Shorts
Clubbing
01 February 2012
Skin crawls, stomach churns: the prospect of a club tonight. I exaggerate only a little. Shouting over loud crappy music, sardine-packed crowds in my face, twin horrors of dancing and light beer. Hours I'll never get back. But every time I do go I catch some vibe of essential pack-animal humanity, a coherent shimmer out of chaos, that reminds me we're connected and nothing's changed in millennia. A hard-won payoff.
Vocational Education
24 January 2012
For St. Patrick's Day practice, Jeff boiled us one of his excellent corned beef and cabbage dinners. After, rather than old dead Shakespeare again—Hamlet stabs Polonius; Ali empathizes: "How awkward!"—Gram uses a deck of crisp Bicycle playing cards to teach the grandkids, as fans of politics and Dilbert might agree, something useful instead: building houses of cards, clock solitaire, Klondike, and other card magic.
Give Me Strength
22 January 2012
In a year which brought two healthy, adorable babies into my circle, nothing has shaken out the hoariest and truest circle-of-life clichés like getting, while driving home from an old friend's wake, the news of a beloved uncle's death. We are forced to stare it down in the starkest terms: life is pain—and joy; some must die, yet we live on; we're next. Is this what syphilitic old Nietzsche claimed made him stronger?
Heracles Meets His Match
18 January 2012
What little strength I have I don't derive from touching the ground, like some two-bit Antaeus wannabe. I get it from my gently snoring wife spooned against my back. I get it from laughing with my roughhousing grandchildren, and sharing meals, wine, and conversation with my friends. I get it when I hear surf and watch vultures. Lucky for me that none of them begrudge a parasite an extravagant helping of their riches.
Camp Myles Standish
06 January 2012
In our early teens, nearly every summer day my friends and I bicycled to some place we'd never been. One was Camp Myles Standish, street after street of ghost-ridden barracks, abandoned to the crows and three raucous boys. A startling artifact of World War II, it served POWs and myriad GIs. We were born just five years after an enterprise of overwhelming scale, and our parents had made it almost invisible to us.
Scream
03 January 2012
Water pump wakes me at 3:30 A.M. Uh-oh. Kitchen's lit up. Insomniac Gram's rinsing recyclables at the sink. I stumble in and croak out "What's up?" She spins, staring, and lets loose a heartfelt, throaty, carving-knife-in-the-shower scream, so worth my lost beauty rest. A startle reflex that much more robust than a twitch and a gasp is such a gratifying gift. Our grandchildren plot for hours how they can scare her.
Therapy
23 December 2011
For mental health, I skin and dismember vegetables. I rock the knife to cut creepily uniform pieces, boil them in stock with spices, and give quarts of it to my grandchildren. I try not to nick my left thumb, which long ago had a two-stitch meeting with my first jackknife. The skins and rejected bits I save to brew stock for the next batch. When I'm doing this alone I play Brahms on the stereo, really, really loud.
Voracious
16 December 2011
Reaching into her backpack, Hunter asks me if I want to see the newest book she's reading. Because I well know my grandchildren's propensity for jokes, I ask "Is it some revolting thing I don't want to see?" "Well, maybe not," she eagerly replies. I can tell from her proud hesitant smile that I need to notice something. "OK, I'd love to." She hauls out a honking paperback and cracks it open. "563 pages," she beams.
Hungry
16 December 2011
My seventh-grade granddaughters doze in the back seat while we wait for their brother to emerge from school. Home, they change into PJs. Ali makes a sub of pepperoni, buffalo chicken, cheese, mayo, and mustard. Hunter grabs a chicken leg and ranch dressing. Jord gets sub leftovers and ice cream. We settle in to watch American Chopper, scoffing grapes, pickled onions, and mini-donuts, and chat about the dog's jowls.
Winter Stymied
14 December 2011
Drab medium grey so dense I can only guess where the sun is: it's a day that threatens snow. I walk toward the Target store, scrunched up against the cheer-sapping chill. A lovely woman comes out, slight, dark-haired, lively-eyed. She pauses to examine her register tape, singing softly to herself. Warm humanity, usually so private, flares in the Christmas-shopping crowd. It's all I can do not to stop dead and gawk.
Omens
04 December 2011
I hear Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" at a cherished family wedding and just before I find Dad after his stroke, as if I need memory aids for these events. Now it gives me quite the frisson; pure superstition, of course. I'll believe it's not coincidence as soon as my radio blasts "You Can't Always Get What You Want" whenever I pass a Powerball billboard or a gorgeous intelligent woman flashes me an innocent smile.
A Good Day
25 November 2011
My grandchildren and niece unexpectedly sleep over. It's the usual debauchery: stay up late, watch stupid TV, play card and word games, eat massive amounts of ice cream, act silly. I gaze at a granddaughter brushing her hair at the mirror. She carefully explains the finer points of using hair gel and mousse. She wastes her effort; all I remember is how much I love this girl. How easily a good day becomes a great day.
Thanksgiving
17 November 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly.
The brain within its groove is a freaking marvel. Dad had a stroke yesterday that would've felled an unluckier man. He sits up in his hospital bed, hands on the tray table before him. The fingers of his impaired dominant right arm want to curl. He flattens them out with his left hand, carefully separating them a hair, each gap exactly uniform. Establishing order in his disrupted life, his small gesture so moves me.
[Stolen from Emily Dickinson. Poems, Series One, Life: XXVI.]
Russell at Ninety
08 November 2011
Uncle Russell hits ninety in a few days. Quirky, he's infamous in our family for drilling holes in his shoes to augment ventilation. He's devoted nine decades to self-recrimination, so I think it's good to celebrate bygones about which he's never once expressed regret: riding a rent-a-horse in the Blue Hills, and his 1938 straight-eight Packard with seventeen-inch wheels and seven-ply bias ply tires. To his health!
Monday Morning
31 October 2011
My twin granddaughters, twelve, get ready for school, a task for which there's never enough time. Through closed doors, voices alternate between indistinct words of towering indignation and vehement conspiratorial whispers. History suggests a problem with hair, clothes, or interpreting "maybe" as a promise. Mom stays calm. The girls run to the car across extraordinary October snow, carrying their coats and shoes.
Desperate
26 October 2011
I hear a lone katydid this October afternoon. In broad daylight, way before his usual sunset debut, he seizes the day. Trying to get lucky, he can't even wait for nightfall, a teenage insect boy who really, really doesn't want to die a virgin. Apparently he's aware that a hard frost is just around the corner and his stridulating days are numbered. It's now or never. Incorrigibly anthropomorphic, but do you doubt me?
Where Angels Fear to Tread
20 October 2011
A white-haired woman at the earthy-crunchy market asks what my cilantro's for. "Soups," I tell her. "I'm forgetting how to cook," she says, "I put things down and can't remember where they are. I don't much like the world today; I really wouldn't mind leaving." "No need to hurry, your time'll come soon enough," I rush to rejoin, the man for whom every day above ground is a gift, who understands nothing of her life.
All Ears
16 October 2011
Two people wait for a train. I see our ethnicity, sex, and age differ significantly; not to mention they dress funny. I give a start when they speak English, not some vile linguistically valid urban dialect unintelligible to dead white males, but my own language. Much of what we perceive as dangerous otherness is from what we hear. We can close our eyes or look away; not so with our ears. Hearing's primal, reptilian.
Fisher
08 October 2011
Ahead, my first fisher runs across the road: to get to the other side. There's no mistaking his gait and shape, as unique as those of a black bear galumphing over the guardrail on my Berkshires trip. Way too long for his stubby legs, long-tailed to boot, he moves in a squirrelly sinusoid, but calm and intent, unlike the typical squirrel. By rights he and his cousins should evolve into the only six-legged vertebrates.
Eavesdropper
05 October 2011. Appears in The Montucky Review.
Waiting for the Providence train, a dude in a hoodie expounds to his Asian pal, who owns a waist-long ponytail: "Weird shit's happening" in the Antarctic Ocean and along every fault line on earth, there will be mega-quakes and thousand-foot tidal waves, the only safe place will be in the air or maybe the moon would be OK, too. I'm hoping Hoodie hasn't reproduced. Then he says it came from the Internet. What a relief.
Too Quick
03 October 2011. Appears in The Montucky Review.
A guy hands a lost dog flyer to a woman with a cane on the commuter platform. She's repeating his tale to us. Not entirely coherent; choppy. Seems sort of simple. And she's blocking my view of the arriving CSX freight train. By now I've snap-judged her, unfairly dismissive. She's a K9 cop, whose dog latched onto the armed robber she and her partners were chasing. He shot her in the leg. That's not the story I expect.
Call It
25 September 2011. Appears in The Montucky Review.
A guy's walking his dog at the edge of the empty commuter rail parking lot, with his dutifully helmeted daughter on her bike, maybe six. She wends her way to the pay phone at the bottom of the platform, picks it up, and carries on half a conversation with a person unknown. Any boy, of any age, would check the coin return for change and be off. Invidious? Politically incorrect? Stereotype? Nature? Nurture? Your call.
Cloudburst
15 September 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i98.
I finish walking the dogs at Jeff's, racing the cold front. Angina ebbs, sky blackens, a few dozen raindrops smack the windshield. A whiff of petrichor and Bach's Orchestral Suite #3 graces the radio: I'm content. Then all hell envelops me. Gravity temporarily trebles, rending water out of air. A half-hour of biblically-proportioned rain and lightning, street gutters overflow, I can't see. Now it stops. Just stops.
Little Things
06 September 2011. Appears in Apocrypha and Abstractions.
On my way to the bathroom I stumble over the vacuum cleaner hose she left in the hall, and jar loose an f-word. I sponge up a lake around the basin, rinse crusty toothpaste off the hot-water knob, set the toothbrush back onto its charger. Flirting with retaliation, I think of her throaty diaphragm-driven laugh: a sonic Duchenne smile, not the faux soprano version she uses to punctuate voice mails. I lower the seat.
Afflicted
17 August 2011
Nobody asked what I think about on my constitutionals, but I'll tell you anyway. The shame of exposure will be worth it if I save one child from a life of sin and misery. Walking, I see a billboard plugging a movie, Rescue: Disaster Response. The madness overpowers me. I think: Rescue. Secure... oh, and recuse. Yeah, that's all. You must eradicate the disease when it presents. There's no other effective therapy.
Echo
13 August 2011. Appears in Prick of the Spindle 5.3.
Guy wheels his bike toward the train, and turns to me, face not overtly crazed but hard-used: "Nice day, isn't it, sir?" I verify it. "Can't complain one bit." Seconds later a well-nourished trainman asks, "Nice day, isn't it, sir?" The carpe diems are implicit. Maybe we sense the past-its-primeness of a soft grey August afternoon. Or maybe I'm making it up, assuming that humans share more than weather commonplaces.
Petrichor
11 August 2011
There's now a single English word (stolen, no surprise) encompassing an age-old phenomenon, the distinctive aroma dispersed when a thunderstorm's first fat drops shatter on parched ground just before the deluge. I've been waiting half a century to learn that word. Then in my own lifetime Aussie chemists identify and analyze the responsible mixture and serendipity brings me the word. So slight a thing, so delightful.
Drummer Boy
09 August 2011. Appears in Prick of the Spindle 5.3.
Drummers are impervious to the enraging diabolical monotony of unaccompanied drums at full volume, which would unhinge a sentient being. No wonder musicians think they're barely human, more primitive than even trombonists. One practices in a trackside flat. Acela riders blaze by before the horror sinks in, and clients of the nearby funeral home don't care, but a neighbor's murder trial and acquittal seem inevitable.
Punchline
08 August 2011
We're driving home from the Catskills with our grandkids and niece. It's a long four-hour drive even without Orange County Chopper detours, teen refueling breaks, and infernal traffic. Mobile devices earn their keep.
Sweet twelve-year-old granddaughter proposes, "Let's tell jokes. I know one. Say I."
Gram: "I."
"Spell map."
Gram: "M-A-P."
"Say ness."
Gram: "Ness."
"Now all together."
Gram: "I am a penis."
Katydid
07 August 2011
Last night I heard a katydid during the onset of a gentle vertical shower. Two favorite sounds, electrifying because I don't remember ever hearing them together. I'm old as dirt and August is not always dry, so there should have been plenty of opportunity. Later, harder rain, no katydids. Perhaps this evening's weather will confirm that rain inhibits katydids, or suggest another theory. I can't believe I don't know.
Marketing
11 July 2011
I love cobalt blue, a flamboyant, gorgeous, even sex-freighted color. Reminds me of lasers. It's de trop, brilliant way beyond good taste. For once I think fondly of marketers. Trendy bottles of so-so wine; squat fifty-year-old Noxzema jar juxtaposed with red lava soap tin; Cheryl's slim picnic table vase flaunting daisies' fecal pungency; plates, cups, and gimcrackery sharing sun in the B&B window: can't get enough.
Restraint
29 June 2011
Memory of an article on the resonant frequency of dogs shaking themselves dry bubbles up unbidden as my shower ends. I picture it: eggshell chest torquing spastically about its long axis, toothpick limbs flailing, wattle and paunch flapping dangerously. The inefficiency, the sheer obscene inelegance, not to mention the likelihood of serious self-inflicted injury, warn me. Age brings wisdom. I snatch at the towel.
In Tune
27 June 2011
Opportunity strikes; Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" breaks out on the radio. I crank it up, first rolling the windows down so the car won't explode. Certain music seems to alter my brain, priming it to more readily perceive moments outside of time. As I glance at two guys on a scaffold hammering on the barn up the street I catch a brief flicker of the 1830s, pickup truck and nail guns notwithstanding. No surprise.
Smoke
19 June 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i88.
Cigaret: caustic, ashy death. Pipe: cloys. Cigar: intoxicating, evocative. Heady as wood fires and burning leaves, sensuous as a woman's Chanel. Port. Gunpowder. Mark Twain, H. L. Mencken, Wm. F. Buckley. The Sherlock Holmes monograph. Connecticut River valley tobacco fields. Writing of Hester Prynne in my 1920s dorm room. Rusty and Uncle Edward cruising Boston's North End. Jeff and my grandkids playing wiffle ball.
Storm Drain
11 June 2011
I'm proud of my grandson. At three he readily grasped what I taught him: always spit into storm drains for the peculiarly masculine joy of aimed spitting, and, since a pebble isn't always at hand, to hear if they're full of water. One Sunday Grammy decided it was time to bring him to church. As she introduced him to strait-laced old women of both sexes, he spied the heating register in the floor. He knew what to do.
Garnet
25 May 2011
A cousin brought Dad a garnet from out West. He kept it in a crazed polystyrene compartmented box with his other minerals. Deep burgundy, complex geometry and symmetry, embedded in grey matrix, it struck me incoherent. I so coveted it. Years later I got my own for $2 at a gem show, my second-best investment ever. No wonder new-agers ascribe magic to crystals. Like finding freaking Excalibur sticking out of a rock.
Power to the People
20 May 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i86.
Casual observers can see a dandelion's intense yellow bionic energy aura; I compute that a typical ball field will power a small city, including its vehicles. Any fool can build a collector of garnets, fluorite crystals, and duct tape—tricky part is the tinfoil shielding to make the thing practical. The suits and sunglasses in the dark green Prius are no problem. They back off when they get a load of my light saber.
Regulars
15 May 2011. Appears in Prick of the Spindle 5.3.
A man and a boy often show up at my Sunday afternoon train watching. The boy always holds his hands at chest level, close to his body, except when he hops around and flaps his arms. I wonder who's the railfan: man, boy, or both. Neither shows much interest in trains. I wonder, too, what the boy's affliction is, because naming opens a world of understanding. But it's all idle speculation—none of my goddamn business.
Western Union
14 May 2011
Forty-odd years ago I sent a girl a happy-birthday telegram, and, achieving a truly geeky simulacrum of romance, promised to send her one every year, forever. She smiled and told me I'd fail; I swore I'd do it. The promise lasted a shamefully small number of years, but before long the end of time came. I regret I proved her right. Superior knowledge of male human nature or technological prescience? I say the latter.
Wiffle Ball
09 May 2011. Appears in Camroc Press Review.
A warm early May sun dips, shading the back yard; gnats and mosquitos rule the air; pine warblers command the treetops. Jeff, his cigar aromatic, plays wiffle ball with his children. Runner, fielder, pitcher, and batter constantly change places as near-chaos unfolds from iterating the simple, if cryptic, rules. Jord and his dad pitch to strike each other out. The girls take their base-running leads in cartwheels.
Burke's
28 March 2011
At Burke's Beach, a gull leaps into the wind, takes five strokes, rises thirty feet, drops a crab onto the packed wet sand. Stunned, defeated by superior technology, it lies twitching and meets its fate as sushi. Later, just after sunset, fire glows on the eastern horizon: a full moon erupts out of the Atlantic. You can see it move, so fast that it seems the cold-hearted orb will traverse the sky and sink in minutes.
Children's Hour
26 March 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i79.
My granddaughter, grave Alice, concentrates on holding the Chianti bottle steady while her father pulls the cork, and she cautiously sniffs the open bottle. Leaving the kitchen she peeks under the lid of the simmering shells to check their progress. In the yard her twin, laughing Allegra, does cartwheels on the trampoline. Her static-charged hair radiates straight out, and pine needles jump away as her finger nears.
Sharp-shin
15 March 2011
Turning off the road into my driveway, I stare into the yellow eye of a young sharp-shinned hawk perched on the four-foot snow-bank. This accipiter would as soon eviscerate you as give you the time of day. I get it in a flash: the blue jay feathers and guts on my car, the fate of Prometheus, a Frenchman's obsession with his liver, and phrases involving chopped liver. Years of baiting the bird feeders finally pay off.
Bambi
31 January 2011
Hunters have Bambi moments when they decide to no longer kill for sport. Mine happened fifty years ago. My grandfather offered me a quarter if I could hit a sitting dragonfly with my inter-digit rubber band slingshot. Carefully calculating windage, at a range of ten inches I took its head off with a hollow-point unfolded paper clip. Amazed, I got the quarter, but to this day I don't hunt insects. Except mosquitoes.
Dialogue
22 January 2011. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i63.
Suddenly I'm aware of a great horned owl out in the swamp, his faint, distinctive hoots seeping in with the cold air around the edges of the storm window. Snow from the last nor'easter is still frozen to tree trunks, and there's another six inches predicted for tomorrow. The owl doesn't give a rat's ass; he's busy soliciting feathery vole-terrifying sex. There are no answering calls, so he won't get lucky tonight.
Lucky
17 January 2011
The older I get, the luckier I am. I have three grandchildren; inexplicably, a wife who loves me; friends of nearly half a century. I've survived open heart surgery and over fifty years of diabetes. I've always been a lucky man, except when I was a lucky boy. As a teenager I sought to build my character—how obnoxious is that?—by listening to my parents' set of LPs purporting to be the world's best classical music. Fortunately I started at the beginning: Bach's keyboard concerti. Doubtless I'd have turned bitter and twisted if I'd afflicted myself with Lutoslawski or Schubert lieder.
Beaches
17 December 2010
Dad's father honeymooned at Quonochontaug Beach in Rhode Island. He'd been married to my grandmother nearly fifty years when he died. Dad and Mom honeymooned at Bass River on Cape Cod, and were still married when Mom died. I honeymooned in Moravia, New York, birthplace of Millard Fillmore. We divorced. When I remarried, we honeymooned in Edgartown, on Martha's Vineyard, and tied the knot there, too. So far, so good.
Osterville
05 December 2010. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly's 2010 Anthology.
On the Cape we spent long August hours at Dowse's Beach, where the gatekeeper had cauliflower ears and was tanned to the bone. The phrase "sun protection factor" had not been invented yet, and we were all pretty crispy after a week. We chased gulls, built castles, buried each other in the sand, soaked our poison ivy in sea water, and accumulated halcyon days against the demands of future New England Februaries.
Coincidence
17 October 2010. Appears in Short, Fast, and Deadly i54 and the 2010 Anthology.
I'm driving home. The air is sharp, my eyes aflame with autumn orange and yellow. The oldies station erupts into Van Halen's "Jump." I crank the volume to its natural level, loud enough for a do-it-yourself lithotripsy, but not so that my ears bleed. No doubt it's coincidence that this is the instant a brown dihedral glides out of St. Stephen's Cemetery into the east, just above the telephone poles: turkey vulture.
Sting
10 September 2010. Appears in Camroc Press Review.
Train pulls out; Cheryl's off to Boston. A guy approaches my car. "I just came in from Kansas City..." "A likely story," I interrupt, not yet knowing how true. He's in shorts, hiking boots, beat flannel shirt. Gigantic pack, bedroll below, bandanna. "I'm going to Lowell; can you help me with train fare?" Ahh. His accent's not from here. He's wicked plausible. "Where Jack Kerouac was from." I give him the eight bucks.
Get a Life
17 August 2010. Appears in Camroc Press Review.
At the Dunkin Donuts there's a muted television. To compensate there's Elvis on the Muzak, three chatty teen-age girls, and Spanish on a cell phone; cell phones by definition are always too freaking loud. Behind me there's a robust trade in ice, caffeine, and fat calories. I'm composing haiku in my head, but lucky for me the symptoms are subtle and misleading. Anyone who notices is too polite to take me to task.
Too Much Time
11 August 2010. Appears in i43 of Short, Fast, and Deadly.
Katydids done, birds haven't started; dead silence. An hour before dawn, when blackest imagining and worst-case scenarios entertain the racing insomniac mind, I lie, aware enough to notice the hours chime by too fast. I hear Cheryl breathe; currents tickle my back. Humans breathe each other's air—a most intimate, continuous exchange—yet can't sense how we alter atmospheric gas concentrations. But mosquitoes can.
1965 Telephony
24 July 2010
Fifty years ago towns bristled with coin-operated telephones, often wrapped in plexiglass-and-aluminum cabinets for audio privacy. One could cheat the Bell System of its real silver dime: talk fast, hang up soon enough. Now dimes are crap, talk is cheap. Cell phones blossom except among misfits, the marginal, the occasional refractory Republican, and it's a sin to be even momentarily incommunicado. I smell progress.
Tommy
15 May 2010. Appears in Magnolia's Press.
Tommy was an Irishman, easily two or three times my age, indoor-pale, with a shy smile, reputed to be drunk twenty-four/seven. He worked with dangerous pre-OSHA machines in the bindery. The massive trimming shears had a safety interlock you had to physically span with both arms spread wide. This effectively prevented inadvertent hand-chopping, but I suspect a determined suicide might have been able to behead himself.
Turkey Vulture
10 May 2010. Appears in Journal of Microliterature.
The vulture floats up from below me, pausing to look me in the eye, perhaps appraising my lifespan: not short enough. She continues to rise, a sublime bird, brown in reflected sunlight, beautiful in her thermal-soaring grace and finesse, beautiful in her power and nonchalance in the teeth of a forty-mile-an-hour wind, terrifying in her diet of putrid carrion. I watch her, beguiling consort of death, for hours.
Linotype
10 April 2010. Appears in Issue 22 of Short, Fast, and Deadly.
Consider a mutant typewriter on steroids, orders of magnitude more complex than Rube Goldberg's worst nightmare. Think of a sort of self-organizing spidery intelligence emerging from the seeming chaos of hot lead slugs falling into a galley, surrounded by a myriad of large-postage-stamp-sized brass matrices marching ant-like up and down the machine. There is no way a Linotype machine could possibly work, but it did.
Donald
23 March 2010. Appears in Issue 17 of Short, Fast, and Deadly.
A Boston-bound Amtrak headlight snaps into view at East Junction. Donald balances on one leg, leans forward toward the train while extending his other leg back like an ice skater, doffs his ever-present baseball cap to the oncoming Acela, and curls his tongue out and down beneath an upper jaw totally devoid of incisors. This man is a living gargoyle, I think, and realize that we don't have much more to talk about.
