  Half a day of playtime, listening to stories, learning to count:  all simple stuff.  I could already read upon entering school, or so claims my mother.  Just one small characteristic that put me outside of the crowd—until my mom brought in raisins for class snack instead of cookies like other parents—and that was enough.  Kindergarten was easy for me, until I realized that unusual behavior didn’t always go over well with the majority.

Like most of those early years, I don’t actually recall much of The Letter People.  Mostly I remember the closing song, during which a flock of Letter People stroll off the screen, hand in hand, waving their farewell to viewers.  Nothing upset me more than seeing that final scene each week, hearing the music that I remember now only as mournful, feeling that with the program’s end, something else was slipping away from me, one more severed connection.

Odds are I had a favorite character, maybe Mister B because of my name (he was made of buttons and one of the more adorable letters).  Probably not Mister X, though, not at the time.  “Quite complex” and isolated from the other letters, Mister X was perhaps the best representation of his letterhood, the one that doesn’t fit in anywhere.  Really, what better role model could you ask for?

Still, I wasn’t able to see myself in Mister X at that age, couldn’t see the gaps between my family and those of the students around me.  The differences became clear over time, when children of doctors and professors began questioning why my parents didn’t just buy me new glasses to replace the ones repaired with black electrical tape, why I wore sweatpants instead of jeans, why I could never invite people over to my house; there were others.

Until these differences were pointed out to me, I never suspected they were there, but knowing kept me from ever returning to my innocence.  Very well, then, I accept my mixed up status; I am in good company, after all.

We are of a kind, he and I.  X—Mister X, to be formal, though I feel we must have reached a point of congruence by now.  You can do what you like, be as different as you need to be, all wrong if you have to, as long as you recognize that in some way, you will always be alone.  Zaniness in any way is not tolerated here.

He left like he always did, hands in pockets down the steps, the crunch of snow, the glass between us suddenly a headline, picture frame, a slap in the face: early cuts of sunshine bright and dry on the sidewalk, snowplow slag, the icy road.  I always feel left behind.  I am here, still here, still breathing the same air, the warm and muddle of it all, and you get to leave here, tick-tock, move along.

The street: gray-white, white, wet.  Slouching jacket, clutch of red.  His hair still shocked me in its redness, the likeness of it.  Mine, I wanted to say, mine, my kin, my kind.  I watched him push the snow off his car with an arm: a swipe and shove, bare fist pulled back inside the sleeve.  I wanted to break into it – to run out in the cold, bare feet in snow, as if the shock of it could make things different.  Look: I will do this for you – barefoot in the street.

What more can you do than run barefoot in the snow after someone?  Stop traffic and shout long vowels until your breath runs out?  Ask him if he’d like another cup of tea and please maybe to reconsider flying off to Africa (and what is Africa?) or to at least postpone this trip until he had a visa, an invitation from the Congolese consulate, something, something…safer.  This is crazy.  Crazy fool I love you barefoot love –

*  *  *

The AK-47 (Автомат Калашникова образца 1947 года, Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947) is a hell of a gun.  The first Russian-designed assault rifle, it is a bulldog among gentlemen: thick in the shoulders, taut through the jaw.  Its hands are clammy beefsteak, good to open pickle jars and tight gaskets.  No hot water / knocking / rubber squeegee action for this number, Big Papa is grunt and thrust: grab that doozie palm to palm and twist the fucker’s head off.  Pop. 

The gun has heft – a wood and metal baby for the bundle.  It’s a compact unit, unrefined, efficient, the first of its kind and the most popular.  It is not a fussy lady, no – no frills, no muss, no fuss, bada-bing, bada-boom.  Design-wise, the AK is a squat slow cooker: shortened Mauser cartridge case and lighter bullets than its precursor the submachine gun, this classic is simple, tidy, gets the job done – bang-up done.  It operates at a range of up to 300m – the Russian response to the WWII German 100m range assault rifle that ripped through infantry like dull buckshot, crude and devastating.

During the Cold War the AK was a bedtime story: the warm shoulder you hold against the night. Stockpiles accumulated and the weapons spread out from warehouses to homes, to basements, sweater closets, because there are times when you think you might be in need of more than just one bullet – more than one and one and one – when you think you may need many bullets, all at once, a blanket of bullets to keep you warm and tight.  Bullets like wool coats with high collars, big buttons, flasks of spirits in the ripping pockets.  Bullets like bread you can wolf down, bread in hot fistfuls torn from the loaf.

The Soviet Bloc: a unit, a machine, simple, centralized.  Glossy from the outside, a grit in the mix.  The AK: large segmented operations, easily cleaned and maintained.  The wide clearance areas between moving parts allows the weapon to perform at near optimal ratings despite the presence of foreign matter: sand, water, gore.  The AK is the man with scruff on his face, a bleeding head wound; a snake bite and no water in the desert who, when stumbling into the Bedouin oasis, still manages to sneak a kiss from the pretty native girl who nurses him.  You can bury an AK in the sand for a decade, dig it up, throw it back together and the mother will still fire.

*  *  *

I am reminded that guns are not romantic.  I am sipping French Vanilla cocoa in my cozy Salt Lake Avenues apartment.  I have fuzzy slippers and three blankets on my bed.  At night I sleep with my lips pressed to Jason’s forehead, a perpetual blessing: please keep this man safe, or else, please let him – or, I want to give – no.  None of these are quite what I wish, his head under my chin, mop top, lovely.  I don’t mind the lack of words for what I wish for him: the best blessings are always wordless gatherings.

Guns are not romantic.  Why should I describe the AK in language that is three layered German chocolate cake, sugar butter rich and coconut, a cream and frosted slathering –

Because these things scare me, I say.  And because you’ve held one in your arms.

*  *  *

The camera, however, is very sexy: a Panasonic AG-HVX200 HD/DVCPRO/DV Cinema P2 with CineSwitch^TM Technology, CineGamma^TM Software and IEEE 1394 Interface.  When J looks through it – when J disappears behind the eye, that lidless bitch that catches everything, that refuses to look away or be distracted, implicated by participation – when J snugs down into the grip of this purblind soothsayer –  all that you can see of him is streaks of copper hair and mouth half parted, lightweight 23lb chassis of magnesium alloy attaching face to the soft maw of the viewfinder, replacing face with hard eye of the lens.  And through that milky pupil, through that opening of possibilities, succumbed to the safety of its indiscretion, J sees reality in 60-frame-per-second HD digital imagery.

*  *  *

It’s lodged somewhere in what I call the well of untold stories.  The well is full of stories that are either too far-fetched or too shameful to repeat.  The problem with these stories is that they’re the stories I want to tell the most.  But I don’t want to be doubted, and I don’t want to be judged.  I’m both a doubter and a judger, myself, so I don’t always trust people and their intentions.  My well of untold stories is a burden; I feel this compulsion to tell everyone everything.  It’s a nasty little compulsion.  No one likes the person who tells all, and I do want to be liked.  I have to work at curbing my tongue, at reining in my stories.  I’ve developed an awareness of the eyes; eyes say everything.  Someone can be nodding and smiling, but if their eyes are cold, it’s time to change the subject.

Now, I only tell true stories, but I used to tell untrue stories.  I used to be a liar.

Maybe that’s why I never told my mother how close I was to being abducted.  I never hesitated to tell her the truth that meant nothing to me, but I couldn’t stand to tell her something so horrible and not be believed, so instead, I said nothing.  It was around that time that I created my well.  I started carrying these stories beneath my rib cage in a physical manifestation that was somewhat like grief—a constant fluttering hummingbird’s heart.

Lies are a burden, but the truth can be a burden too.  What do I tell when I can’t tell the truth?  I guess I just shouldn’t say anything.  I guess that’s what shrinks are for, but blurting out all of my shameful tales to a shrink has never really made me feel better.  Shrinks have adopted poses of implacability. They never lean forward or look interested.  Looking interested can be dangerous, because that’s akin to looking shocked.  I once had a shrink tell me: “There is nothing you can say that would shock me,” and I found this strangely comforting, but I still censored myself.  I didn’t tell him everything, and I cried in the car on the way home.

That same shrink, a round man with a beard who wore sweater vests, would write things down, but casually, and I always wondered if he was secretly writing a to-do list.  To Do: Buy milk, Pay the cable bill, Cut back on bagel consumption, Stop listening to losers for a living.  I would have rather had someone weep with me and rail against this big ugly world than look indifferent.

I would have rather told my story to my mother than a shrink, but it was hard to break the silence when I hadn’t told her the full truth in years.  Yes mother, I believe in god (just not yours).  Yes mother, I exercise (infrequently).  Yes mother, I’m happy (most of the time).

○

If I could tell my mother the full story, I would tell her this:

I am sixteen in Salmon, Idaho, possibly the quietest town in the universe.  It is May, and the town has just found out that we are to receive our first chain restaurant—a Subway sandwich shop—and while my father laments the end of our culture, I am excited at the prospect of some life in this small town with one stoplight and dusty roads.  Salmon is perched on the edge of a river in a wide, deep valley surrounded by mountains, and the only roads extending through town are small two-lane highways that wind over steep mountain passes in the high mountain desert and are punctuated by ghost towns with names like Leadore and Gilmore—or some other type of ore—a remnant from the promise of gold.

Salmon is so isolated that we live under the shadow of a nuclear power plant, one of the few places in the country that creates its own nuclear waste.  When I was in the fourth grade, there was a scare at the plant, and we were warned not to drink the water.  This was before the whole bottled water trend, so the local Budweiser distributer donated water in beer bottles for the schools.  At home, we were told to boil our water for 20 minutes, but when I was thirsty at school, I would pop the top off a Bud and swig cold water from the brown bottle; it was the best water I had ever tasted.  At home, the water was tepid, and my parents joked that it might make us glow in the dark.  I lay in bed at night waving my hands in front of my face looking for a hint of light coming from my fingertips, but there was nothing, and I fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of childhood.

○

I’m sorry for picking the chicken out of the soup and telling you it was vegetarian.  I was broke and there wasn’t anything else in the house to offer you.  Besides, the last time I saw you, you were eating a cheeseburger and smoking a Marlboro.

Apology to Three Lovers from My Youth

I’m sorry for telling you I was a virgin that night in the back of your car.  In your parents’ basement.  In my dorm room.  As you may have guessed years ago, I wasn’t.

Apology to the Boy Who Wasn’t Quite Right

Even in the comparatively egalitarian world of first grade, it was social suicide to be seen with you on the playground.  Until third grade, you were The Boy Our Parents Made Us Be Nice To, the one who was invited to birthday parties and sat in a corner, alone except when our mothers dragged you out of your chair to play some game they rigged so you could win.

It wasn’t until we were almost ready for Junior High that we realized you’d started to disappear.  Your skin became translucent, like the skin of the dead goldfish floating at the top of a tank.  You stopped talking and it seemed your parents kept you home more days than they allowed you to come to school.  If we hadn’t stopped noticing you years before, maybe it would have occurred to us that something was wrong, but I doubt it.  We were safe children whose understanding of danger didn’t extend beyond the laughing, swinging-too-high, running-too-fast sort.

At some point, you disappeared all together.  I vaguely remember thinking you were away at a boarding school for frighteningly smart children, but that may have been someone else.

It wasn’t until years later that we learned your scoutmaster had raped you almost daily.  You weren’t the only boy, of course, but for almost a decade you were his favorite.  I like to believe that, had we known, we’d have rallied behind you and launched some sort of children’s crusade to protect you.  But, really, I’m certain we would have seen it as just one more reason to avoid you. I’m sorry.

Apology to a Friend with a Difficult Love Life

There wasn’t someone at the door; it’s just that you had gone on and on about what a jerk your new boyfriend had turned out to be and I had better things to do.  Had I listened to you for one more minute, I would have said, “Look, you’re only dating him.  If he’s such a jerk, move on.  You do this every time.”  Instead, I rang my own doorbell.  I’m sorry.

The First Ghost Who Lingers, Waiting for an Apology

An old woman I didn’t know—the grandmother of a friend—reached up toward the sound of my cough and muttered who are you and where am I as I witnessed the spectacle of her death.  I’m sorry for intruding on a moment I had no right to attend.

Apology to a Man I No Longer Love

I’m sorry for hiding your favorite Leonard Cohen CD in the bottom of a box of tampons when we were dividing up our stuff after the break-up.  I still have it, all these years later, and sometimes forget it wasn’t a gift from you.

Apology to a Well-Meaning History Teacher

We were as cruel as thirteen-year-olds always are, and didn’t care that you’d escaped a World War by hiding in the dank basement of a strange family’s house. We laughed at your accent but didn’t listen to your stories about surviving on rotting apples and hard, brown bread.  We hid your glasses when you stepped out of the classroom, as you often did, to hike up the pants of your ill-fitting suits that shone at elbow, knee, and seat.  We rearranged ourselves with utter disregard for your seating chart, knowing you could not tell if we had moved or if you had simply grown confused.  We laughed at everything except your small jokes meant to show that you, too, knew you’d grown a little pathetic and befuddled.  Instead, we whispered “creepy old man” to one another behind our pink, uncalloused hands on which we’d inscribed the names of Renaissance artists, just in case there was a quiz.

Apology to Everyone in The Dress Row at the Metropolitan Opera, Seats 114-120, on October 13, 1995

When I woke up with a hacking cough and runny nose, I thought only, “These tickets cost a fortune” and “I’ll never get another chance to see Plácido Domingo sing Otello.”  I didn’t think of how my constant sniffling and wheezing would ruin your evening.  And, to the lady in seat 118, my particular apology for sneezing so emphatically that I caused you to drop your opera glasses onto a gentleman in the Grand Tier.  I hope no one was hurt, and that you were able to retrieve them after the curtain fell.  They looked expensive and heavy enough to raise a good-sized lump. 

Apology to the Man I Hit With My “Peace in the Middle East” Protest Sign at the Anti-War Rally in DC on March 26, 1991

I didn’t see you until after I felt your hand on my arm, pulling me out of the phalanx of marchers armed with placards and chanting our way down Pennsylvania Avenue.  The people, united, will never be defeated and What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now! I was hopped up on adrenaline, a sense of moral certainty, and the bourbon Paula and I were passing between us to fight off the cold.  I was marching, and then out of nowhere you were pulling me out of the ranks and shouting at me that I was to blame for every one of our soldiers who died because I was a God-damned bleeding-heart liberal.  It scared me, and before I knew what I was doing I felt the thud of your skull against the two-by-four to which I’d stapled my peace sign.  I am sorry for the bloody gash across your forehead, and for making you think you’d been proven right.

In This Story, Christmas Past is the Second Ghost

The Peters boy died on Christmas Eve in 1977, his head in our yard, his body still in his brand new convertible; the top down in spite of the snow. The drunk who hit him was yelling “You cut me off, you little shit” at the dead boy.  I watched for a while from my bedroom, the scene strobing off and on with the blinking Christmas lights that framed my window, and then went back to bed.

What I remember most about that Christmas is the Major League Baseball pinball machine from my father, with real bumpers and a slot for the quarters it no longer needed.  My brothers and I loved that pinball machine, and all the younger kids in the neighborhood spent Christmas day at our house, trying for the high score and looking out the window at the torn up patch of lawn and the blood in the snow.

I’m sorry for being part of the crowd that stood away from your younger brother at the bus stop when school started again, shuffling my feet and looking down whenever he glanced at me from his lonely post by the stop sign.

Apology to a Great Aunt, Who Got Just What She Expected From Me

I didn’t really want the shoes; I had a little trunk full of Barbie shoes at home in my bedroom.  I wouldn’t have thought to steal them if you hadn’t said to me, “You can play with these, but only as long as I am in the room.  They belong to my daughter, and I wouldn’t want anything to go missing.”  What else could I do, really, but pocket a pair of pink rubber mules and then insist I was too old for Barbie dolls, anyway?

Apology to the Armless Guy Who Used to Steal Panties from the Laundromat in Tuscaloosa

After the second time, Putt and I started washing our panties and bras in the sinks of the dorm bathroom.  We should have told you, when you rushed for our dryers, that all you’d find were t-shirts and socks, but we were afraid that if we spoke to you, you’d speak back to us, and then we would have to know you.  And we were too young and too skittish to know an armless man who stole panties from the Laundromat.  I don’t regret foiling your theft, but for thinking of you as less than a person, I’m sorry.

Apology to the Man Whose Woods We Burned Down

We were fourteen years old and brave in that stupid teenage way, learning to smoke and flicking lit matches into a wet pile of leaves in the woods behind your house.  Fifteen minutes later, we were back in Donna’s room, pretending to only then be getting up for the day, and heard sirens wailing closer and closer until they dopplered past her house.  The street was a dead end; they could only be going to the woods.  We yawned in our little-girl pajamas and asked her mother what was going on.  “Oh, some vagrants caught the woods on fire,” she said.  We asked for pancakes and plopped down in front of the television, laughing in that stoned teenage way as we watched Scooby-Doo, worried about getting caught but not about whether or not we had done something wrong.

Both you and Donna are dead, so maybe there isn’t any point in apologizing.  Still, I wish you could see the hillside now.  With the pine all burned away, it has become a Georgia O’Keeffe explosion of pastel mountain laurel; in the spring, it stands out among the scraggly evergreens like a swath of virgin-pink lipstick.

The Third Ghost, Because in Literature There Are Always Three Ghosts

I met Great Aunt Bethel, with her shriveled hands and sunken cheeks, in a nursing home when I was ten.  She held my arm with surprising strength and begged, over and over again, “Please get me out of here.”  Finally, a nurse pried Bethel’s fingers from around my wrist and took me outside to the horse they had stabled in the backyard.  When Bethel died, a year later, my father said, “Well, it’s not like anyone is going to cry over her grave,” and we laughed. I’m sorry for not understanding that it wasn’t a joke, and for laughing as if it were.

Apology to the Girls in Cabin Eight, From the Girls in Cabin Nine

I don’t, of course, have the authority to speak for everybody else, but it was my idea to steal our counselor’s Kotex and decorate your cabin door with them the night Heather got her period for the first time.  We were jealous, which shows just how young we were.  But we did not know that you’d invited the boys to sneak over after lights out, or that you’d have to explain the Kotex to them in a way that ensured they would stay on their side of the camp for the whole rest of the summer.  We didn’t even realize boys were that squeamish, or fully understand why you cared so much that they stopped calling you names or tossing you into the pool.  On behalf of all the girls in Cabin Nine, I’d like to say, “I’m sorry.”

Apology to the Spider I Killed in the Bathtub, Even Though I Tell People I Don’t Kill Spiders

I was already naked, and you were bigger and more menacing than the simple brown house spiders that usually crawl down from the attic.  I should have cupped you into a water glass and carried you safely to the garden, but you looked poisonous and I needed to get into the shower.  You died because I overslept.

Apology to an Accidental Cannibal

We were docked for every sandwich we wasted, and it was only a minimum wage job.  So when I noticed that I had sliced off a thin layer of skin along the backhand edge of my right hand, and that the flesh and fatty tissue had fallen into your roast beef sandwich, I just slapped some American cheese over it and served it to you anyway.  I am sorry for not telling you, and also for telling the other girls at the counter once you were safely seated and chomping away and I had a rag tied around my hand.  You must have wondered why we kept looking at you, laughing, and then doing the stiff-legged zombie walk up and down the service area.  “Brains,” we said, “must eat brains. Or hand sandwiches.”

Apology to the Birds We No Longer Feed

After you ate the sweet inside of the nuts and seeds, the rats gathered for the bitter husks.

Apology to My Martyred Forebears

When Christmas time rolls around, someone always says to me, “You know, you had family that died in the holocaust because of their faith.  How do you think they’d feel if they saw you in this Mennonite church of yours?  Don’t you ever think of them?”

And I say, “Which holocaust was that?  There are so many.”

But, in truth, I think of you all the time.  I picture you miserable in some version of the Hereafter that fits neither my old nor my new religion, but looks something like a bus station in Poland in the late nineteen-thirties.  You are dressed in drab, damp coats and eating greasy food from rolled-up newspapers. Your eyes are tired, your bodies lumpen and dirty.  You are the miserable dead, and I am your misery.  I am sorry for my thousand betrayals.  Forgive me.

My grandfather was an Indiana state trooper with eyes as wide and good as a pair of sunny-side eggs.  He used to bring baby chicks home each Easter for his four kids. The chicks were dyed festive colors: green, blue and pink, with a few lucky yellow ones. The first Easter granddad brought home the chicks, my Aunt Lisa bit hers and killed it. She was only five, and to this day no one knows what she was thinking. The next year, Lisa tried extra hard to take good care of her bird. She gave it a bath. She put it in the dryer. Thunk thunk thunk. It came out dry but dead: a warm ball of lifeless fluff, buried in the back yard with a well-attended funeral. Everyone thought Aunt Lisa was retarded anyway. It turned out she was just unattractive.

My mom was the second oldest. Her chicks were a problem for a different reason: they thrived. She fed them, named them, talked to them, gave them the run of the backyard. When her first two grew up to be chickens, her father gave them away to a farm. But the third year she got Peck. He grew up to be a large, loud rooster who rattled the windows of the Friendly Oaks subdivision about two dozen times a day, dawn included.

Peck’s feathers grew in black and rust and fanned out in all directions like a rich lady’s hat. Peck would have gone to a farm sooner, but my granddad died by the time the chick grew into a rooster. My mother’s father was killed while helping an elderly driver on interstate 65. The semi driver said he fell asleep. He was all kinds of sorry. But sorry doesn’t turn a stain on the highway back into your dad anymore than Peck’s hollering could bring up the sun.

The neighbors forced my Mom to give Peck up once the family grieving period ended. But more animals appeared: dogs, cats, rats, chicks. She’d feed and name anything she could find, bring it home, love it, sleep with it.

By 18, she was a mama of a real baby boy. By 21, she was a mama of two. She loved us just as good as she’d loved those animals, petting us and feeding us. She sang us Beatles songs as she danced around the house, cleaning out the birdcage, the guinea pig cage, the hermit crab cage, and letting the dog out. She was always right there, checking on us, tucking stray hairs behind our ears, smoothing down cowlicks, offering up a special treat. People still say she did better than anyone could have expected. After all, just like her pets, she kept us mostly alive.