later that summer

We got a call during the week from the folks a few doors down, retired couple making the sojourn to Florida. Of course we'd love to help load the truck this Saturday and can you bring a side dish for the luncheon? Well, we've already got potato salad coming but how about baked beans? That's wonderful, thanks so much, see you at 8:30.

Dad and I arrive a tad early, he in his work clothes and I in Nike shorts, tank top and my brother's old ball cap. Just as we greet ol' Bud his wife comes out jabbering with a certain young lady with whom I haven't spoken in over a week. I had tried calling a few times since we went out but she never seems to be able to talk long if at all, which just seems odd because up until now our conversations had always come easily enough.

Pretty soon the group rounds out and we start with the bigger furniture as the hens finish boxing up some odds and ends. In and out of the house, on and off the truck all morning we work and joke and laugh and rib each other but she still won't hardly look at me, and if I do get an accidental glance she tries her best to play it off, sometimes well enough to fool me.

Before long we have the big stuff all in place and their son's family are coming over later to help wrap things up so let's eat, everyone to the back porch before the flies carry it off.

Call it fate but there's an empty seat next to her at one of the tables and I figure why not. I plant myself there and hardly find it surprising how she throws herself headlong into a conversation with the ladies and I may as well not even exist. So I enjoy my meal in solitude, being careful to conceal my smile with a hot dog or plastic cup as needed.

When I'm done I arise to throw out my plate. keeping the cup, and then check out the back yard, only to return in a few minutes to see her heading into the house.

Without missing a beat I proceed into the garage, then the kitchen and she stands facing the other way, the wall phone's receiver to her ear. I take a sip of my pop.

After a few seconds she says, "Hi, it's me...yeah we're all done and I've had lunch, so I'll be home after a bit...okay, I will...okay, bye."

She hangs up, leaving her hand on the receiver. I take another sip and move closer. I place my hand on her shoulder. She remains still. I step to within inches, and she doesn't move a muscle. I reach up and brush her hair back past her ear, and she turns slightly as if to conceal a clandestine grin. I lean in and lick the right side of her face, from chin to temple in a single stroke, and then, I walk home.

After showering and resting off the move I end up at a trailer park down the road, where there always seems to be something going on involving slingshots and other crude munitions. I get back a bit after eleven, grab a handful of Chex Mix to graze on as my parents doze in their recliners, then start watching an SNL rerun in my room. Halfway through the guest monologue there's a knock at the window, so I peek behind the curtain and there she is.

up the river

A small swarm of state cruisers wails past just as we get our bikes onto the highway, spreading a wake of pebbles and dust around our tires, and just as quickly they fade into the horizon. Whatever is going on is way up past the bridge, it would seem.

Just over a mile later we make our way to that spot where the guard rail sprouts from the ground, as if it has roots, and marks a flat clearing where anglers and whoever else can head along the south shore.

For whatever reason we find this overcast morning rife with excitement and what better place to start than the riverbank, since it's probably too early for weirdos to be roaming around yet, not that we've ever seen one. We coast off the road a little ways and come to a stop facing the steep bank with about 40 yards of thick brush to water's edge. A group of us sometimes go hunting down there in winter when the growth is dead, but after a rainy spring it's a world of its own that doesn't welcome our kind.

And that's when it appeared. From beneath the bridge some type of craft emerges, at first maybe a bass boat, but no, it's a wooden raft and with someone on it, or maybe a mannequin. I turn to Jake and quip about there being a float parade here in the middle of nowhere.

As more of the barge comes into view there are several men, all wearing suits and lying in and about a white four-door Continental. Not sure what to think of this until I note the flat tires and blown-out windshield, and then the bullet wounds magically appear, as if someone had switched on a black light in some macabre special effects show.

By now I am unable to look away. It's somehow zooming towards me, forming a full-body death grip and filling my veins with the icy murk of the currents below. Finally I turn to Jake, finding him pale and still as a limestone monument straddling his bike seat.

"Hey -"

He doesn't move. I lean to take a swat and barely get the sleeve of his faded gray t-shirt, having to catch myself from falling over in the process. This brings him out of the spell a bit and he shifts his lifeless gaze down into the foreboding vastness of vegetation.

"Let's go."

Jake draws a deep breath and starts maneuvering his bike toward the road. I hold off at first to make sure he's able to keep it together, and then, I follow.

the earth is my body

We stand in this sepia landscape, my older sister and I, next to a runoff ditch near our house, except, here we live in a farm house, and where the neighbors' should be.

But the ditch is dry and I am finding out that it can talk to us. They explain it to me as if queuing a sound bite, then a deep resounding voice has its moment, "the earth is my body."

I wander around in the wispy grass, noting weeds and withered cattails that line the eroded creek bend, and a small bare tree protruding near the bank, just a stick really, "that's his pee-pee," my sister tells me.

Then I turn and hurry toward the house as it all fades to the tune of a buzzing alarm clock.

that odd-numbered year

The economy is down, unemployment is up here in "free" half of the planet but it keeps on spinnin' just the same. For me it's not so much the threat of the bomb, it's more that the Iron Curtain is so opaque. I choose not to watch The Day After but hear about it at school.

One time I waited while my mom got groceries, lying down in the back seat of our '71 Monte Carlo. Two dudes I didn't know, with partially grown-out Mohawks, knock on the window above my head and ask if I have any matches. Seems I should take that as some kind of compliment.

Hanging out with a buddy I learn that 50's sounding song from the radio is actually a new group called the Stray Cats. Back then we'd sit in church with felt-tip pens and insert guns and grenades into the cartoon hands of unsuspecting Bible characters.

My sister is expecting again, and so we become blessed with one of my favorite brunettes ever.

Sooner or later we end up at a discount store called Rink's. Even though I had shied away from popular music when I had a near-nervous breakdown and accepted Christ last year, I find myself taking a look through the records and tapes. The Police, Journey, and Styx are all on an end cap with their slick cover art and strange symbols. The Styx release has a robot face and even says it contains backward messages, maybe even the kind that make you worship the devil, and so the End Times will probably happen before the next Olympics.

In my last year as a student in Vacation Bible School there were five of us in the "sixth grade" class, which we would start officially next fall. Two girls and three boys, the latter of which went to my school, one of them living next to my sister's family. Sad to realize at a young age how fast friends are rarely the best kind.

The summer is filled with uber-hot days that encourage me to stay inside, usually the house and sometimes Radio Shack. When I start back to school we change for gym and I can't believe how everyone else is tan around their shorts. By then all the girls are in heat over Michael Jackson, and one of the dudes cracks me up every day retelling the comedy routines he hears on cable channels.

Every night at the supper table there's a waxed paper half gallon of Clyde Evans store-brand milk with the owner's name on it. My friend's mom works in one of his delis. There is a S-A-V-E in EVANS.

Here lately the other kids seem to spend a lot of time standing around talking, and whenever I walk by it seems that's all there is to it, just talking. We used to just go with the flow and play stupid games all the time.

To escape the heat we head north to camp on the shore of Lake Huron, and Ontario's quasi-puritanical charm was the perfect oasis. There's a picture somewhere of me dragging my dad's pocket comb across the sand, as if I were a "beach comber." Get it? Anyway there are also shots of storm clouds I tried to capture in black and white film back then, because storms brought refuge from the sun, but it all taught me there are some things you just have to experience.

My childhood friend and girl next door is turning into a young woman and that's just insane, even though she still has me over to play Atari. Both her parents work and so some days she comes over after school to push my buttons. One time her dad butchered their chickens in the back yard. All said, my first real taste of dark humor.

Where's the Beef?

Mom has choir practice before the Sunday evening praise service, so Dad and I get milk shakes unless we pick up a lady and her toddler son, and either of those is kinda fun. With the shakes it's a hard choice between mocha and mint chocolate chip. We always drive the pickup, the same one used to haul firewood that he cuts around the area, sometimes with my older brother. It's like pulling teeth to get me to help out with that kind of thing. The buzzing saw gets old really quick, plus it's either too hot or cold and I end up waiting it out the cab.

Another one of the neighborhood girls just drives me insane. Period. There's a bug-zapper on her back porch that we can see and hear through the thick brush in their yard.

During one weekend in the spring, we hear some really loud rock music coming from two houses away. I ride my dad's bike to the neighbors' and peek around their bushes, when all of a sudden two high-school dudes come running out. One of them comes straight for me and the other gets in a car. I'd never worked the pedals so hard and finally make it to our garage. Dad goes out front as we watch the dude stroll past the house, staring as we stare back, and get picked up by his brother. That was the end of the loud music.

Jimmy Swaggart preaches his ass off every Sunday morning in our living room as we eat pancakes in the kitchen. Seems I could always hear the same nasal voice during the sinner's prayer at the end. There's a new name written down in glory!

It's mid-summer when mom finds it necessary to visit my sister's house while they all have a stomach bug and then brings it home for the weekend.

I'm usually scouring flea markets and garage sales for deals on seasoned electronics or cameras. One time I scored an old bag-type hair dryer, minus the bag, just because it produced hot air. Sometimes when the family came over for a holiday meal I would set up a card table in the living room to show some of them off, or else, just set up a tape recorder and narrate things.

One Saturday I had to be at the church while Mom was doing something, and the junior pastor gives me some "youth character building" books to read. One of them featured a drawing to illustrate that adults also "throw up when they are sick." To this day I'm not at complete peace with that moment.

At the mall you could go preppy or valley girl. Ewww my gawwwwwd, like, totalayyy.

About a month into the school year we spend half a week at a nearby YMCA camp doing all kinds of camp stuff. It's amazing how delightfully scary your peers can be in moments when there's little sense of adult supervision, fervent chants and wild-eyed speculation of pantyraids and orgies, only to have our counselor show up and make us pretend to sleep. My sister's neighbor boy was in my group and "found" that my camera had been messed with. But at one point someone wants to see how many of us can stand on an old tree stump and so a quiet blue-eyed girl I hardly knew gets an arm around me. I don't think I bathed the whole time.

As the Dukes of Hazzard loses steam the A-Team becomes the coolest TV show ever. Magnum PI was still for a more mature palate. Blue Thunder is fun, I don't care what they say.

Yet another girl next door teased me for the way I tried to deploy an experimental FM antenna. As I struggle to explain it and she'd keep asking "so that's why you were throwing a board onto your roof?"

At one point I start running speaker wires through the crawl space to set up a house-wide radio station serving the "Living Room, Family Room and Greater Garage Area" with the help of an old rack-mount PA amp someone gave me. I type up a charter of sorts for operating "The Speaker" on an on old Remington portable I drug home from Goodwill and co-sign it with my dad. It doesn't take long to figure out what volume levels will draw fire.

During some kind of meal event in the fellowship hall a bunch of us are sitting on stacked tables by the wall. One of the new dudes cuts a squawker and gets red in the face laughing as we scatter.

Just after Christmas I develop a taste for country music, years before people my age were flocking to Garth Brooks but not before Able Archer raises a few eyebrows behind the Iron Curtain.

here

having finally
accepted
a cordial invitation
i'm green as grass
even though
i've been

here

quite a while
from the looks of things
my own likeness
tastefully framed
on the scarred walls
then scattered about
books
and magazines
with familiar words
i must have uttered

here

in a burst
just shy of tearful
i shove them away
this simply
cannot be
hard to describe
how it feels

here

because
i am just
what i am

disillusioned

i turn my gaze
to the big bay window
such a perfect summer day
fluffy cotton floats in the blue
meeting lush verdant foliage
many creatures abound
in air and on land
great and small
two by two
too much
to take in

here

yet

i notice
a closet door
cracked, it beckons
crammed with boxes
of childhood drawings
mommy, daddy and kids
with the dog and a cat
one might think
all was well
except

i know better

then

i hear music
from another room
songs from the radio
speak
to the moment

but how

can it be
that the moment
had a finite beginning
yet
never seems
to end

here

one foot out

rolling

down a hill

biting and licking

as two pups

just fed

so it seems

only yesterday

they wake you up

emotions pull

right arm

toward the left

mind pulls the other

far to the right

a heart

in torsion

faced with lies

but not from lips

we convince ourselves

out of sheer pure

ignorance

sosad

same old

song and dance

inside quiet moments

truth screams but silently

she needs more of him

yet he longs for

everything

else

lie with me

lie with me
and listen to some jazz
it's on the radio i love the sound
on a saturday night how we work so hard
can we do it all by doing everything?
lie with me
so i don't lie alone
saturday night seems right for the sound
we can leave the light on you can read if you want
if you still can't relax
maybe i'll rub your feet a while
just lie with me and listen to some jazz
even days like this when we need to make something
why this crazy life running around?
lets make some time
that's why they play jazz
on a saturday night