The Loon

I know it sounds crazy, but—like you—I might be a tenure-track catamite today, instead of a virtuous poet working temp jobs that I detest: if only Fred had selected a slightly tighter pair of pants that evening—our first date. 

Our dinner was fine. French. Bouillabaisse. His conversation and his choice of wine, thoughtful and excellent. We discussed my possible future—the famous men and women (and others) that I might meet at cocktail parties with his help.

After coffee and crème de menthe, we took a stroll. He waxed poetic, rattling off bits of Bishop and Merrill by the light of a waning moon. It was a beautiful autumn night. The sky was clear. The air was crisp. Three or four stars sparkled above Manhattan. I doubt that we would have lived happily ever after, but we might have enjoyed a few evenings of strip-poker in his apartment, or, at the very least, a healthy hand of Old Maid.

It was not to be. I was his student, you see, and a former gymnast, as I had just demonstrated on the horizontal bar in a little park near his apartment.

Fred Roland was here on a special Visa: a visiting professor of poetry at the university. And he wore baggy khakis.

I looked down at his face. I kind of admired the man for attempting to defy time as well as gravity: turning purple, eyes-bulging, hanging upside down in Washington Heights—keys, credit cards, condoms, and a handful of change cascading from his pockets. I realized with sadness that cards were probably no longer in the cards for us. Not even Old Maid.

So much for my career.

I lifted my eyes toward Heaven, and I sighed, “Don’t kill yourself, dear.”

He consented to live, with a grunt, after a painful attempt at something more spectacular—some kind of spin—before he dismounted, with stinging soles, upon the Earth.

Fred staggered over to a nearby slide and sat on its steely lip, to catch his breath and balance. I crouched to collect the scattered contents of his khakis, chattering about how I had once crushed my nuts in junior high attempting a similar move.

He said nothing.

When I thought I had collected everything, I handed the stuff back to him. He sorted it. He counted the change. He looked at me quizzically. And then he looked around. He squinted and he said, a touch tersely it seemed to me, “I think you missed something.” He winced, “over there.”

He pointed to a derelict disk shining in the dark.

I followed his shaking finger and walked over to where he was pointing, to see for myself.

He was right.

I had missed something.

I picked it up.

Even in the dim orange light under the swings, I could tell it was a coin. A newly minted dollar. A lost Canadian Loon.

The Mysterious Mr. N

To Mr. James Boswell, Esq.

Aberdeen

July 19th, 1776

Dear Sir,

Enclosed you will find the late Mr. N. I urge you to set aside your personal Distaste for the Man and read his Book.

I know that from Age to Age, from Page to Page (indeed, from Line to Line, Word to Word, even Letter to Letter), things change radically in his Universe: Prose bleeds into Poetry, Poetry into Prose, and, suddenly, the most sober and reflective Soliloquy may dissolve into a fit of hard-to-conceal Flatulence, the Curse of uncontrolled Mirth.

I understand your Disgust. In part, Sir, I even share it. He is not what I expected. With Mr. N, one begins to feel—very quickly—that those very same Laws of Reason which have governed our Lives since the Birth of Newton have been reshuffled and re-dealt to an Ever Hopeful Humanity from a pack of Playing Cards consisting entirely of identickal practickal Jokers.

One never quite knows what to expect with Mr. N. One might just as easily wander off a Cliff as trip over a Ruby when strolling through Chelsea. Indeed, more than once, I have been caught in Bed with him—quite Red-Handed—by my Landlady, Mrs. Prynne. Can you imagine me following Him—Jowl to Cheek, Face to Fundament—crawling toward a subterranean Lake at the End of a hot Lava Tube in Java?

And yet, Sir, there we were. And there was Mrs. Prynne. And there were Mrs. Prynne’s scandalized Eyebrows scampering backwards like a pair of frightened Spiders across her Scotch Bonnet and out of the Door! 

What else could I do, Sir, but lower my Gaze, lift my Octavo Fig Leaf, and blush? 

I have lost track of the Years I have idled away in Mr. N’s imaginative Company:  beside a small Lantern, wiggling my Toes in the cool Waters of his cavernous Immensity; regarding with wonder the Darkness above and waiting for a Stalactite to fall and crash through my gaping Mouth. All the while, he stands fishing in the Shadows: a bored Cork bobbing above a School of blind Guppies, his Hook baited with Nothing but a naked Barb.

Plato was wrong about the Shadows. Light a candle and look around you, Sir. Now, look inside. Deeper, Sir, deeper. Does not the interior World we occupy more closely resemble Mr. N’s volcanic Lagoon than She does the dusty Caves of Platonic Philosophy? The Shadows our Lanterns cast upon the sulph’rous Walls of our Crania bear no relation to any idealized Form; but even here, the thorniest Rose one may encounter is no less fragrant despite its vicious Stem.

So it is with Life, Sir. And with Art. In the scarlet Petals of a Rose, all of our Hopes and Fears finally flower. According to Mr. N, these Eruptions are simply the ordinary Properties of Existence, the sort of things Mr. Garrick’s theatrickal Troupe trafficks in: Sheets of Steel Thunder, mangled Shakespeare, a quiet Cassandra with itchy Privates.

At least from Her, if not from Him, we may infer an Intelligent Design to the Cosmos, even a benevolent Heaven; or, failing that, Damnation and Eternal Hell-Fire—the Clap.

I suspect that the Truth of the Matter lies buried in the Act of Creation: somewhere between a burning Desire and a painful Discharge.

Alas.

Alas, Sir, alas. I should have done. Mrs. Prynne has arrived to badger me with Milk and Tea. 

“Patience, Madam. Madam, please. Madam, will you desist? Sit ye down with your Milk and your Tea! Have you no Eyes? Can you not see? I am busy in Bed; and, but for my Nightcap, completely undres’t! Please, Woman, allow me to add one further Paragraph to the Body of this Letter before I rise. I cannot leave my dearest Friend with one of those nettlesome Hangnails which AUTHORS do so often AFFECT: Afterwords, Epilogues, Epitaphs, and the forever-to-be-dreaded Post Script. I shall leave NOTHING unsaid.”

To speak plainly, James, in brief, with a furious Widow at my Elbow as Witness: after the Death of my dear Wife, without my Midnight Rambles with Mr. N—and the Milk, and the Tea, the relentless Ministrations of Mrs. Prynne each Morning—I am sure that I should have committed Suicide.

I hope you will consider this Book, as I now consider my Life, a Gift.

Your most Obed’t, Humble, Serv’t,

Sam Johnson

Untitled

  

            My first foray into the world of friction [sic] was an untitled piece I slaved over for two years in the mid-nineties. As I envisioned the work at the time, when I was twenty-six and obsessed with Thurber, this would be the first in a series of Jamesian character studies centered around academic life.

            In the opening tale, Jack (34) returns triumphant from a contentious conference in Boulder, Colorado, where he delivered a provocative paper on the position of commas in the sex life of Gibbons (collateral descendants of the famous historian of Rome) at the Modern Language Association’s Annual Conference: only to find his boxer, Elgin—Marbles, for short—dreaming of beef marrow bones in an inaccessible crotch of an elm in his courtyard.

            As Eve (34), his girlfriend, is out shopping for fruit-flavored lubricants and other gluten-free delicacies with her best pre-op friend, Paulette (28), visiting from Portland, and President Clinton is downtown distracting the rest of the neighbors, most of the story we spend with the perplexed young adjunct, orbiting the tree: trying to figure out just how the dog came to be there. Jack advances several different theories, all equally credible: extraterrestrials, an earthquake, a mountain lion, Mustafa Kemal, ghosts, a tri-cobalt satellite (left over from an episode of Star Trek), the black magic of his gardener (Barney Haller), a cantankerous kite string, or a confabulation of faeries.

            For five pages we wander in circles with Jack under this tedious tree, looking up at his dreaming dog, trying figure out just what has gone wrong with the forces of Nature in this idyllic corner of Iowa. It never occurs to Jack to wait for Eve and Paulette to return with the fruit-flavored lubricants and gluten-free delicacies and ask them; or to call the fire department; or to grab the aluminum ladder the painters left under the lilacs and try to rescue his dog himself, so lost he becomes in a maze of sensitive semiotic questions arising from the presence of a dog in the crotch of such a tall tree: since, as you will notice, the word “Dog” spelled backwards is “God.” And we all know in what mysterious ways THAT gentleman works.

            Sadly, I never got further with this story than the thin filament of drool connecting Elgin above—Marbles, for short—to the Earth below, before I abandoned it as totally unworkable. Plausible as the image of a fictitious dog sleeping in a fictitious tree might seem to me, I couldn’t imagine anyone else would believe it.

            Except for the people of PETA, who would have hopped in a minivan and been over in a flash to burn down my house.

Sunday, January 27th, 2013: Journal Entry

I have been trying not to think about him, but now and then I do. At those moments, I get a terrible feeling of unease in my bladder: the same sensation I get leaning a bit too far over the rails of a tall suspension bridge and staring at the Elysian green below; wondering if it would shatter the calm of the water if I dropped in unannounced or if the wet would welcome me with open arms like an old and loving friend.

Since it is impossible for me to say for certain without testing the hypothesis, I do not dwell on bridges for very long. I move along.

My Muse

Dear—,

My Muse. Do I have one? I do, indeed. Thanks for asking. I don’t think the idea of a Muse is dead. The fact that you asked the question at all suggests to me that the Muses are very much alive.

Each Muse is personal, I think. I also think mine is spiritual, in a way, and physical, as all living things are. I have a hard time seeing my Muse as a Harpy, a creature like Robert Graves’s snake-handling Minoan, his White Goddess. Or Rilke's fearsome Angel. Rilke's great inspiration has always reminded me more of a Zeppelin than anything else. Maybe this is because I am gay and I admire large, inflatable objects which explode in my face. Maybe it has something to do with experience: how I have come to look at life. I don’t know.

My Muse is kind of like Cupid. I see him as an impossible putti somersaulting through my subconscious mind, scattering daisies and chaos in one of those blue skies from the French Baroque. He appears to be: comic, tragic, totally anarchic, totally ruthless, and well-armed.

My Muse is Love, clearly. I can’t speak for everyone, but I have a feeling that Love is far more protean today than he ever was before. He might be an itchy jock at the gym, for instance. Or an anonymous gift to the Salvation Army. I have even known him to hide in the blast of a nuclear bomb. He might even be you. There is no telling how he will turn up.

Most often I see my Muse as my cell phone, a muted buzz perpetually interrupting me, wherever I am, whatever I happen to be doing: jogging; having sex; taking a dump; trying to sleep; juggling a pumpkin, a carton of milk, a carton of eggs, and a carton of light bulbs at the grocery store; or maybe squatting in a desolate aisle of analgesics at the pharmacy; looking at bottles of aspirin, comparing prices; wondering, amusingly, how many of these I would have to take if I wanted to commit suicide.

My Muse sees to it that the reception is always terrible on these connections, and that the number (Blocked) is usually wrong. But I am a creature of habit, and I never know if the call might be something important: about a new job, a surprise visit from a friend, or the news that a loved one has suddenly died. I always drop whatever I am doing and search for a quiet area—a napkin, a notebook, an empty afternoon—where, if he has left a message, and if it is meant for me, I can return the call.

As always,

E.

Eric and Michael meet...

“Hello,” he said, standing to the side, so I could get a better view of his crotch.

            “Hi,” I replied.

            “You are new here. You work for that crazy Czech bitch upstairs, don’t you?”

            “Yes.”

            “You are Michael, right?”

            “How do you know that? Have you been spying on me?” His eyes narrowed into slits and he edged behind his books, leaning lightly against the rear of the truck, teasing the wood, swaying on the tips of his toes from side to side.

            “I am a spy,” I said, “I have eyes everywhere. You had better watch out.” I whispered confidentially, lowering the Atlas I was carrying, glad I held a whole planet behind which my desires could hide.

            “If you are a spy, tell me who you work for?” He moved from behind the book truck.

            He had nothing to hide.

            “I am a freelancer. I sell my secrets to the highest bidder.”

            “Well, I’m pretty high so you had best pony up, Mr.,” he said, tossing his head and his hair back with a gotcha laugh, and slapping the top of his truck with such farcical force it caused one of the books he had been in the middle of shelving, something by Hemingway, I think, to slump to its face between us, leaving poor old Papa a defeated but delirious man, ass in the air, eyes closed, mouth open wide.

            “I’m Eric.”

            “I know who you are. I have spies, too. I know you live in Brooklyn. I know you have a boyfriend. I know everything about you,” he said, looking down, “even your dick size.” He brandished his copy of The Idiot, as if he would club me with it. “My spies are Russian. I asked them to find out who that guy was working for Misha. I might want to fuck him sometime.”

            I didn’t know what to say.

            I nearly dropped the world I was holding.

            “I caught you there. Didn’t I? Didn’t expect that. Listen, you are new to New York. You are from Boston. I will do all of the talking. I’m from Detroit. I have lived here for two years. Let’s get a beer first, after work. We can go to The Abbey.”

            Here, he paused.

            “It isn’t gay.”

            Another pause. His eyes narrowed again.

            “Are you gay?”

            “No. Are you?”
            “Nope.”
            Under the circumstances, without actually unzipping and taking each other’s pulse there and then, what else could we say?
            “Good. I go to The Abbey after work all of the time. The barmaids love me. Meet me at five o’clock at the main entrance outside.”

            With that, he carted himself, Dostoyevsky, my heart, and everything resembling Reason away.
            I turned around, leaned out the door and watched him go down the corridor. He bent, slightly,  steering the truck with one hand while he adjusted his cock with the other.
            He was right handed, too.
            I leaned the atlas against the wall and also fixed mine.
            I was glad nobody ever came to this section of the library.
            It was now ours.
            I shut off the lights and went over to the window and looked up at the sky.

            It was getting dark.

            It was snowing. A few light taps struck the windowpane. I expect the snow was general all over Long Island, including the borough of Brooklyn, where Nat lay in a fever, dozing under a warm green satin quilt of Nyquil all day.
            Nat.
            By now, my erection had subsided.
            I could go back to the office.

            I would see Michael in an hour, at five.

            

About Poets

Our words are nothing to live by:
You cannot drink a syllable,
Whatever your capacity.
We say that love will never die
Because the truth is terrible.
Time winks at our mendacity.

So, we tend to be soft-spoken.
We tell dirty jokes, we smile,
We see that no one cries alone.
For this, we may receive a token
For the Ferryman’s turnstile,
To pay for passage, when we’re gone.

Drama, Updated

The curtain rises on our stage. Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons of economy—live together in very close proximity, in fact, side by side.

For now, all you really need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling that was converted from a carriage house early in the 20th Century. Our family purchased their property in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.

On the right side, you will see a victory garden, less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nevertheless: cucumbers, peppers, rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug up a crusty dime minted in 1857.

Beside the garden, there is a pleasant patio full of potted plants sheltered by a large corrugated aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with a discrete cough through a side door.

They would never be left alone with their cigarettes, however. These men were always attended by my grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this:

“If all you gals are going to do is gossip, I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”

“Francis, one of these days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.

Francis was not a smoker himself, or a drinker, or a veteran anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s rolling pin, Chinese checkers and the vinyl chloride vats of Goodyear. (Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.)

According to family tradition, it is possible that—in revenge for the rolling pin—my grandfather broke my grandmother’s nose at the time of The Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962: the fatal day Florence snuck up, leaned over Francis’s silent figure and shouted, “Boo!” as he was dozing on the davenport.

I do not think any malice was intended. From the way she rolled her eyes when he told the story, I gathered that he accidently struck her in the face with his fist when she frightened him out of his wits.

Besides, violence would have been completely out of character for him, if not for my grandmother. She was a different sort of creature altogether. Florence once threw a croquet mallet at my mother as she ran out of the happy home they inhabited during the Eisenhower administration.

When I asked her why anyone would want to throw a croquet mallet at her, my mother looked up from the jaws of the ceramic shark she was painting (a bank, a future Christmas present for me, it turns out) and she said that she didn’t know. She said she was a perfect child. She invited me to ask my grandmother about the incident. I immediately turned on my heels and stomped out of the house like the Spanish Inquisition. I rang the bell (which I never did) and my grandmother answered the door. She was pickling beets. She led me up the back stairs.

“Why did you ring the bell?”

“Why did you throw a croquet mallet at my mother?”

She turned and squinted and looked me straight in the eye and said, “Because she deserved it.”

Having been spanked with a wooden spoon by my mother on more than one occasion, I could accept that. I sat down on the steel and rubber step stool my grandmother used to reach the upper shelves in her pantry (where she kept mason jars) as she decanted a can of Spicy Hot V-8 in an orange juice glass. She gave it to me and went back to stirring her cauldron.

My grandmother might have made a spectacular witch, as my grandfather often alleged, but she was a terrible shot and had no sense of timing: the mallet crashed through a pane of glass in their old screen door instead of hitting my mother. I also adore Spicy Hot V-8 juice and did as a child.

A loving husband and a caring father, I have always felt that my grandfather—uncle Franny, as he is known to my cousins—played the role of pater familias and gracious host to perfection. He will succumb to cancer while I am holding his hand.

With that same hand, on a rickety wooden gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used for transferring her plants to larger pots, he would habitually place a chipped ashtray decorated with tiny, indeterminate flowers. On the reverse side, the glaze bore the mysterious legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’

This was the one ashtray that my uncle John refused to use. He preferred to use another one in the living room, one that my grandfather reserved for his butterscotch candy wrappers. For some reason I could never fully fathom—maybe because he had a reputation for being more ornery than everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in my grandparents’ house was uncle John, a recently retired shoe salesman. I loved him for that. When he insisted, nobody resisted.

As you might imagine, the day uncle John died was something of a disaster—especially for him. I heard the phone ring in the kitchen. I followed the blur my grandmother formed as she whizzed by me—as she tripped, running up the front stairs, shouting, “Dad, Dad!” When she was forced to complete her ascent by crawling on her knees, bawling like a baby, I almost laughed. I had never seen an adult behave like a child before.

I thought my grandfather might have agreed. I am not sure that he did. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck t-shirt on the second floor landing—trying to make sense of things.

He was getting ready for work. Third shift.

“Ma, Ma, what is it?”

With wet hands, he lifted her gently by her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it took only a few seconds, it seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her head together sufficiently to blurt out, “Oh, Francis, John is dead. He had a heart attack.” I had no idea what a heart attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me, even worse than death.

I dropped the chain of multicolored plastic monkeys I had painstakingly connected on the carpet and was about to dispose of in their home—a brown plastic barrel. Suddenly, I felt like crying, too.

In fact, I did cry. So did my brother.

We had no idea what was going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family had ever died until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such circumstances?

Once my grandfather had inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the door. This time, I sat on the stairs. I heard a tap gushing into the sink. He emerged a few minutes later clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt and a sea-gray acrylic cardigan with a black Greek meander design dancing up both sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.

After making a few quick phone calls, my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something suitable to wear to my aunt’s. My grandfather tied my brother’s shoes while she took her turn in the bathroom.

He took us next door and explained the situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister, aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra pair of work clothes in the trunk of his car.

As I had already eaten dinner, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash my hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.

You see, I was 7, which I had always been led to believe was a lucky number.

Now, I was confused. What did the death of uncle John mean for the blackberry bushes that grew next to his garage? Would aunt Midge allow me to continue to pick them? Would the proprietors dim the pink and blue neon bowling ball at Rojek’s on Payne Avenue, two doors down the street from the chilly house with the lemon trim where my aunt and uncle lived? Would Principal Baker order the flag at Grant Elementary School to flap quietly at half-staff for a few days? Would President Ford address the nation? What kind of future did I have to look forward to? Would there be nuclear war?

I wanted answers. Unable to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a Windmill cookie. Only my grandfather ate those, of course, and he was carefully backing down the driveway, trying to avoid the swing set he had once almost demolished with his Buick. In other words, we didn’t have any Windmills in our house. Or answers.

By way of a compromise, my mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil. It rolled to the edge, paused, and then rolled back to the middle, glittering at the center of a flower fringed universe like a gilded turd. I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to bed. It was already after 8:00 p.m., anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the kitchen and sulk.

38 hours later, a prophylactic whisper in the funeral home foyer informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away on his porch, napping beneath The North Tonawanda News, after eating a basket of fish and chips at Arthur Treacher’s.

I may not like liars, but I have always admired a lie told with élan. My mother could always manage that. She took no chances. Out of the air, she plucked a pen that seemed to be swinging rather too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to a little pulpit. She signed for all three of us: Edwin, Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She laid the pen to rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she led my brother and myself to the casket.

My father was at work. My mother said he would be dropping by to add his name to the book later.

Relativity

The shadow of a spectacular sunset seems to be following me. Let us call this apparition a sliced mandarin—a cross section—the fruit of memory—an orange orb whose radial interior segments resemble a star—or—for the purposes of this disjointed memoir—Exhibit A.

From my perspective—my plane of reference—the sunset never occurs. The blade never falls. Although, of course, from where you sit, it does. It must. The frozen moment exists in a rectangular wooden frame, where past and future elide into the present—your decision to continue turning pages—to pull the rope and release the guillotine.

I hope you will continue reading. The end of this book will come as a tremendous relief: even the smallest stars can weigh quite heavily upon the shoulders. But whatever you decide to do, the scene I am describing will remain—for me, anyway—the last lovely thing I see: perpetually visible in July, through the northwest quadrant of a pane of glass (second floor, double-glazed window on the extreme left, mine) at an angle of 20 degrees above the western horizon.

Our source of illumination resides at the center of an obscure planetary system approximately 93 million miles from the world I inhabit—hardly a bunny hop through the void—yet an incalculable distance from the walnut tree lit by those long fingertips of light caressing my face. What I cannot understand is why my green and gold friend should have been marked for execution. What kind of crimes against nature must a tree commit to be cut down—to be turned into poetry: pulp, toilet paper, trash—that worst of all possible worlds—Art?

I imagine that arboreal being produced nuts edible only to squirrels. I assume that the immense crowd of furry creatures which gathered beneath its boughs autumn—hypnotized by hunger—presented a menace to public health. So, in the dead of night, an ordinance was passed: that tree must die. I can only scratch my ass in wonder and move on.

Although I am sure a transcript exists on microfilm somewhere in Erie County—evil decisions are always reached and recorded in excruciating detail by The Authorities—I must confess that I was not privy to the deliberations of our City Fathers in 1970, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, or 78—the last year I occupied the front bedroom I am presently haunting.

In other words, I am 5. I am a shadow of my former self. I am not a reliable witness to subsequent events. I peer at them like Alice—through the looking glass—darkly. I cannot be called to testify in court—either for the prosecution or the defense. I take no sides in the dispute between The Town of North Tonawanda and the squirrels, my mother or my father, their divorce, up and down, forward and back, left and right.

I am sorry to be so evasive, but as you can see, this was an unusually hot summer. I couldn’t help tossing and turning. Since my three-year-old brother was constantly whimpering after his surgery (glittering scalpel, baby-blue eyeball,) I spent most nights perspiring in bed next door, wedged between my grandmother and the moon.

Each morning, the nosy scent of coffee would nudge a door open, and discover me sitting Indian-style in her pastel dressing room, reading random entries aloud to myself from a 10 volume set of books, A Child’s Encyclopedia, that once belonged to my mother.

[Turning back a page.]

The spot of doom handed down by the Aldermen—in this case, Exhibit B—was in reality a dark blue circle spray-painted on thick rough bark. I know the circle was round and that it was blue because it looked like the bumpy steering wheel my grandfather’s soft hands gripped in his Buick while I sat next to him, spitting the pits of sour cherries into a glossy brown paper bag.

I know the bark was rough because it scratched my arms whenever I embraced the trunk as a child, seeing if could comprehend its entire texture. I never could. I was too small. I lacked the reach. Now that I am older—I am 43 as of this writing—I notice that my embrace is wider. I am tempted to try the walnut again today.

Nobody is here now, except us ghosts, so let’s see what happens.

Hold on.

Here goes.

We see from the street view on Google maps that the tree has disappeared. The squirrels have scattered. The new residents of Bryant Street have dipped my delicious chocolate house (there is no more tempting form of cocoa, in my experience, than those last few peeling flakes of lead paint) into a vat of hideous vanilla siding that tastes today—more or less—like total oblivion.

Which is all just my elliptical way of saying—apart from a pair of geographical coordinates—a general shape around the eyes—everything familiar about me is gone.