Throwback Thursday

          The blue slipper box that says "TOWNCRAFT" has the old wooden chess pieces in it. The grey Asics box holds my vine charcoal and drawing pencils.
          Where is the green box with my photos from the eighties?
          Furious, my heart racing, I shine Gary's super-duper killer flashlight—the size and shape of an old car headlight—under the library table and back behind the bookcases temporarily fanned in front of the hall windows like Tarot cards or cold cuts until Gary refinishes the big bedroom. John Updike and Robert Louis Stevenson squeeze together on the dusty shelves like subway riders.
          There aren't enough Saturdays for this house, and we fall behind and further behind, until the idea itself has crossed the horizon—out of sight. What was it we were trying to do?
          I find the box and open it, but every picture has been scanned and heightened, its story already told.
          My narrow self in that black wool coat, bleary-eyed and porcelain in the middle of Avenida Corrientes, exhausted from a night of fucking.
          Jose's harrowing close-up of my face at Valley Green Inn, my jaw like a bone filigree.
          Our cats and Ikea, my old car, and the shots of me on New York streets—in 1986 we had to go to a travel agent's office in Manhattan to buy plane tickets to Argentina—have all been embroidered with my prose, lovingly recalled.
          For I was on a mission, in my late forties—after my mother had gone and released the past from the tyranny of her silence—to tell it all. My life became my art, and I weaved it into web pages and spliced it into so-so-so many videos. I sculpted it into sentences that I read to myself, now and then—so pretty, and so accurate.
          I am past talking about the past—sizing it, laying down its audio track, feathering it as I loved to do: blurring the edges, bleeding one nut-brown image into another. I feel empty, no better for having hung my gallery—nothing was achieved. Even poor Jobriath has had his party, and he falls back to sleep on his pillow of vitamins and Brewer's yeast.
          Perhaps art has only ever been a way of fighting the stubborn banality of the present time, its refusal to elaborate—its colorless silence. The desire to entertain or impress has left me. Or, maybe, the people that inspired it have gone. Childless, grandchildless, nevertheless I too am forced to turn to the present. But nothing around this house is forming itself into photos, no childhood memories are being made in these rooms. It's time for gardening and bingo.
          Like my pouting, adjectiveless mother, we are all the sum and retrieval of our past—stunned, caustic more often than is attractive, covering our ears to irony's perfect end rhymes, living without any resolution to the pointless suffering, turning the corner to sixty, and silent.

Two Cats

          Bit and Holden sit in the unfiltered sunlight at the foot of the bed, sphinxes facing one another. 
          Their overlapping front paws form a hairy rectangle, half grey and white, half beige and brown—striped like a barber's pole.
          They know that I have carefully made the bed, and their Neoclassical posture mimics the embroidered figures in the fancy white spread.
          It's been ten summers since I heard the six-week-old kitten crying like a bird inside the tall Barberry hedge surrounding the school. I was within yet another rage of dieting and exercising—trying to bend my forties violently back toward my thirties—and I still had Rock Creek Park between myself and home.
          Kneeling down on the pavement below the August sun I fed it sushi from my backpack. No larger than my palm, it alternated between feeding and rubbing its head against my thigh.
          All the way through the park, the kitten gripping my T shirt, I tried to think of what agency or organization to call. I still don't know.
          From the beginning she was a subject for the camera, her saucer-large eyes and insouciant gaze so hypnotic. She remained essentially feral, never appearing before guests and—confined in a tiny powder room—deftly eluding the vet on home visits designed to accommodate her.
          Four summers later, again fleshy and resigned to my lost beauty, I heard Gary call nervously from the front of the house:
          You let Bit outside?!
          A clean young tabby—a taffy-colored Doppelgänger of my own—was boldly exploring the cement columns and painted floorboards of our front porch.
          And within six weeks Gary had a house cat of his own. Sitting on the bed talking one night, we came up with the name Holden because I read one of Alain de Botton's tweets that day: "William Holden is the working man's William Holden."
          It fit the new cat, who accomplished the transition from stray to pet without scruples or temerity: bawling into the dining room windows from the driveway like Stanley Kowalski, he possessed the lurid treble of Jagger (which we had first thought to call him). His gaze was urgently communicative and singular in its motivation. He possessed no complexity of intentions or second thoughts. He took the house, and us, as a rite of passage—upholstered and stocked with food. 
          He was instantly, deeply affectionate.
          His gradual pairing with Bit (from Gary's moniker "the little bit") was boilerplate Tennessee Williams. He cleaned her head, her discomfited expression as his tongue pressed down on her ears like a woman in a crushed bonnet. At night we could hear their paws like horses' hooves sprinting through the upstairs rooms, and Bit screamed—to be certain, disproportionately to the pain—when Holden gave, occasionally, those little assertions of his control.
          When the new puppies came, they were exiled together, permanently, to the second floor. This came as no hardship to Bit, who continued to commune with me from the toilet seat as I sat in the tub, or posed providentially on the bureau top as I took scores of pictures of her before I went to sleep. 
          Her gift is waiting; her genius is contemplation, the motionless hours before a deft kill ... or a mere decision to relocate. All is empty, but gorgeously athletic, strategy. Visceral, impossibly elegant, her eyes are wary and reptilian, and she cannot be lifted or held. Each striped leg bears a shallow cotton glove of white fur at the paw, and, ladylike, on a long sunny afternoon she might extend them in front of her, delicately crossed.
          But Holden suffered in the restructuring.
          His treasured access to us, his daily requirement for physical intimacy, defined him. In the afternoons he cried from the other side of the doors, faced the dogs from behind gates, and once braved a leaping run to the top of the sofa, the dogs barking and nipping from below him. At night he dominated me, sprawling on my chest so close to my face he had to turn his head slightly to the side, covering me in kisses and chin rubs, and always threatening to inflict those little bites that were an inconvenient byproduct of his bottomless, proprietary affection.
          Before sleep, he positioned himself in the half circle of my arm and shoulder with a roaring purr, and with a single gesture he touched my face with the mere tip of his paw.
          But in the last few months his determination—his belief in his relationship with us—has flagged. I kept feeling him for lumps and staring at his coat for signs of dullness. I observed how he held his tail, and I gently stroked his back and sides, which seem to have softened and lost their tone and resistance. 
          His cries are infrequent and sometimes 'silent,' his mouth opening with intent but expressing only resignation.
          Last week we took him for a complete evaluation. The vet's palpation revealed nothing of importance, and a few days later his labs came back perfect.
          Last night Holden failed to appear on my bed at all. He seems to have found some place to hide in another bedroom, and often I cannot even locate him. Bit wakens me on and off during the night, her back and rump so firm and vibrating with initiative, but affection takes hold of her like a head cold—something to suffer briefly and to recover from, slightly embarrassing. I dispense a few pats and scratches and, thankfully, we are done.
          Sometimes during the day I find Holden on the bed, stretched out shapelessly as a coat thrown across a chair, and I speak to him. 
          Bit will be with me for years, outsmarting stink bugs, arranging herself artfully, until her sinewy shape simply evaporates as she regards a lamp shade intently. 
          But Holden's need is too great for this world, and he has not even his body to console him.

My Irish Aunt

          Sharon still lived in the house in York when we started tubing a section of the Big Gunpowder Falls, the ice-cold, fast moving river below Prettyboy Dam. 
          There were several parties in the summers of 2003 and 2004, always with two cars. But one July day Gary and I drove up alone, parked at the old railroad station in Monkton, then walked the length of the river up to the low, slightly creepy concrete bridge of Blue Mountain Road where we always put in, screaming as we first sat back into the giant whale-colored tubes.
          After the hour's ride, shivering in the hot car, our hands pruned and white, we got to the intersection with Route 45—the Old York Trail—and I suddenly told Gary "Keep going on this."
          What has kept us together for 24 years is his responsiveness to my passionate or manic concepts—in the graceless, bureaucratic parlance of modern therapy, an enabler—and we found ourselves silently heading north, following the serpentine rise of the two-lane road up from the river valley. The opposite direction from home.
          At the top of the hill, I looked back over the fields to find the high bridges, like two towering aqueducts, that carry the four lanes of 83 across the river.
          I last saw them when I was seven, and the distant view (there were far fewer trees then) provided me with my first full-on Sehnsucht. My grandmother, my great-aunt, and I were driving down from Shrewsbury to White Hall to visit my Aunt Lillian. I had never met her, and after that day I never saw her again.
          Thirty-seven years later, I am trying to remember the roads and turns as I saw them from the massive back seat windows of my grandmother's 1951 Buick.
         "Turn right."

A Habit of Remembering

          The smell of snow in my grandmother's deep backyard.
          Alice's smile as I laid on top of her—a slight show of tooth and the eyes wide as if we were about to take a trip.
          The smack of my mother crushing ice cubes for another cocktail.
          Everyone has memories.
          I listen for the boiling point in others—a certain tone of voice, a moment of combustion in the narrative.
          Yet the craft of empathy, like piano scales, requires discipline. I want to be sucked in, struck dumb.
          Is reticence the calling card of stability?
          I prefer a hair out of place, something to be caught on—the wire of an old fence—repeating forever a sad, pretty theme. Lighting it differently, restaging it.
          Is it hubris to think life has something—quite specific—to tell us? Flipping backward in the book when one is so close to its end. Still asking: What did I fail to understand?
          The creamy assault of my first wedge of Roquefort, purchased because it was the most expensive—and most unfamiliar—cheese in the case. The sound of the desert wind over the bathroom skylight my first night in Palm Springs.
          My first Easter with Gary.
          My last walk with Jamie.
          The foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

January Still Life

          Highly colored, sodden fabric dog toys, chewed apart as a butcher butterflies a lamb leg, dot the back yard. 
          One small brown bird sits, alone, on the fence post and will not stop declaiming, bouncing his body entirely to the left, then to the right, as if in parade uniform—his tail decorated with a pencil line of vermilion.
          Some tender-leafed ground cover proliferates in the frozen soil, proving that gardening is not a skill but merely a preference for things that refuse to thrive.
          The air is wet and cold, and the distances between objects are long. The park is too far away today.  
          The concrete bowls of the birdbaths lie face down on the ground, sitting winter out like bystanders to sudden, sourceless gunfire. When we lift them in March, the handful of spindly dandelions beneath will expire in the sunlight.
          The canvas top of the neighbor's Home Depot cabana lies hiked up like a wet skirt over the metal frame, exposing chairs grouped like riderless carousel horses.
          And even now a gauzy copper band of light is forming in the west, and night is coming while we are still at work. 
          February is a week away.
          The back yard waits for our summer candles and outdoor kisses.

Self Among Others

In my beginning is my end.

—T.S. Eliot, "Four Quartets"

          The first time I went into the cement building with the big cross on it, set at the top of the hill like a pan of bread dough slowly rising, I was 10. Nannie ordered us off across the Betzwood Bridge not to church but to Sunday School, which has no Hell—only pianos on wheels and classroom doors with paper hands and crayon-heightened Jesuses taped onto the glass.
          The two stories sat upon one another like Duncan Hines layers, with a portico running the length between them like escaping frosting. The ground floor was a dark labyrinth of little rooms, but upstairs was a single meeting hall, airy and open as a ballroom, with a stainless steel kitchen at one end and a small stage at the other—the whole studded by curtainless casement windows gazing down onto the tiny green cemetery like portholes. 
          Poppy just dropped us off, and I didn't know which tiny room to enter. I was terrified of the families—all familiar to one another—and at the end of the hour we never went back.

* * *

Trailer Park in Trooper

          I sit at the giant monitor scrutinizing two different roads, both flanked by buildings that would have been there in 1965. Did I ride past either in the back seat of my mother's car—one an auto repair, the other a formal wear shop? Which one led to Nannie's trailer?
          Hers was on a corner, to the left of the road. In the middle of the night the furnace failed and soot fell on the interior like black snow.
          The memory itself immolates, white and diaphanous as ash. It cannot bear my weight.
          Was my mother away again on some long weekend date?
          Was she, as I have been told, a prostitute?

* * *

          My obsession with the past refuses to cow down long to the wisdom of my fifth decade. I can make it disappear for a little while, but it returns—a genetic tide.

          Alone with my personality, often I long for my own, flawed kin.

          Heavy smokers, as I recall.

          The money-loaning, Sunday-phoning world around me doesn't fit my blood: all the adjectives that won't get used. I dig for their stories but rarely pull a gem.

          I cannot stop describing what happened to me.

          Nannie, topless, sitting at the foot of the bed. I said "I see your shopping bags!" 

          It was my first simile, and the family repeated it laughingly until Nannie died, on a cold Friday in December.

          I was walking home from school and suddenly my mother's car pulled up alongside. Brian was in the passenger seat in his black leather jacket, staring at the windshield, and I knew something was wrong.

          After a binge, she had vomited, ruby-black like coffee grounds, into a small plastic pail. Afterward, someone had just placed it in the bathtub. 

          I still have its unused twin.

          She was a great cook, Nannie, and she is supposed to have studied with James Beard. They had a sandwich place in Arizona, for a while. Then she worked in the kitchen at Bungalow Inn, on Ridge Pike. We stopped by, once, and she took me into the back and gave me maraschino cherries from the massive, restaurant-sized jar.

          She was talented, caustic, bigoted, profoundly unstable, and her verbal caricature was unsettlingly accurate. She smoked Kools from a jade-green plastic case. She drank crème de menthe straight, from a bottle in her bathroom closet.

          Her oldest daughter drank herself to death at 37.

          My brother Jimmy smoked himself to death at 55.

          My father shot himself at 33.

          My brother Bruce was a rock star.

          I have a hard time concentrating.

          Still, my mind drives along the roads of Jeffersonville, trying to remember the buildings then: the drive-in bank on the corner, across from the fire station, the S&H Green Stamps store, the animal hospital, and the tiny drive-up photo place.

          Their lives were squeezed between Collegeville and Norristown like folders, and my feeble memory brings them back, reeking of smoke, hard-working and broke, pleasure-loving, self-destructive, violent, remorseful, fashionable, and tall. 

          Oh the colorful ashtrays!