Sweet things, p.5
Sweet Things, page 5
Some artists find success by capturing frogs in their habitat but if the creatures – frog and artists – are handled too aggressively terror ensues. Everything has a level of delicacy both artist and subject must respect. The best frogs appear happy with their circumstances. Happiness is difficult to detect but the longer a frog is studied the more its happiness becomes apparent.
Keeping a frog happy is hard work. A good artist must put a smile on the face of a little, green, Mona Lisa. Keeping company with other frogs is not enough. The best practice is to raise a frog from a tadpole to a complete frog so frog and artist can trust each other in a lasting bond where a happy artist draws, and a skilled frog poses.
Every Day
Every day, it’s a getting’ closer
Goin’ faster than a roller coaster
Love like ours will surely find a way,
Heh-hay, he-hay…
Buddy Holly
Light in the universe is rare. Light requires the presence of a myriad of atomic explosions within a star or the reflection of those cataclysms on the surface of lightless bodies. In between those engines of action and reaction exists an expanse where nothing happens, where voices are not heard, and where the shape of matter is in a constant state of flux.
I came home and sat down on my bed when I learned about light and dark in science class. I wept. I asked myself why daylight was so brief, why time was measured in the constant sunrises of our lives, and where hope could find a place to exist without the darkness chasing it away. That moment was a profound revelation to me. Every day I try to hold on to a little bit more of what enables me to see the world I live in and if that weren’t enough of a challenge everything around me changes with every second.
My mother wanted me to get help. I was only nine years old. Older members of the family who did not understand told me I thought too much. My Uncle Gary, the consoler-general of our clan, said I shouldn’t worry about it, that I needed to live life as it came to me and there was nothing I could do to alter the way the universe works.
When I was twelve I woke one winter morning with the idea that perhaps that reality was an illusion, the I obeyed rules I didn’t make, and that there is always light in the world, somewhere, always a sunrise, and always a night but with a little bit of effort on my part I could alter the course of things. I could make light the predominant expression of the cosmos.
I didn’t want to tell anyone – at least not until I figured out how I could change the rules and make daylight the perpetual gift we all could receive. Our church minister had told me only God could change the way time and physics work. The disparity between light and darkness, after all, had been by His design, and that boys my age should rise early, use the precious daylight to read and study so we wouldn’t strain our eyes, and then go to bed early because that would make me healthy, wealthy, and wise. My mother had that saying on a Torquay ware candlestick. The motto had never meant anything to me until the Reverend said I ought to obey God’s work.
Then I asked who God was. He didn’t like the question. “Could God be any of us?” I said.
He told me I was speaking blasphemy. He said we all wear God’s image, meaning we look like him because the human race was His family, and he cited a philosopher named Emmanuel Levinas who argued that each of us bears the mark of divinity because we are made in God’s image.
I asked the Reverend that if that was so if we looked like “Our Heavenly Father,” would we not also inherit some of his skills? I look like my father. My mother says so. My father is very good with tools. He spends long hours at his workbench in the basement fixing broken mechanical objects. He saved my alarm clock when it fell on the floor. Like that? I asked the Reverend. The man of God just shook his head and walked away.
Maybe he didn’t want to reveal trade secrets. That had to be it. Each of us inherited not only our looks from God’s side of the family but also the inclinations (a word I looked up in a dictionary) or predispositions (a word I found under the same definition) to be able to do certain things. So, if God was light, another of the catchphrases I heard in church, and God made the light, then maybe I had the power to make it too or at least to encourage its co-operation with the way I wanted things to be.
I started practicing. At first, I realized that calling the sun to rise a few minutes earlier each day was kind of stupid because, after the Winter Solstice, the days get longer so the planet can warm up and enjoy some nice summer days. The careful notes and tables I created during the winter were suddenly wrong, at least scientifically, and the real test of my will would come after the Summer Solstice in June, which in reality doesn’t mark the beginning of summer at all because everything is in bloom by then. My mother is already picking her cherry tomatoes and cutting them up into salads.
On the morning of June 22, I rose early (with the help of the alarm clock my father was able to salvage) and I stared at the northeastern horizon where I knew the sun would come up. The day should have started later but instead, the sun came up early by about five minutes. The sudden change in the time of sunrise made the news but I wasn’t ready to make any claims for my skills.
All summer long, I repeated the experiment and got amazing results – not the same results which would have been a form of insanity but sunrises that came earlier and earlier. Then I set to work on the sunsets and got an even better reply from the universe. The days were longer and longer. The problem was that too much sunlight made the summer a scorcher but I wasn’t going to stop training myself.
There were complaints to the local and national media that starlight was becoming more difficult to see, that something had gone wrong with the universe. My answer, had anyone asked me, would have been that nothing was wrong. I was just correcting a situation where darkness was the prevailing presence in the heavens.
Then, one day, after I had stayed up not just all night but for three days and my mother was worried I was hallucinating and thought I had gone manic, I did it. I flipped the structure of the night. The stars, except for our Sun, became pinpoints of darkness in the night and the darkness became bright. The crew from the Space Station discovered they could take off their helmets and talk to each other where, before I learned to use my skills inherited from God, they would have drifted in an empty and lightless void and their heads would have exploded into the vacuum of space.
But I hadn’t anticipated the effect perpetual light would have on the universe. Grasslands and forests burst in flames. The sea began to boil. The Reverend said it was the “End of Days.” And I realized, perhaps too late to save many people, that the starry night sky served a purpose – that the light of stars, so distant and lonely – made days, however few they were worth living and worth seeing. The sunrise, I decided, was a flashbulb like the kind Uncle Gary used on his vintage camera when he took family pictures.
We would line up, as he asked, and arrange ourselves with the creases smoothed out of the aunts’ dresses and the men’s shirt collars straight, and we would smile. We would smile and say “Cheese,” and show our teeth because in that brief pop of life we were saying everything we possibly could say about life. We were saying, “Here we are in this moment, a moment on a summer afternoon that we will not live again and look at how happy we are even if we weren’t, and how we long to exist forever if we could only hold the light in hands the way I cupped fireflies in the dark and their tiny behinds glowed because they wanted other fireflies to know they were there.”
I had to go to a lot of work to put the night back in the sky. I wanted to write an apology letter to the people on the other side of the world but even if I wrote it they probably wouldn’t bother to read it or want to read it. The document, a world-changing statement, would just be to them some piece of garbage penned by a kid who was probably out of his mind.
What I learned – and this sounds like the sort of essay teachers expect everyone to write on the first day back to school after a long summer – “What I Did on My Summer Vacation” – was why the stars appear tiny in the night, and so small and so few compared to what surrounds them. Maybe God really is love and light, and if love is hard to find so is light. A person has to look for it. Too much love and light aren’t good and the fact there isn’t much of either to go around complicates things. The stars are infinite but so is the darkness and in terms of proportion there is more absence of light than presence. That’s sad but that’s just the way things are and for a good reason.
I have to look hard for love and light though there are times when I am with my family I can’t help but feel the whole house or cottage is full of their shining expressions.
The following summer I decided to pursue a new skill. I began my study of waves and whether water was liquid or merely an illusory absence of solidity. After all, glass is a liquid and I have seen pictures in magazines of rooms and swimming pools where people installed glass floors – surfaces they can walk on. The question of density is the fly in the ointment but I am working on a way around that. Water became my new passion as the world returned to normal and my family, Uncle Gary included, spread themselves on towels in the sun on a long, sandy beach where the ocean sparkled with millions of tiny stars twinkling and thanking me for giving them their brief months of freedom and the opportunity to know why they must remain so rare.
Afternoon
(Heartwood Literary Magazine)
You posed with your arms slung over each other’s shoulders, holding fish in your free hands with a dock in the background.
I never knew my own father. But yours? He was a father you were close to, a father who would listen, who’d be there, an ‘old man’ who would tell you what’s what but in a kind way. A father who took you out for a damned fine steak on your eighteenth birthday because you were a man and steak is what men eat. A man who stood you a drink as if you were an old friend.
Sister Macklin said he’d hang on for the rest of the afternoon and a can of warm pop and a questionable sandwich of dried out white bread and a slice of ham was all the respite you were given. The generators had failed. The corridors were sweltering. Ices melted in the freezer. The tea and coffee machines weren’t working, and though it was a hot day everything you touched was cold. I tried to take your hand but you turned to me and said, “No.”
We’d only just pulled the tabs on the warm Cokes. We’d only just taken one horrifying bite from the sandwich when Sister Macklin appeared, her black hair rolled under her white nurse’s cap, her forehead sweating from doing the flights of stairs and the return trip awaiting us as we had to navigate the stairwells lit by dim evacuation lights to the seventh floor, all so we could look upon a man who was no longer there. The dying leave us breathless.
You entered the room. The sister, perhaps to spare you or give you a moment that is so important between a father and son – not between a father and son and the son’s boyfriend – was right out of Hamlet.
You had to go in alone. You had to cradle the truth in your arms, tilting the head this way and that, saying nothing but pain nonetheless.
You had to be told the truth of his demise straight from his spirit. I felt as if you’d walked into the fog on a battlement and a horrible truth was about to be revealed to you. That’s all it was. The truth. It wasn’t horrible. It just was the truth.
I never told you that just before you left his room and stood talking in a low voice to the sister, I went to him and opened one of his eyes and I was the last thing he saw or didn’t see. He probably didn’t see me. If he had, I would have felt I violated your relationship with him.
The eye did not look at me as much as through me. I asked his forgiveness but none was forthcoming. How could it? He’d said all he had to say during his life. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was just acceptance. The way he accepted his own death. The way he believed he would never see a grandchild of his own. It was just a loneliness. Isolation. Living with so many ends unanswered for, so many threads that could not be neatly tied up into a neat conclusion he dreamed of knowing in his isolation. It was abandonment. You were there, but no matter how close you stood, leaning over him the night before so he could whisper secrets in your ear, he was abandoned. And he abandoned you because that’s the way death leaves things.
His face had collapsed in on itself, his false teeth taken out for mercy’s sake, and the round O of his mouth caked with what looked like dried oatmeal but is the crap that comes out of the mouths of the dying.
I looked in that one eye. It wasn’t seeing anything. It was just there, staring. But as we climbed up the fourteen staircases, sixteen if you count the fact the cafeteria is in the basement, I heard you growing short of breath, huffing, and then the sound of a sob, your shoulders going up, and your hand gripping the stair rail. I thought, “Don’t hold back on my account. Don’t show me your grief if you aren’t.” I was the jealous lover that Keith Douglas describes in his poem about the dead Panzer man in the burned-out tank. Vergissmeinnicht. I don’t remember the lines and even if I did you would hate me for thinking of them.
I wished we’d all gone fishing together. I wanted more than anything to have been a better part of your life. I could see what I had missed, what I could never understand. Long conversations. Steak on my eighteenth birthday. The advice poured shot by shot at the kitchen table.
And as you stood there weeping into your hand, standing like a shadow over the body of your father, I could picture you and me together, maybe not in the past but someday, somewhere, maybe if we had a kid of our own, and we’d be standing there with our arms around each other’s shoulder, the little guy proudly holding up the undersized fish we caught and should have thrown back, and some guy hanging around the dock we hand our camera to and hearing him say, “Smile” and clicking the shutter because it all is over in the blink of an eye. And what we fail to love or be loved by makes us see what we have or should have had, or ought to hold on to even though it is slippery and it fought for its life on the end of a thin line. And as an afterthought, after the hook is removed from the fish’s mouth, you persuade the child that all things deserve the lives they have struggled to live. You lie flat on your stomach and lower your hands over the side of the dock. The fish is inanimate. It stares at the sky. And then, to the boy’s amazement and yours, its opens and closes a gill as it is submerged, its tail awakens, and it disappears into depths we will never completely understand.
The Toll
I wanted to be a shadow when I grew up. The light from the bathroom of our apartment shone in the door of my room, and when my mother thought I was asleep, I would make shadow puppets on the wall. The rooster from my grandparent’s farm always had a conversation with the spider who lived in the toolshed where my grandfather would sharpen his ax on a grindstone and repair harnesses for horses he hadn’t seen in sixty years.
My grandfather’s life, at least as much as I knew of the only father figure I had during my childhood, was rural and simple. There were dangers in what he did but the dangers were caused by moments of carelessness – a fall from a hayloft, a misplaced stroke of a cross-cut saw. The old man would take my hand as we walked through fields to his woodlot astride a creek. He shaped his hands and gave voices to his shadows animals.
My grandfather said, “If you want to become a shadow, you have to know how to make them.”
We invented stories of dogs, cats, spiders, mice, and a rooster with a comb atop its head. I asked the shadow where it was from and why it was such a long way from the sea, and the shadow replied it lived in the harbor and someday I would raise my open eyes to the sky and follow it as it circled upwards toward the sun.
A barn cat pawed at a mouse. A rooster crowed in a bright morning. Then I saw a hand reach into the light and form a seagull.
The hand was neither mine nor my grandfather’s, and it wasn’t attached to an arm. When my grandfather left my room, I wondered where this extra hand had come from. My fingers could not shape that way.
People said I had my father’s eyes. They claimed I was the image of him, the shadow of the boy he once was. I told them I was not a shadow but always added that I had my grandfather’s hands. My grandfather’s broad palms and strong fingers were shadows of a life spent toiling with nature, repelling the forces of circumstance, so at the end of each day, he felt a small victory had been won in his fields or his tractor shed.
When a pastor asked, “O death where is thy victory?” I never counted my grandfather among the victims. The father I mourn but never knew was felled by circumstances he could not control.
The bell tolls until all the names have been read, and because our last name begins with W, I have to wait and keep my eyes closed for what feels like forever. When I open them and raise my gaze to where the towers once stood, I see the gull as it circles in an updraft. And for a moment the bird becomes the hand that wasn’t mine floating above my shadow animals.
Day of the Dead
Annie was aching to see Pedro. She needed him so very much. His absence felt like death and her empty arms were almost numb from the pain of missing him.
Pedro lived in Galeana on the other side of the grey saw teeth of the Sierra Madres In the late afternoon light with the sun behind them, they traced the jagged outline of an enormous beast with a rough back. The nearer she approached, the greener slopes became. She had been warned not to drive alone over the Sierras on her own.
“A woman alone in a car,” the man at the rental agency had said in a whisper as he leaned over the counter.
The road snaked through the mountains. The shoulders were narrow and in some places non-existent, especially on the turns, and if she had to pull over for any reason – goats crossing the road, a flat tire, or simply to admire the green view on the steep valleys on the lush Caribbean side or the bone-colored hills facing the interior once she went over the crest – she would be watched at every moment by cartel snipers.
