Trevor stopped a few miles back. As he filled the gas tank on his dad’s 1985 Plymouth Gran Fury, his next move came to him. For a month, his mind nibbled at the idea of changing his life completely. His girlfriend moved to Texas at the beginning of summer. She settled into a routine as the fall semester started. Last week, she casually mentioned that it might be an excellent place for him to visit. Or live. Trevor had planned to start classes at the community college in Georgia, where his uncle owned a shop. He also had a loft above the garage that was Trevor’s for as long as he wanted it.
He went back inside the convenience store and bought a large black coffee. He sat in the passenger seat with the door open, sipping at the coffee. It was the first cup of black coffee in his life. The taste was bitter to him, but the heat was welcome. By the time he reached the bottom of the cup, Trevor knew he wasn’t going to college, at least not in Georgia, and he certainly wasn’t returning here. Texas seemed like a great place to start a new life.
As he pulled away from the store, he pressed the accelerator hard. The money his dad spent on this car made its presence known in the engine as it roared. Trevor felt like he might be driving a rocket. He put the driver and passenger windows down as the wind howled through the car’s interior. By the time Trevor reached Highway 103, he had forgotten that he was traveling at over eighty mph. As the wind whipped his hair across his face, he was thinking of seeing Becky in Texas. He didn’t know he was smiling. He definitely didn’t notice the partially-obscured stop sign.
The truck hauling the cattle trailer behind it hit Trevor’s car on the passenger side, caving it into the steering wheel, breaking Trevor’s neck instantly, as well as shattering a variety of bones throughout his body. He didn’t know what hit him.
A few seconds later, the driver of the cattle hauler emerged from his truck, dazed but with only a broken wrist and a few minor injuries. He knew the boy driving the Gran Fury was dead. He looked inside the car anyway, hoping for a miracle he knew wouldn’t greet him. Hopefully, his CB radio would still work so he could radio in for a state trooper or local police. On the way back to his cab, he kneeled to pick up the license plate that had been knocked off his truck in the crash. He noticed that his blue sticker was going to expire at the end of this month. Texas was no place to be driving around with expired tags, especially in 1993.
In a few minutes, the driver heard a siren, followed by flashing lights approaching. The driver waited, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The Arkansas State Trooper looked inside the mangled Gran Fury and then asked the driver if he could have one of his cigarettes.
I sat on the steps of the porch, feeling the boards against my back. I was barefoot and wearing cutoff shorts, the official uniform of Southern boys. The porch was a stack of large railroad ties. Each section had at least two hundred nails driven in it. If the summer sun were shining on them, the nails became unbearably hot against your legs. The narrow highway was about thirty feet away, its tan hue rendered black in the early morning. No car was parked in the driveway because my grandparents didn’t drive, a fact that still surprises me. Later in the day, Aunt Betty or Aunt Marylou would come, and we would go to the store, probably to the Mercantile in Monroe. Grandma would let me pick out one of the cheap toys hanging on a rickety metal carousel. In a few minutes, one of the robins that preferred the protection of the cedar tree by the ditch would begin to call.
The days of the summer of 1973 filled with Watergate, and one of my favorite books, “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” was a best-seller. Both of these facts might as well have been part of another world, one only remotely attached to Monroe County. I came back for the summer. My parents had precipitously decided to move to Northwest Arkansas the year before. I skipped kindergarten and went to first grade. Coming back to be with Grandma and Grandpa probably saved my life that summer. I didn’t know until I was over fifty years old that my Dad fled his hometown because he had another secret, one which was unacceptable to many people in that part of the state. He could kill someone and pay no price, but he couldn’t escape the pressure of violating an unwritten social norm. Mom and Dad spent many of their nights beating one another into reality. I was a couple of hundred miles away that summer before the interstate crept into Springdale. Because school used to start later, I had about three weeks to enjoy the summer. Three weeks at that age might as well have been a year. And time in the rural areas of the South slowed to a pace that most modern people couldn’t accept easily.
Because it was early August, Grandpa would come outside sooner than usual. He might cut a plug of tobacco but would probably wait until after breakfast. Grandma’s Saturday menu invariably included sausage or salt pork and toast with butter. Years later, I thought it strange that everyone didn’t have extra biscuits or toast leftover in a pan on the stove or table.
Sitting on the porch, I knew that just a few minutes separated night and day for everyone in the house. All the windows were up because the night was hot and dense. Being outside, I could hear the fans whisper against sheets and mosquitoes. As the day lengthened, I knew Grandma would be in the living room, asking herself what time she could seal up the small area, turn on the window air conditioner, and feel the chill of a small victory against hot summers. Much of my day would be spent digging in the ditch along the road or sitting on the floor near Grandma, cradling an infinite glass of Coke and crushed ice Grandma often made for me, using a hammer and hand towel. It’s a recipe you won’t find on The Food Network. It’ll never taste the same anyway because its alchemy includes water from old ground and love from one’s Grandma.
I knew I wasn’t there again, even as I smelled the dark earth of the surrounding fields fade from me. Monroe County receded and dissipated, leaving me to awaken in 2021, imagining August 3rd, 1973.
In a minute, I’ll get up, peer through the blinds at the backyard, and wonder about the intervening forty-eight years. I’ll make a strong pot of coffee, and as I take the first sip from my green Pyrite cup, I will invoke the misty morning I left behind.
I don’t dream of my summers before Grandpa died with much frequency anymore. When I do, though, I find it takes me a few minutes to shake away the idea that some part of me still sits on the edge of the porch.
One of the benefits of having hundreds of extra full-size candy bars is that it is easy to reward the growing list of delivery people showing up at the house. It’s rare for a driver to respond without appreciation as I hand them a couple of candy bars. It’s like a tip, except it’s for people we wouldn’t normally tip. If I were left to my own devices, I think I would have a basket of chips, cookies, and candy bars – and let the driver choose. If you’re interested in experimenting with it, I recommend you give it a try. It’s a benefit to the driver and it will lift your spirits a little. It might make the driver make a little more effort for your deliveries in the future.
Note: I have hundreds of full-size candy bars. But I haven’t eaten a candy bar in at least seven months.
Potato chips are a bigger risk than candy bars ever will be. The easier method to deal with temptation is to simply not have unhealthy snack choices in the house. I can’t make that decision for everyone, even if the presence of ‘real’ chips is akin to a bag of cocaine lying on the counter. The same is true for real cheese of any kind.
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I visited a Dollar General store the other day. As I often do, I grabbed a helium balloon from the party aisle, took it to a huge cemetery near my house, and let it go. This time, I wrote words on a scroll of paper, rolled it up, and tied it to the truncated balloon string. (Sort of like the “write-the-letter-you’ll-never send.”) I didn’t plan on getting a balloon that day. But the balloon corral on the ceiling was stuffed with innumerable balloons. I’ve done the balloon thing on and off my entire life. It’s a stupid bit of fun trying to see how long you can spot the balloon against the immense backdrop of the sky.
It was damn near impossible to take good pictures that day, being close to noon. The sun was relentlessly beating down, washing everything out in a bright pattern. I planned to park on the newer section but the caretaker was struggling to mow the 4,500-gravestone cemetery on that end. I walked out to a random section and took a couple of selfies. I noticed by coincidence that I was standing in front of one of tombstones of one of a friend’s grandparents. It gave me a laugh, the coincidence.
Recently, I told a therapist that I loathe the entire concept of burial, but that I love cemeteries. She laughed. We could have talked for four hours about the absurdity of our rituals. Cemeteries fascinate me. Not just the range of names and types of stones, but the idea that there are thousands of stories buried where I’m standing, lives as complicated as mine, and all of them extinguished.
Like the life on this eye-catching stone. Leonard “Cowboy” Kilpatrick. I could discover so much about his 37-year life. Were I to kick over a few clues, I have no doubt that I might find myself with a longer list of questions. He had a lot of siblings. Whenever I go deeply into someone’s story, one like Cowboy’s, it never fails that a strange series of revelations and coincidences would align. I’m still in awe of how many ways all of us are both separated and overlapping. I don’t find it macabre that we’re all marching toward oblivion, although the loss of so many stories continues to bother me.
I forgot how much I love the terse prose style of Robert Parker, and of his Jesse Stone character. Most people seem to know him from the CBS movies starring Tom Selleck. While Pat Conroy’s purple prose resonates in my heart, the stripped-down way Parker wrote fascinates me.
My cat Güino stares at me from his perch in the bedroom window. The sun is making sporadic appearances this afternoon. If the rays are bright enough, the prisms cast their rainbows around me. The absurd thickness of the pillow is amusing.
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Take a hard look at the circumstances and context of the words, “You’ve changed,” or “You’re not the person you used to be.” Clinically speaking, it is possible that the person saying this is saying it because you’ve stopped behaving in a way they want you to.
This isn’t necessarily an indictment of you – or the other person.
Sometimes, though, it is.
There’s no two ways about it. We all need to grow, change, adapt. Especially if any part of our behavior isn’t reflective of who we are or who we want to be.
I was asked to examine the phrase intensely: “You’re not the person you used to be.” It’s a therapy response. One of the things I came away with is this: IF someone says it to you in an emotional or angry way, it can’t be taken at face value. There’s no proper defense against it, and not just because all good adults change significantly.
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I almost forgot to start taking allergy medication again this season. Allergy medications confound my hunger response. And no matter what the packaging says, it causes both sluggishness and excitedness, no matter what it is supposed to do.
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Someone related to my deceased wife went back to prison for something related to her parole. I don’t have any details but it’s distracting and needless. A few years ago, I spent a lot of time trying to keep her connected to her old life and to imagine there was a reason to hold out hope. I can’t imagine going from living a normal life to being put back inside. She’s 26 with a young daughter.
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One of the objectives of me going to therapy is to figure out cognitively what shifted in me that makes it harder for me to sleep. I’ve never been one to require eight hours. But having gone through a phase where sleep evaded me taught me that it is very dangerous for me to go very few nights with inadequate sleep, especially less than five hours. I learned that it is stupid of me to try to make decisions or to hold conversations while in such a state. Trying to keep a sleep record is harder than it sounds, too.
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Regarding men on social media: As the tendency to post a profile picture of himself wearing sunglasses increases, so too do the odds he is a narcissist.
Corollary: the greater your resistance to this idea, the more likely that you tend to think such men are more attractive.
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I letter bombed Ford Motors. They chose to not do the right thing in regard to a failed transmission with my Ford Focus, which had only 55K miles on it. I bombarded their social media people first. When that went nowhere, I shifted to a comprehensive letter containing the history of the failed transmission design and my involvement. I mailed that letter to several different people within the company. It was like the old days, when “Letters From A Nut” was something I aspired to. I finally got a tepid response back from Ford. Just like Andy Dufresne did in “Shawshank Redemption,” once he got his foot in the door with the bean counters, he started writing TWO letters a week. After all, what is it really going to cost me to try to get Ford to do the right thing? Shame on Ford. Callous behavior is expected of large impersonal corporations, of course. But that’s why I shouldn’t take it personally: they screw everyone equally. Or mostly equally. There’s comfort in that.
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I bet you will find something interesting in this article:
Jane stood by the bridge railing, peering down to the surface of the river below. It didn’t seem so far down now. Every year on May 5th, she drove a county over and illegally parked on the bridge, got out, and peered down at the river. It was a ritual to mark her survival. Until this year, she made a point to drive over around the time of the original accident. For no discernible reason, she waited until five in the afternoon to drive over today.
Eleven years ago, she had plummeted over the railing and landed in the river. She had no idea who rescued her. The man who witnesses saw leaving didn’t come forward afterward. Some thought that the man was the driver who clipped her from behind and spun her out of control, sending her car over the railing. While it was possible, Jane didn’t believe it. She knew that whoever saved her had a darned good motive to stay out of the spotlight.
Jane returned to her car, turned off the emergency hazard lights, and pulled away from the railing. She slowly rolled the length of the bridge. As her car reached the end, she noticed an older yellow Chevy Cheyenne pickup on the side of the road past the bridge. A man wearing blue jeans and a white t-shirt stood in front of the truck, looking down toward the river.
Not knowing why she did so, Jane pulled a little further along and parked on the grass. She didn’t bother with her emergency lights this time. She reached into the passenger floorboard and picked up her flask of whiskey. Exiting the car, she walked along the far side of the Cheyenne pickup and stopped a few feet from the man in the white t-shirt.
She stood silently, staring at the river. She took a pull from the flask. As she wiped the side of her mouth with her hand, the man turned to look at her. Without a word, he took a step and reached for the flask. Jane didn’t hesitate. She handed him the flask and watched as he took a long sip.
His eyes widened in surprise, as he probably expected something of lesser quality. Jane never skimped on whiskey and she certainly wouldn’t have thought to do so during her yearly visit over to the bridge that changed her life.
“What are you watching?” Jane asked. “My name’s Jane, by the way.”
The man made eye contact with her and smiled. “The name’s Mark. Just thinking about a day a long time ago.”
“Oh? Me too. This bridge changed my life. It woke me up, if that makes sense.” Jane didn’t know what propelled her to speak honestly.
“I know exactly what you mean. This bridge saved my life. I used to come here every year, thinking I might find what I was missing. This is my first visit in five. It’s still beautiful.” Mark stopped talking and seemed wistful.
Jane took another pull from her flask and handed it back to Mark.
“This is great whiskey, Jane. Thanks!” They looked at each other and held eye contact for a second longer than normal. “I saved someone’s life here once. On a beautiful day exactly like today. It went from sunshine to hell in three seconds that day.”
Jane held her breath, calculating the odds of such a coincidence.
“I had my life saved her on a day exactly like today, Mark. One minute I was driving and the next, I was waking up on the riverbank right there.” She pointed below as she spoke.
They each took another sip of whiskey and let the silence accumulate between them.
Mark turned to face Jane directly. He seemed to struggle to say something. He shrugged and said, “Can I hug you?”
Jane stepped toward him and allowed Mark to wrap his arms around her, holding her against him. The sun beat down upon them and they held their pose. A vehicle passed slowly. Neither looked up to see who it was or whether they noticed the odd couple hugging on the side of the road and bridge.
Mark pulled away. “Would you be interested in going to eat, Jane? There’s a pretty spot up the road a couple of miles.”
“Are you kidding? I’d love to.” Jane smiled.
Mark smiled, showing his teeth. Jane watched the smile travel to his eyes.
“I might have a few questions for you, though, if that’s okay.” Jane watched Mark’s smile grow larger.
“I figured you might. Let’s eat and see what comes next.”
Some milestones are preposterous. The one I reached today is both ridiculous and noteworthy: I bought new underwear. It’s not a life event, the act of buying new underwear. But it can make you feel markedly different, especially if you fail to put on pants while wearing them. It’s best to skip over any accidental mental image the last joke might have inspired.
Not to be stylish or because my other underwear was old and worn; quite the contrary. My last set of underwear was remarkably new, at least on a timeline representing men’s underwear. There are two types of men: those who need stylish and updated underwear and those who change underwear with each new president. (If they’re lucky.) As I do with my socks, I buy an entirely new set when I buy them, discarding all the old ones. It’s quite the ritual, one that people mock until they try it.
It hasn’t been that long since I replaced all my underwear. I did it because I had lost so much weight and size that I floated in them. The same is true today. I put off buying another set, as it seemed stupid and wasteful. (But not ‘waistful.’ Ha! I just added ‘waistful’ to my dictionary.) For reasons unknown to me, a woman at work said, “Hey, you look amazing!” as I retrieved a diet soda from the case. We briefly chatted, and I shared my deep secret of weight loss with her. (Don’t open your mouth so often.) She told me I was starting to look invisible, and she wished me luck in the future. She’s older, so she well knows that the yo-yo effect is no laughing matter, especially as we age.
Almost all my clothing is different now, over the last several months. It didn’t occur to me that I might need to downsize underwear twice during the process.
The picture on this post is of me wearing another vest. This one makes me look a bit pastorish for reasons that are hard to pinpoint. (I added ‘pastorish’ to my dictionary, too, because I am one of the millions of owners of this language we share.)
It’s hard to believe that I had trouble tucking in my shirt six months ago.
It’s even harder to believe I let myself stay fat for so long. I’m still processing why that was the case.
But for today, it’s new underwear – and bragging about it on the internet. Some people run marathons. The rest of us take our small victories where we can get them.
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“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” ― Mark Twain
The bowl of lemons remained on the end of the kitchen counter, taunting him. Darel continued to refill the basket in a mindless and intermittent ritual. He wasted a minute, lost in his thoughts, wondering how inanimate objects often contained invisible power. Before thinking too hard about it, he grabbed the wooden bowl of lemons, opened the back door, and stepped outside. He placed the bowl on the railing of his deck. One by one, he grabbed the lemons and hurled them across the yard and into his neighbor’s yard. Within seconds, he had thrown all of them.
“Hey, Darel? Is everything okay over there?” Darel looked up to see his neighbor John standing about twenty feet from the rear of his own house. John must have been standing outside when the barrage of lemons started pummeling his yard.
Darel surprised himself by shouting, “No!” to John.
John walked toward Darel. Darel, for his part, struggled to control the urge to turn and run back inside and barricade the door.
“It’s okay, Darel. It was just lemons this time. You must really be angry at lemons!” Even Darel smiled at John’s joke.
John now leaned against the chain-link fence separating their back yards. Darel walked over to the fence and stopped a few feet away from John, who now stood silently, waiting for Darel to speak.
“John, I don’t know what to say. Looking at the lemons in the kitchen just made me sad. I’ll be okay, I imagine.” Darel looked up at John as he nodded.
“I know what you mean. This pandemic has ruined us all a little. You’ve had it harder than most, Darel. My offer still stands: if you need an ear, a beer, or a meal, or maybe just someone to sit in the room and not talk to you, come on over. Anytime, okay?” John looked directly at Darel, who nodded and then smiled. Darel instinctively reached toward John to shake his hand. John took it and gripped it over the chain-link. “I mean it,” he said. “We can sit in my living room or on the back porch and ignore each other.”
*
The following day, Darel slept in late, until about 6:30 a.m. He made a pot of coffee out of habit, without thinking that he’d be the only one there to drink it. When he poured his first cup and noticed he made a whole pot, he decided that since it was Sunday, he might finish it off. He stood at the counter, sipping his first cup until he finished it. He poured a second cup and peered through the blinds and into the backyard.
“What the eff?” he asked, looking outside. It looked like one hundred tennis balls were scattered around his yard.
Darel took his second cup of coffee and went outside to his desk, peering at the ground. It took him several seconds to realize that the tennis balls were lemons. He jerked his head up and looked at the back of John’s house, which was still dark.
Darel walked out in the wet grass barefooted. He had the idea that John might be watching him from a darkened window, so he flipped a high bird in his direction. And then he laughed, his head thrown back in genuine amusement, as he imagined John out in his yard last night, tossing dozens of lemons into his yard.
“I need some vodka to go with all these lemons,” Darel said to himself as he sipped his coffee and shuffled his toes through the wet grass.
He decided he’d take John up on his offer. It was about time to stop looking into the rearview mirror. The pandemic had stolen enough from him.
He laughed again as he looked at all the lemons scattered in his yard. After he sipped the last gulp of his morning coffee, he went inside.
The algorithms at work on the internet know way too much. I googled “Interesting things to do in East Springdale” as a joke. Literally, the first thing that popped up was an ad for funeral services. Note that even the maps of this part of the town convey a very specific message…
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 