March 29, 2013

Easter 1967

     1.

     In those days Pennsylvania Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, went through Lancaster and Columbia without a bypass. After Gap, and the half block of fussy, oddly contemporary Amish shops that were like a five-second commercial strip tossed into a corn field, you entered Lancaster, passing by the Hamilton Watch building and WGAL TV 8.
     But my mother would have already pulled over, probably someplace outside Coatesville, at a converted gas station or perhaps a simple wooden stand, to buy flowers. 
     One year, it was a single pink hyacinth in a pot—entirely plasticthat I held in my lap like a goldfish bowl or a delicate treasure, picturing my grandmother's face when I would hand it to her.
     Together in the blue bucket seats of her Mustang, I can still hear my mother punch the cigarette lighter into the dash to get it started, and I can smell the raisiny tannin of her Viceroy pack as I fished one out for her to light. She held the metal cartridge up to her face and sucked furtively, suffocating me.
     The metal seat belts lay across my lap like chrome barbells.
     The drive to my grandmother's house, "100 miles!" as my mother used to say, always rounding up, as imprecise as her gift wrapping or her motley Swedish meatballs, was the greatest pleasure I knew as a child. Crossing the Columbia-Wrightsville Bridge with its deco lanterns, driving by Lake Redman splashing up against the scoured-out rock of Route 83, and finally spotting the steeples—still only about as far south as Hametown—of the two facing churches at the very top of Main Street, each marker in the journey increased my excitement.
     A system of narrow, angled streets—and finally alleys—led to my grandmother's large backyard. As soon as my mother had pulled into the grass drive, defined by two handsome white fences and a lonely black lamp post, I was pushing against the heavy car door, running up the long flagstone walk with its treacherous caterpillars of sod between each gray or aubergine piece.
    The back door was already open, my Aunt Ada bracing it with her arm, one foot in the kitchen and the other on the top step, preparing to catch me in her arms like a runaway shopping cart.
     It is a moment—for the remainder of my life—with which I compare, by which I judge, every abstract pleasure. 
     It is a singular, ecstatic touchstone.
     Above my head, now buried in my aunt's apron, I could hear my grandmother greet my mother, her tone like contralto molasses.
     Well Marion!
     There was a reserved pleasure, and a hint of admirationbut nothing that you might expect toward a woman who likely predicated her much-loved only son's suicide.
     My mother would stay the night and leave after coffee and toast the next morning.
     The big old house, with its oversize furniture, lumpy carpets, and dark, stinky bathroom seemed stubbornly ill-suited to my mother's efficient style and constant grooming. The vanity lights on either side of the tiny bathroom medicine cabinet were never turned on except when my mother was there, applying or removing something from her face or daubing at her hair with a rat tail brush.
     Ash trays were produced from deep within cabinet drawers, and my mother's cigarette smoke hung in the air above the kitchen tableconfused.
     The chiming clocks all had to be stopped for the night.

March 19, 2013

In the Alley

     Through a garage door two toilets sit together in a backyard smiling like ceramic dolphins.
     The sun is high and the shadows are short. No one is around.
     A sofa the color of Crayola #47, green yellow, waits for the trash man.
     Though I am walking slowly, too slowly for 53, the gaps in the stockade fences are still fleeting hints—accelerated as the dancing light from a film projector.
     The men in the group house gently float their muthafuckas into the air like quarter notes.
     My cat jumps off the step to welcome me home.