Pursuit

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

My search for you begins anew
In futures between silver linings

That veil’s razor-bright edges
Slicing through my armor

Sending my bloodfall surging over
The distant rim on a far horizon

First blood of agon is yours
Triumph is eternally yours

The coup infuriating my slow pulse
Waking all my meteoric pursuits

In early days my chases
Crafted an impatient make off

I hear soft laughter
Behind your fingers

Now you hide because
I so willingly bleed

Past seasons remain like your
Garments thrown in the mud

Your watery footprint
No signature of return

I know you return to prove
Devotion is irresistible

Yesterday

Photo: Diego Fernandes

Yesterday, a last vestige of summer lingered
Like warm arms and a farewell kiss

The trees were green still hardly a tint
Of autumn color stirring under bird trills

California still golden under a gentle sun
Just taking in a final passionate breath

Today October’s wind blew from the west
Knocking red and yellow leaves to ground

Chasing birds into flight toward Mexico
The cool breeze tendrils chill late grapes

Cold weather friends are smiling again
Jeering summer’s hasty departure

They will be gleeful and grateful for frost
After winter rains transmute dust to mud

I will be grateful for rain to hide my tears
My heart never tires of flying in the sun

Birthday Party

A neighboring table was set for a party of ten with an enormous Victorian epergne almost hidden under tropical flowers and orchids in an arrangement of red, yellow and black while one of the eternally cheerful cherubs of the epergne held a small dowel with a banner attached reading ‘Happy Birthday Wolfgang’ in English and German jammed into its tiny bronze hand. A sad looking woman of about thirty, over-dressed in a white evening gown, was sitting alone at the table with her back to a spectacular equatorial sunset.

As I had approached our table in the early evening light of the rapidly sinking sun, I thought the dress might have been cream colored but Elena informed me it was from last season and pointed out faintly marked sweat stains under the woman’s arms.

“How do you know the sweat stains aren’t this season’s; or maybe they are just some sort of fashion detailing? And how could you possibly know what the current fashion was here last season?”

Elena never misses a chance to point out my ignorance of such things in the kindest possible way, “If you ever paid attention to what I wear, you would know that I have a gown exactly like that minus the sweat stains. I wore it to the Black and White last year.”

“You did? Hmm … the only thing I remember from that event was that you wore Kelly green shoes, for which by the way, I would like to thank you. Those shoes helped me find you in the crowd all evening.”

“I thought you said you liked them because they matched my eyes?”

“That too.” I paused and looked back at the woman at the next table, “I sure hope Wolfgang brings a crowd with him. I am not sure I can bear to watch a scene like that all through dinner.”

“Just watch the sunset and think about that trickle of sweat running down your jaw.”

“That isn’t sweat. It’s water. I used a little too much combing my hair a moment ago. You know what? The men’s room here has wallpaper!”

“You combed your hair?”

A waiter came to take our drink order and Elena asked for an extra dry white wine from California. I ordered something I invented in the moment, confusing the waiter briefly, but he recovered his poise and simply wrote down the combination.

The woman at the next table was leaning on one hand and studying a couple of pages in a small booklet, turning the page and then flipping back to the previous page. Her head came up quickly at one moment to watch a waiter walk by asking if madam wanted anything. She said something I couldn’t hear after looking at her wristwatch and the waiter departed, returning a few minutes later with a large glass filled with something alcoholic looking and littered with tropical fruit, two straws and an oversized pink drink umbrella.

Elena brought my attention to a motor-sailboat heading in toward one of the piers from the direction of the sunset. I hadn’t even noticed the sails until the moment the waiter set the drink down. But there it was, large and impressive, a motor-sailer with blue sails, now being furled, and a white hull. The waiter said something to the woman in white and pointed in the direction of the boat.

The woman’s careful blond highlights flipped over her shoulder as she turned her head quickly to see. Standing, she placed the booklet in her handbag, rearranged her table setting, carefully making it match the others, then saying something in a low voice to the waiter, to which he inclined his head, she took a breath and grew a very broad smile. Pushing her hair behind an ear with one hand she walked quickly out a seaside entry of the restaurant and almost skipped down to the pier where the boat was being moored.

While the crew was busy with mooring lines a crowd of men and women were rising from the boat’s interior cabins and carefully making their way along the main deck toward the gangway. The men were wearing white tuxedo jackets and black pants, while the women seemed to be clothed in the tropic light itself, jewels and sequins flashing and glittering in the red and gold light of the sunset.

“Looks like an animated jewel box,” I murmured louder than I intended.

“It is an animated jewel box,” Elena’s hand touched my arm, “I wonder which one is Wolfgang?”

The waiter had just then appeared with our drinks and heard her question, “Mr. Wolfgang is a guest here in the bungalows, madam. Your drinks; a very dry white wine for the lady and for the gentleman … the gentleman’s … cocktail.” He looked doubtfully at the drink as though it might not be the right thing, and then asked, “Please sir, would you try the cocktail and tell me if it is correct?”

I took a slug and making a face said, “Yep. That’s the ticket!”

Looking relieved, he nodded his head smiling and said he would be returning momentarily for our dinner order. I looked at him with a deadpan face and said, “Oh, we won’t be having anything to eat, we’re just going to get drunk and spill our drinks on the other guests.” His startled face actually brought an uncharacteristically sympathetic response from Elena who quickly interjected, “Don’t listen to him. We are having dinner and he’s just joking.” Relief again flooded the waiter’s face and he laughed saying, “Ha ha ha … The gentleman is being funny ... ha ha ha! I will be right back.” Then he scurried away, almost running.

Then she added to me, “Please pick on someone who can’t put ipecac in our food. If my dinner comes out strange because of you, you can dance by yourself.”

“You couldn’t let me dance by myself. What would people think?”

“They’d think you were dancing with an invisible partner. They’d also think you are a little touched, and they would be correct. How’s that drink?”

“I think I’m getting a little touched.”

“It serves you right for teasing the waiter and ordering … well, whatever that drink is.”

“Do you think I could get a copyright on this recipe?”

“Tell me again what’s in it?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Then, no.”

“Sadly, he said, I should have written it down.”

“Pity, she said, he never learned to write.”

One by one the party from the boat was finally making its way down the gangway and toward the woman in white waiting on the pier. Many of the men waved to her as they walked down the brow and took her hand as they stepped onto the pier, occasionally kissing her on the cheek while the women gave her slight embraces and a cursory air-kiss on one cheek. When the last man stepped onto the pier a brief conversation took place and the woman indicated the restaurant with a wave of her hand and the party began to move up the pier toward the seaside entrance.

Elena made the observation that from where ever they had sailed, all the guests must have dressed on the boat because their freshly groomed appearance couldn’t have been achieved otherwise. “Can you imagine me sailing in a dress like one of those for an entire afternoon in this humidity?”

“I can’t imagine you sailing at all. The thought of a mast protruding from your oh so lovely cleavage, with or without a dress, is too much of a stretch for even my twisted imagination. And where would the passengers sleep?”

“Have you thought of going into advertising?” she asked sweetly.

“We should advertise for Wolfgang. I think this shebang is for him, and that banner says “Happy Birthday Wolfgang” and it says it in two languages and that big fancy chair is just sitting there empty. I don’t know, but it just seems to me that when you throw a birthday party for someone with all this hoorah, they ought to be there to make fun of it!”

“Maybe Wolfgang doesn’t like hoorah.”

Elena is mostly, but not always, right.

All the guests had arrived. The seating seemed to be quite a problem because someone wanted to sit somewhere other than next to Wolfgang’s chair and a quiet girl of about 14 must have been an unannounced arrival and a place setting had to be added even though there were more than enough chairs which threw the woman in the white dress into a small panic. A moment or two of eavesdropping convinced me no one at all wanted to sit next to Wolfgang and that caused me to wonder aloud to Elena if perhaps he was flatulent.

“Well, it has me wondering too. But I was wondering if the fellow throws food?”

Elena wasn’t far wrong.

Our waiter returned and asking what we would like for dinner smiled when we ordered an entire kitchen full of food. Elena has a good appetite and my eating habits frequently are compared to that of large omnivorous beasts.

“Would the lady and the gentleman care for our special appetizer this evening?”

“And what would that special appetizer be this evening?” Why is it that when Elena asks those questions she makes it sound like she’s talking about herself?

The waiter stuttered a little under her green gaze, recovered and responded with, “Madam would truly enjoy our appetizer this evening. We are offering a thinly sliced crostini with bitter endive and …”, he lowered his voice, “Beluga caviar.”

Elena’s perfectly straight white teeth flashed a devastating grin and absolutely awash with enthusiasm she took the waiter’s hand saying in an alto voice, “Madam would be delighted if you, yourself served it up.”

The waiter blushed and his slightly tanned Asiatic coloring turned vaguely purple. “It is my pleasure!”

“How do you do that? I am sure you were talking about food and I think you gave him an erection.”

“Did I? I hope so. It builds my self-confidence.”

“I wasn’t aware that you lacked self-confidence. Are you sure you aren’t building self-aggrandizement? You are the only woman I know who can make trained monkeys forget their acts.”

“You are the only trained monkey I’ve ever spoken to … perhaps in my entire life,” she said in an aggrieved tone.

The birthday table had settled into a series of conversations mostly relating to the circumstances of the boat trip. The young girl who showed up unexpectedly, simply sat and occasionally laughed at other guest’s comments. Elena told me quietly she was literally dying to find out who the young lady might be and was absolutely certain her presence was going to cause some drama. Elena is always correct about such things, well, almost always, and that perception was pitch perfect in this situation.

Our caviar-laden crostini laying on its mattress of bitter endive made its entrance and bowed its final exit with not a crumb left behind to the extreme delight of our waiter. Before the caviar’s appearance he had asked if we wanted a different wine with our appetizer, and when Elena had quickly told him we each wanted a shot of vodka instead, his smile stretched halfway to his ears and when she named an obscure but extremely expensive brand, his molars were finally seeing his own earlobes. “Yes, madam. We keep that brand for special occasions, but confidentially, the chef sometimes uses it for a better flambé effect on some dishes.” He looked doubtful when he asked if we wanted it on ice, but Elena’s horrified look told him everything he wanted to know and this time, the smile’s stretch had almost pulled his nasal lobes into his sideburns. “Very good, madam, very good. I will be back in a moment.”

“Yew shore know how ta git ‘em movin’ señorita!”

“Why, darlin’ it’s mah specialty!” Elena has a way with anything with external sex organs. Truthfully, she also has a way of engaging her own sex without intimidating them with her startling film star looks. Our neighboring table kept sending surreptitious looks in our direction, well, truthfully in Elena’s direction, and I knew she was enjoying the attention, so when I mentioned to her that they were probably just wondering if they could get the special appetizer, she snorted an unladylike sound resembling a leaking balloon and almost guffawed. I enjoy making Elena laugh because I know it’s sincere. When she is truly amused she has a loud bray like Tallulah Bankhead.

The neighboring table had relaxed into a gentle buzz of conversation although no food had arrived for them and Elena and I were halfway through a salad of lettuce young enough that eating it might be considered infanticide and it was garnished in julienne vegetables and a lemon vinaigrette so sparse it almost forgot to show up, rather like Wolfgang. But Elena’s enthusiasm for the food had prompted an invitation into the kitchen to advise the chef, then asked to give service instruction to the wait staff and even requested to be the godmother of all the first-born children in the district. After all that, Wolfgang still hadn’t arrived.

The fancy chair for the birthday boy, resembling a baroque throne, sat empty, expectant, with the chairs on either side empty as well. It seems no one wanted to sit next to Wolfgang, and that worked out very well as Wolfgang wasn’t there to sit next to. The woman in white presided pleasantly, if a little formally. She didn’t seem to be experiencing any extraordinary anxiety. The centerpiece with its inapt presence and flag-bearing cherub kept cross-table guests busy stretching their necks to address someone opposite. The birthday banner fluttered in the light breeze from the sea assuring the guests that it was indeed still Wolfgang’s birthday whether they spoke German or English and whether or not he ever showed up.

I suddenly realized that none of the guests had had even an appetizer, although many of them had had a cocktail or two. Elena brought it to my attention that there had been some small rows about whether ordering cocktails would be inappropriate.

“Really?” I asked.

“Oh yes. In fact, it was the lady in white who told them why not, she had one.”

“She certainly did! That pink umbrella thing. But I’ll bet it wasn’t as good as our vodka.”

“Probably not. Do you suppose there’s a vodka drink that comes with one of those umbrellas?”

“Certainly not! Vodka drinks come with fur hats!”

“And fur tongues if you drink enough of them!”

There was no way I could top that.

The sun had dropped well over the horizon and the deep black night of the tropics had enveloped the bright lights of the restaurant. Tinny German music from the Weimar Republic and 1930’s Berlin had been playing over the in-house music system thinly since our arrival, meanwhile blue lights for the purpose, occasionally snapped with the electrocution deaths of flying insects. The restaurant had filled and emptied and filled again and mostly emptied of its first and second seatings and still Wolfgang hadn’t made his appearance. Maybe he didn’t like birthdays but Wolfgang certainly wasn’t demonstrating Germanic timeliness.

Elena and I had stretched our stay across two seatings and grazed our way through a vast set of courses while our neighboring table watched the arrival of every one like starving pets. A different glass of wine accompanied each course and our waiter had the look of a man who had found the treasure of the Templars. The woman in white though, barely seemed to know we were there. Her initial poise was beginning to wear thin and every so often her eyes drifted toward the bungalows facing the beach, a strange look of fear invading them as they glanced in that direction, and seeing nothing, a flicker of relief like breath came back into her entire body.

The quiet girl suddenly speaking loudly, announced that she was going to order and a silence fell over the table. She didn’t care, she was hungry and he was rude. He had kept everyone waiting for hours and those people, she indicated Elena and I, had finished their entire dinner (not quite true) while the birthday party was still waiting.

The Maitre’d hurried over and began speaking in a low voice in the young lady’s ear, but she pulled away saying she didn’t care; she wanted to order now. The Maitre’d shrugged his shoulders but something caught his attention and he looked toward the bungalows where his stare caught a movement and everyone at the table followed his glance.

Against a background of incandescent lights from one of the nearer bungalows and its reflection off the wings of hundreds of flying insects the silhouette of a large man could be seen walking through the tropic blackness toward the restaurant.

“Now we get to see who all the fuss is over,” Elena said matter-of-factly.

At another table one of the other guests overheard her and said, “he sure likes to be fashionably late. Very fashionably late!”

And fashionably inappropriate, I thought.

Wolfgang entered the restaurant with a deliberate slowness. There were two or three steps up from the grass leading to the bungalows and his steps seemed designed to bring more and more of his being into view. His entrance was cinematic.

The woman in white stood as he reached the top step and some of the others automatically responded by also rising, which brought the remainder to their feet except the young girl, who crossed her arms and refused to even look in his direction.

Oddly, a few other tables also rose and applauded his entrance. I am not sure whether they knew him or were applauding his incredible entrance or were relieved that the guests at his table could finally eat. I would have bet on the entrance.

Wolfgang stood about two meters tall from his strangely sandaled feet to the crown of his head covered with long, rather shaggy blond hair. It was clear from the carefully managed display of his muscular figure he worked obsessively on body-building and physical fitness. He was wearing a loose white shirt unbuttoned to his navel revealing a tautly muscled chest and abdomen with the barest hint of a tan. He had carefully rolled his sleeves up about halfway to show off his lower arm development. His shirt barely covered a pair of brief style bathing trunks revealing massive, carefully shaved leg muscles. Most disturbing was a set of deeply carved creases, like a sargent’s chevrons, running upward at an angle from the bridge of his nose parallel with his eyebrows, giving him a perpetually angry expression, like an unfortunate Klingon.

In his passage across the restaurant floor he was forced to pass on one side or the other of our table and it seemed to annoy him but he kept his focus. His path took him behind me forcing him to look at the people impeding his progress. I’m guessing it was Elena’s brilliant auburn hair that caught his eye because he stopped briefly and stared. It wasn’t a stare of recognition of beauty but seemed to be more a look of competition, as if something in the room was drawing attention away from him and he did not take it well. As he stopped behind me, a whiff of expensive cologne stopped with him.

The guests at his table were silent; in fact, the entire restaurant was silent except for the tinny sound of 1930’s Berlin cabaret music floating with insects in the air.

When he reached his chair, one of the restaurant staff pulled it away from the table for him. I thought everyone would wait to sit until he had seated himself but it wasn’t that formal. For nearly a full minute he ignored everything but the epergne and its decorations, finally nodding his head in satisfaction. Wolfgang didn’t seem to notice or care that the chairs on either side of him were empty and while he had a brief greeting for most he very pointedly ignored the girl with her arms crossed and asked if everyone was ready for dessert.

The girl blurted out that they hadn’t even had dinner and that he had kept everyone waiting for over an hour to which Wolfgang merely looked at her until she leaped out of her chair knocking it over backward and ran from the restaurant. Laughing heartily, Wolfgang said in his heavily accented English, “Who invited her anyway? Ha ha ha!”

The restaurant staff must have been forewarned because one of the staff merely righted the downed chair. Wolfgang announced that everyone would be having his birthday dessert and, nodding, the staff member retreated to the kitchen. A low murmur of conversation enveloped the table and I watched the woman in white shrink into herself. Words floated toward our table about business and the accommodations and the boat trip but it was clear, Wolfgang was rather like a lion that had arrived at a fiesta for gazelle and the gazelle were very nervous.

A noticeable tension descended and the air in the restaurant seemed to be thickening around that rather tinny music and Elena noticed it as well.

“Why does that music sound so … saccharine now? It didn’t sound like that before, did it?”

“Let’s see if we can’t get them to find an alternative.”

Signaling our waiter, who almost ran to our table, I asked him if he could please change the music to something more contemporary. He looked a little doubtful, but nodded and gave a thousand watt or so smile moving off in the direction of the kitchen. Moments later he and the Maitre’d appeared together in the kitchen doorway with doubt in the Maitre’d’s eyes. The waiter seemed to be reassuring the Maitre’d it was those people who had ordered the special appetizer making the request and even pointed in our direction. They returned to the kitchen and a few moments later the music changed to Elvis Costello followed by some contemporary American Jazz.

I was expecting an argument from Wolfgang but while Wolfgang’s face underwent a brief loss of color, whatever equanimity he possessed returned and no comment was made although the other guests at his table seemed to be holding their breath until he started to speak again.

Elena and I had ordered a rather fantastic dessert, naturally with its accompanying wine, and when our waiter with his now perpetual smile arrived, Wolfgang seemed to be giving his complete attention to the cherub holding the banner, but his guests watched the progress of our dessert across the restaurant floor. The deep creases on his forehead seemed to grow deeper when he saw his guests’ attention was elsewhere. When he turned to see what they were watching, a russet color invaded his face and seeing it, a young man touched his partner on the arm and she in turn touched the man to her right and the touching went around the table like a little ballet until everyone had their attention focused back on the birthday boy.

Moments later, a birthday cake arrived at the table and Wolfgang’s face was wreathed in smiles as he explained what was in the cake and how important it was to eat a healthy diet. The waiters for the table began cutting and serving the cake. I believed the guests were hungry enough to consume Wolfgang himself whom, judging from the pained expressions his guests had after they started to taste the cake, they probably would have preferred.

Elena and I concentrated on our tropic fantasy dessert and toasted each other with its accompanying wine while Wolfgang loudly exclaimed how grand the cake was; I don’t think his guests concurred. One woman arose and left in the direction of a restroom and a waiter began to lift her plate with its remainder of cake to which Wolfgang said, “Leave it. She’ll want more.”

Lingering through our wine, Elena leaned over and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “Let’s have espresso!”

“Deal.” I whispered back.

Elena told the waiter we were not in a hurry and he replied, “Yes, madam. No rush, madam.”

At the next table the entire cake was being consumed. The guests looked vaguely nauseous and Wolfgang looked triumphant, but one guest must have marred poor Wolfgang’s evening because he wouldn’t accept the last piece, and in spite of his gusto for whatever kind of cake it was, Wolfgang wasn’t having any more either and a rather quiet row ensued growing louder until Wolfgang, leaning toward the guest and extending his powerful arm flicked the plate with its contents onto the floor.

A waiter hurried over and without much apology in his voice, Wolfgang said, “I am sorry. A mess for you to clean up.”

“This is the part of the movie where I always eat lots of popcorn,” Elena said.

“This is the part of the movie where I always go to the restroom,” I replied, “You were right. He throws food.”

“Don’t let it bother you. Think of it as all part of a grand experience.” She was all smiles.

“I’ve been around food throwers before. They just raise my dry cleaning bill. Why can’t we just enjoy the insects and the humidity?”

“This is better than incest and humility,” she malapropped, “I can’t wait to see who wins!”

Fortunately, our espresso arrived with a national debt sized bill and a smile from the waiter wide enough to cause ivory poaching. It was great espresso and I asked the waiter how it happened that such good espresso occurred south of the equator. What I didn’t notice was that Wolfgang’s table had grown completely silent, they may have been praying for all I know, but Wolfgang must have overheard my question.

After the waiter finished explaining that they received training from an Italian barista and left with my watch, ring, wallet and bankbook, Wolfgang sat forward in his chair leaning on its arm and turned to face our table wiping the corners of his mouth rather delicately with his napkin then said a little louder than necessary, “You know, coffee is bad for the complexion because it affects the liver function. You mustn’t drink coffee. American coffee is high in caffeine and that is ruinous for blood pressure and the heart. With dairy products included it is also bad for the veins and the arteries.” He continued on in this manner for a few minutes and then having finished his lecture, turned back to his guests and said, “I am always the spreader of truth. It is necessary for me because it is who I am.”

“What about popcorn?” Elena quipped loudly.

Wolfgang simply ignored her, but it seems he and I were destined to come into brief contact again. He left his party as Elena and I were getting ready to leave the restaurant and as he walked by our table I just couldn’t help myself saying, “Happy Birthday, Wolfgang,” and restraining myself from throwing a sieg heil instead stuck out my hand for him to shake.

He paused momentarily, looking down at my outstretched hand but instead of shaking it, brushed the back of his hand against the back of mine and then continued out of the restaurant. Elena hadn’t noticed because she was gathering her handbag, but when I told her she giggled and said, “Well, now I am sure of one thing. Wolfgang is very kinky!”

Gratitude

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A dor da minha alma
Foi marcada em mim porque
O céu respira
A chuva impetuosa

Os anjos sozinhos
Souberam porque deus
Queimou nossas pegadas
Na terra

Desvaneçeu-se a música do carnaval
Como o fumo após o fogo
Que deriva ao céu
Esquecido aqui na terra

Como uma faca a luz solar
Cortou a noite para dar
A cada fantasia
Um desaparecimento ideal

E cada fantasia
E cada fantasia
E cada fantasia
Como o sonho desapareçeu

Todos os suspiros
Todos os gritos
Todos os rasgos
Todas as pétalas caídas amor

Você o perigo dão
Porque posso confessar não
Recordar eu posso não
E eu posso não esqueçer

Brother

My brother appears
Occupied in occupations
He rarely or never filled.

The last time he was dressed
In a tuxedo like James Bond
Holding a martini glass.

He raised his glass to me
Overhead in a noisy crowd
Excluding them for a moment.

Once I sat while he rowed
A tiny dory with just he and I
Out on a secret quiet sea.

A rowboat?
Surrounded by mist
Rising from the water?

The sea was calm green
The fog gray and warm
With steam room odors.

That pea green water
The sea flat and reflective
As a well-polished mirror.

Never speaking words
He just rowed the oars causing
Quiet splash sounds.

Once I saw him sleeping
Just quietly breathing
The moonlight.

Then his apparition was
Rounding a corner
On some busy city intersection.

Traffic lights were flashing
While he removed a cornerstone
Containing a clock, a rusted tool and a note.

He never fails to smile and wave
And I never know quite
Why I am there.

He always appears youthful
Almost dapper jaunty
Full of curiosity.

Source

Source generates sound
Sound generates thought
Thought generates word
Word generates speech

Hear the speech and the word
Hear the word and the thought
Hear the thought and the sound
Hear the sound and the Source

Find the speech from the word
Find the word from the thought
Find the thought from the sound
Find the sound from the Source

Island

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A secret voyage
In the untold long ago
Across immense seas
Unknown and terrifying
Currents carried our ship
To a hidden island
On the very edge
Of eternity

Peaceful suns
Warmed our lives
Amid green leaves
Sitting at the tide line
Of a golden beach
We didn’t hear
What was said
By whispering sand

“A great wind is blowing
Centuries of seasons
Across your lives
And the river is drying
The caravels weighed anchor
Set sails and departed
On the west wind
While you were playing”

Now night comes
And the savage moon
Is masked by storm
It cannot find us
I fell into a mirage
Remembering your kiss
And the deepening shadow
Has taken you

Folk Tale

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

Last night I was talking with a friend about the phenomenon of epiphany and today, as my mind returned to our conversation, I was reminded in my own odd way of stories like those of the brothers Grimm and other transformational folk tales. This train of thought led me eventually into a sort of thoughtfulness about the human voice (I know you are wondering how I got from folk tales to human voice?), and that got me to wondering about why it is that we, at least here in the west, still do not know how the human voice produces the quality of pitch, which led me still further into remembering something from a favorite author.

The tale of a shepherd who was overheard by Moses talking to God about wanting to comb his beard and mend his sandals and so forth, which caused Moses a great deal of consternation. Actually, it made him quite angry and he began to shout and belittle the shepherd for his ridiculous assumption that he could comb the beard of God or mend his sandals, which, in turn, shamed the shepherd and sent him off in a blue funk.

Naturally, the tale is cautionary and at that point Moses hears the voice of God coming from heaven, or from where ever such voices are supposed to come, saying, “Moses, you’ve just treated one of my most loyal servants wrongly. He was worshiping me in the manner he knew.” Etc., etc., all of which sounds rather whiney, but Moses, himself a faithful servant of the divine, realizes his error and sets off into the desert seeking the shepherd to deliver an apology and after finding him, Moses is rightly contrite and profusely apologetic but the shepherd interrupts this outpouring saying, “No, no, really, Moses, it is quite alright. You were correct, I now understand what you meant and I no longer want or need to comb God’s beard or mend his sandals.” Even though Moses protests that God told him it was okay for the shepherd to comb God’s beard and mend the sandals, the shepherd reaffirms that Moses’ sudden attack had given him a shock and the energy of the shock of this transformation had allowed him to make a spiritual advancement so he really didn’t need the old worship pattern any longer. All’s well and good. Now God has two faithful and advanced servants wandering the desert.

Here is where my own thoughts started interfering and wondering about the human voice pitch thing again and I told myself that perhaps here was an area that needed to be studied and researched and in the way of my usual brain activity, immediately began wondering about the word ‘research’.

Re search. Look for again. So something that was previously known seems to need the re-knowing or re-finding because somehow that knowledge has been lost. Perhaps the idea of how to make pitches in the human voice was known once upon a time and a journey must be made and a kind of archaeology performed to find that lost treasure. How could such a thing, an important idea, a knowledge possibly have become lost? Actually, if one looks at the etymology of the word research, one will find that it comes from the French and the ‘re’ prefix is an intensifier of effort or energy; therefore an intense search. That is very like one of those cautions found in folk tales. Nonetheless, we can both look again and do so intensely.

Well now, that isn’t such a difficult thing to understand.

Perhaps somewhere in the dim and distant prehistoric and ante-technical past some remote ancestor of us all discovered a way to change the pitch of his or her grunts on purpose and taught the family and tribe and they taught their families and tribes and so on and then pretty much everyone figured it out and it didn’t seem like a such a big deal because everyone could change pitches and all it took to teach them was a simple kind of mimicry. This sort of thing happens all the time. Consider the automobile for example. At first, the only people to move around in them were the people who could actually build one. Then those master mechanics taught others to drive and maybe a little about the inner workings, which were more or less promptly forgotten and those second generation drivers taught someone to drive but left out the mechanical workings and so on, and now it is difficult to find a driver that knows anything at all about the mechanics of his conveyance.

But for the first fellow, the fellow who discovered pitch in the human voice that is, it was a really big deal. That legacy gave us all voices and speech and words and sentences and languages and writing and reading even though no one now knows how pitch is created. There are some who might argue that it might have been better if we never learned to speak but I prefer to think of those persons as rather cranky misanthropes. It is this technology that allows us to communicate with one another across all kinds of barriers although it has caused problems for translators of various stripes.

But I have digressed from my original thought regarding folk tales, epiphany and inner reality.

When I was very young I used to make ‘deals’ with whatever I thought was god. I frequently made a request of the divine to, “Please do this and I will do that.” In other words, I was performing my own ritual of combing the beard of god and mending his sandals. Rather marvelously, many of my requests were miraculously answered (even if they might have happened regardless) and so I continued to comb tangles out the beard of god and rivet and glue those well-worn sandals, but in the meanwhile something else was happening. Let us call it a proliferation of litter.

In many of the folk tales I’ve come across, the protagonists, male and female, are told by the wise, “Yes, you can get/find/recover/arrive at the goal of your choice but here are the problems involving the progress of your journey,” and then the warnings and problems are clearly laid out for the protagonist by the cautionary authority. Every transformational tale has these roadblocks: an ogre with an appetite for just such travelers as the protagonist, a number of magical totems or gifts, an irritable companion or even a personality quirk of the hero or heroine.

Eventually though, in the best of these tales, the protagonist sets out and indeed, finds the way to their heart’s desire and they live happily ever after. Sometimes. In some tales the protagonist must effectively rerun the journey from a different perspective and in many tales the protagonist is only the last in a long line of pre-protagonists who have attempted and failed to achieve the desired outcome, so what happened? Here is my opinion.

In combing the beard of god and mending his sandals many of us ask for a trade, a bargain, a deal. Quid pro quo. If you, God, do this for me, I, the undersigned, will promise to comb beard and mend sandals. Occasionally, however, we are so overwhelmed by the quick response and complete fulfillment of our stated desire, we forget our part of the bargain, which is roughly equivalent to what happens in a folk tale when the protagonist forgets a caution about listening to what order of events to follow to reach the heart’s desire.

It is my idea that those cautions and traps are still there waiting somewhere deep in our minds to trip us up and prevent us from reaching our heart’s desire and because we keep making bargains, we keep leaving more traps for ourselves and pretty soon our mental landscape looks more like no-man’s land after a battle and truly is not fit for mental habitation. This is not to say that such an area cannot be reclaimed for useful purposes, but to do so requires a great deal of effort. That is why there are so many pre-protagonists and so few of the more familiar and successful heroic type.

Here is a very great secret; that source usually labeled god or the divine does not want or need placation or payment. But it does need attention.

Mastering The Heart

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Waiting terrified
Not knowing why
I watch
Serene fields worked
By invisible hands

In the quiet rest
Of evening
I watch
My father rise
Crippled and lame

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

From darkness beyond
Crystalline glass
I watch
My grandfather
Scream silent curses

Never a reply
To betray shame
I watch
Grandfather’s son
Limp into death

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Muscle blood sinew
Holding stillness
I watch
Generations
Compromise futures

Breathing out darkness
Golden dawns break
I watch
Shining stars fade
The Work continues

Mastering the heart
Opens all possibilities …

Interface

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

I am trying to crack the hardness surrounding my mentality, or at least a piece of my mentality. I remembered this morning the incident of the “missing exercise record” from my youth.

In brief, I heard and became quickly enamored of an exercise recording at school one day with a catchy tune called “Chicken Fat” that was probably a product of some physical fitness campaign. Some fellow brought the record to school and put all of us fourth graders through all of its eight minutes of exercises and being thrilled with the thing I immediately ordered a copy for which I had to pay out of my allowance some outrageous sum…probably four or five dollars.

So thrilled was I with the record that I took it home and played and exercised over and over, stretching the eight or so minutes of exercise into something like maybe fifteen or twenty. Not a bad aerobic workout for a fourth grader. I must have really got the exercise bug, because I remembered faithfully going through the routine every afternoon for about a week.

However, my mother wasn’t as thrilled with either the record or my exercising, and I couldn’t say which bothered her more but she did say that if I wanted to exercise I could go out and dig in the garden or cut wood or rake up leaves or some such thing. Whatever it was I cooperated fully and completed the task because I knew that her “suggestion” was a command. I will not say I did whatever it was cheerfully, but I did it.

So after that final routine I carefully put away my record in its sleeve and did my chore. The weekend went by and the following Monday I went back to school actually looking forward to getting home, not a common occurrence, and once again exercising to my record.

Upon arrival at home however, I could not locate my record anywhere and I put in a great deal of effort looking. It took me years to realize that my mother had most likely thrown it into the garbage and because I was always suspicious of my parent’s actions, it was a place I checked. What I didn’t realize was that she probably buried it in the garbage knowing I would dig through the top layers of the stuff.

What does this have to do with me today?

I have recently tried to inject an exercise regime into my life. Exercise is not difficult; I am not overweight and while I am slightly ‘jiggly’ around the middle, I am certainly not fat. I need more to move weight rather than lose it; in fact, I may be a little underweight. To accomplish this, I have joined a website that promotes fitness and has a social networking aspect to it as well. More importantly, it demands a certain mindset of positive energy and its founder speaks eloquently about spiritual aspects of health and fitness.

So what is the problem? The program has certain requirements. There are a series of ‘assignments’ to be read and carried out and the founder has carefully laid out a syllabus for students to complete. Therein lies the big hurdle for me: I am essentially a terrible student. I think I like to learn but learning takes effort and somewhere I learned that effort isn’t worth the effort.

I live almost completely upside down and backwards from the average American, whatever that is.

I have difficulty competing because competition wasn’t allowed by my parents or in my family environment. For example, when my siblings and I played the game Monopoly (which we all blithely called Monotony), no one ever won because it would mean someone was trying to win! The only way anyone was allowed to win any game was by complete chance; skill and strategy caused too much dissention and anger. So every ordinary game we played was a chance-driven game like a strange little card game my grandmother taught us given the curiously aggressive name of “Beat Your Neighbors Out Of Doors”. Games that were completely driven by the roll of dice such as board games were pretty much okay, but games like chess stopped being played as soon as someone seemed to start improving beyond the abilities of my parents.

Some of us did eventually learn to play whist and gin, but these were games which had such long stretches of time between playings that they had to be relearned every time or were actually learned long after my parents had lost any interest at all in games. There is certainly skill to games like cribbage but that skill has to be taught and my parents had no interest in losing and taught only the barest of fundamentals of how to count the cards and when and if they started losing, they stopped playing.

I mention games because I have heard that the learning of games is one method of learning how to interact with and deal with the complexity of a society. If this is true then an individual living in a complex, competitive society needs to learn how to compete and understand the social complexities and these skills are most easily taught and learned during formative years. What happens to the individual who does not learn the skills needed in his society?

I remember one evening my brother and I sitting at the dining room table, which was where school homework was usually done until we finally acquired a desk for our room somewhere during my middle school years (and even then my brother tended to pile books and papers on it in such a way that it couldn’t easily be utilized as a desk). I do not remember what we were actually involved in but I made a comment something like, “well, I need to strive to achieve (it)…” using the word ‘strive’ because I had read or heard how striving to reach ones goals was how things were done. My brother, who had been listening to my yammer suddenly interrupted me saying, and I will never forget this, “Oh no! You must never strive for anything!!” His interruption shocked me. To this day I am not sure whether he said it because he really felt that way or because it was his way of breaking the ‘non-competition’ rule of the house.

I later asked him about it and he seemed to indicate that he actually believed in non-competition but many of his actions seem contrary to the idea. He did tell me one afternoon sitting by the American River in an almost confessional way that my father had spent a lot of time comparing my supposed grace to his clumsiness and apparently gave him the idea that I was favored in some way. This completely took me by surprise because I had always thought that he, as the elder, was the favored one! Some time after that event my father began to reveal some aspects of his personality that astonished and depressed me.

He revealed a certain bitterness about some events early in my brother’s life that my mother and her parents developed a monopoly on my brother’s time and only allowed my father special access when it suited them, taking my brother to watch my maternal grandfather in his workshop or taking him to his place of work, never allowing him to see my father at his place of work.

When my brother was registering for the Selective Service he told them he had seizures and was listed 4-F. My father was angry and told him and me, and then told me again later that my brother had been “stupid” and “should have lied”. Again, this astonished me, because we had always been conditioned, sometimes violently, to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”. I rather confrontationally asked my father where we would have ever got the idea that under some circumstances it would be okay to lie? He didn’t seem to care that my brother’s circumstances could endanger another human.

At the time, I tried to smooth things over by saying, “well that wouldn’t have been a good idea because (my brother) wanted to be a pilot and it could have been really dangerous…etc., etc. … He really wanted to go into the Air Force Academy … you know, to become a pilot, an officer...” To which my father replied, “Oh, he just wanted to surpass me.” I was and am shocked that a parent would say this about his child, and the offhand way in which he said it and the gleeful relief in his voice that it hadn’t happened still stirs my ire.

Which brings me to another problem: my parents didn’t seem to believe in or want a future, or maybe even a goal. The future, and its corollary, goals, were either nonexistent or at the very least, suspect. “Why do you want to do that?” was always the question. “What’s the point?” Recently, one of my sisters told me she isn’t sure there is a point in thinking about the future. The question arose again while I was filling out a job application recently and came across a question, which read, “What do you want to be doing in five years?” It took me a few days to think up a response and I can’t even remember what I wrote.

My elder sister, toward the end of her high school years contacted a school that trained airline personnel to become flight attendants, ticket agents and the like and a representative of the school came to our house to interview my sister and talk with my parents about enrollment. I was really hoping my sister’s excitement would carry the day and she would get hired by one of the airlines, mostly because I thought maybe I might get to fly somewhere exotic. It was a beautiful spring day; I love to fly so I went for a walk to daydream about flying to Honolulu or Rome.

At the very moment I returned to the house, my sister came running, crying and screaming out the front door and, not too far behind her, the woman from the school tightly gripping a briefcase came striding, angrily, red-faced, toward her car. Then she stopped, turned and yelled something back at the house about what “…you are doing to your daughter’s life…” I stopped abruptly in the yard to watch her throw the briefcase in her car, slam the door and speed away, nearly running the car off an embankment opposite our driveway, but just before she got in her car and slammed the door, she yelled at me in a rising crescendo, “Don’t have any dreams!”

A moment later when I warily entered the house, both my parents were sitting comfortably in our living room, my mother looking like she had just won the academy award and my father had an unfathomable grin on his face, rather like an agent whose client had just won an academy award. I knew in that moment that any plan I had for any kind of future for myself must be kept completely secret until it became fait accompli, Worse, any plan or goal I might have had up until that moment completely evaporated. To this day I have difficulty visualizing goals unless they are extremely short term, but practice has given me an ability, however slight, to anticipate consequences.

But this disability hasn’t stopped me from continually trying to reformulate my future.

Today, I was monitoring my body because of the program I am trying to accomplish and suddenly realized that pursing my lips has become habitual! I love to laugh but I have forgotten, if I ever knew, how to smile! When I started trying to loosen the musculature around my mouth, I noticed my eyebrows were either in a mild frown or slightly raised in surprise, or maybe fear. What is happening here?

Here is my theory.

We are, all of us, creatures of habit and some habits form without our knowing it. We may all be born in beauty and joy and surely some of us develop in beauty and joy but what happens when our development is skewed away from it? I think a kind of anger forms from the loss and that anger is expressed in various ways, perhaps the least of which is a habitual form of facial expression.

I think it is our nature to “wear” our bodies into a shape that satisfies our most constant mental and emotional condition. This isn’t anything new; actors and dancers have been using an enforced technique of this idea for thousands of years. The Greek comedy/tragedy masks are a good example. But what is necessary to alter that conditioned stance?

My answer is some kind of readjustment that has as its genesis an alteration of the inner mental/emotional/spiritual condition. This isn’t new either. In fact, nothing I write here is new, even the fact that I myself am involved in an attempt to alter my inner climate. I previously wrote about how I got the idea to enter the Navy but I did not write about the ideas that kept that idea on track.

In high school and even before, I developed a way of interfacing with my universe. I use the word interface because I saw myself as a unique system that could not operate with any other system without a special program operating. After I developed my ‘interface’, I could interact. Part of that program allowed me to mentally slip out of one personality mode and into another, usually without anyone noticing very much. Those who did notice usually didn’t comment. To anyone reading this, I know how this sounds. My brother actually called me “a little schizo” (and he meant small not ‘just a tad’…) once and my mother quite belligerently told him that I wasn’t because that is what she was diagnosed as being and I couldn’t possibly be the same. I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. However, I am not schizophrenic nor do I have multiple personality disorder.

But let me return to my interface technique.

This self-developed program allowed me, like an actor, to put on a personality or character if you will. In school, I necessarily developed what looked as close as I could reckon to what I thought a “shy person” must be like. I used my siblings and shy schoolmates as patterns and worked very hard to keep up this appearance and it was quite difficult because I am not natively shy at all. It was also this ‘character’ that I most often slipped out of accidentally. Another ‘character’ was a kind of spy I used when I felt I wasn’t getting enough information or I felt there were sides to a story that hadn’t been expressed completely. I used ‘the spy’ to ferret out what I thought of as the reality of a situation. I used detective and espionage novels and movies to learn spy characteristics and learning this ‘character’ was also useful in learning to listen.

The most difficult part of developing this interface was the problem of being alone. First, it was lonely, and second I didn’t know what ‘character’ I needed to play to interact with myself. It was a very thorny problem because I knew on some level I had to develop a way of listening to myself. I had read and heard many times that we all have ‘that little inner voice’ and unfortunately, mine seemed to be missing or, at the very least, muffled. My paternal grandmother was the first person I remember who told me about listening to my inner voice and while I am fairly certain she meant something altogether different, because I was quite young, I took it to mean and began listening for a voice inside my head that sounded like a voice outside my head. Thankfully, this did not happen.

What I did notice though was that when I slipped into one of these characters, my proprioception changed! I have always been fairly ambidextrous, even to occasionally writing with both hands. Changing hands can be forced but hand dominance stays the same. This is difficult to explain to most people but there are also moments when the dominance changes and using the opposite side is much easier and, more importantly, it can be sensed. It is an odd sensation that feels a little like I am going through a minor earthquake, but when the sensation passes I am seeing differently or feeling the need to use the opposite hand from moments before. These changes of hand or eye dominance however, have nothing to do with slipping in and out of character other than my ambidextrous dominance changes primed me for being able to feel when my body had ‘slipped into character’.

What that means is that when my mental/emotional inner climate had changed, something about my body changed. What changed might be my tension level, or the slump of my shoulders, but the inner change always occurred first. However, occasionally in forcing a physical change, I could promote a dominance change and that seems to mean that changing a physical posture might also change a mental attitude.

Now many years later, having learned a great deal of cynicism and not needing the interface any longer, I have misplaced the ability to use it. Perhaps I don’t really need it but isn’t it also possible that if I can alter either physical or mental posture my demeanor to others will be altered as well?

What I now need is to reacquire some beauty and joy and release some mental and physical tension from places it has longed called home. I wonder if it is too much to ask for an epiphany?

Shrine

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

An elderly nun sat
Under a shade cloth
Like a shroud
Surrounded by a cage
Of cast-iron bars

Dreaming on her hand
Awaiting requests
Demands or questions
Her companion
In dark habit

Ushered each
Supplicant forward
Into her presence
Holding back a tide
Of queries

Pilgrims crawled
On hands and knees
Up tiny marble steps
Steep and white
Strewn with rose petals
And dry bloodstain
Reminders of previous
Penitential passages

One by one
Into that tiny iron cage
Surrounded by smells
Of rose and old bone
We slowly crawled
Staring longingly
At the saint’s relic
A broken skull

Wanting answers
From the sleeping guardian
A Sister of Pythoness.
That tired face
Wanted sleep and dreams
But I turned away
Request unspoken
To leave her
Floating in sleep
On the scent of roses.

Where Fallen

Where fallen, a pelican
Perfectly displayed in wind drifted sand
Spread wings and feathers,
And spine extended, dies
Headless like a fallen angel
Forgotten and forsaken
By all except the flies.

View

Sitting on Choirbench I
Watched you roll the tribe
With some kind of sculptured toys
Even though you promised
Macking corduroy
Buzz went aggro in the drop
His nose kick tripped up
On a speedbump hidden in the bowl
Then Hatch tried to hang
But every digit missed the rail
And he face planted in a gnarly perl
With his stick going ballistic
On the back swing his pintail
Nearly sent him mystic.

Signal

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

There is that alien light again,
Drifting around the port periphery
Floating in the offshore fog.

Waves crawl the quay wall
Channel markers are flashing
Harbor Master consent has gone.

A surfer is chasing down his stoke
A camera gathers scattered light
A heart is pumping blood.

I keep thinkin’ they wants to land
To browse this ‘ere exotic port o’ call
To muck about with rum and riot.

But they are still waiting out there
Now lightless and without signal
Silent as rags on the Dutchman.

A mooring awaits and pinnace
The telegraph marks a welcome
A maiden longs for converse.

Heading to a pineal pier
Or outbound for celestial psyche
The captain seems uncertain.

The tide is high and channel clear
Either way, naught thwarts or bars
But a call of beat to quarters.

Thieves

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2005

There are special kinds of thieves
Not that kind who long
For the solid clink of coin
Or the dry hiss of currency
No those are simple types, ordinary thieves

There is another much grander kind of thief
They do not long for economic power
Or tradeable baubles
Of mineral or metal
Those are easy targets

These are special kinds of thieves
Who enter with hungered looks
Slack-jawed they whisper for time
Once fed they chew furiously and ask for more
With great staring still hungry eyes

Mistress

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009


San Francisco
My mistress
Told me today
To take off
My sunglasses
And look at her
In full color
She was wearing
That veil of fog
And carrying
A bouquet of flowers

This Little World

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

I used to carry pictures each of my siblings in a wallet
And showed them with pride to my fellow travelers
There is the oldest this one is the middle
That one our youngest member of the tribe

I don’t carry a wallet anymore or pictures
Season my Grandmother called those special papers
I discovered early on wallets accumulated stuff
So much became unreadable and indecipherable

And sitting on my siblings just seemed wrong
But sometimes I wonder whether pitching the pics
Destroyed a something in the living maybe
Somehow I threw a something away I shouldn’t have

There is no comfort in comforting my turmoil
Just sit quietly and listen with everything you’ve got
My beautiful intelligent sister still beautiful still intelligent
Lives in an idea world from a land of fantastic otherwhere

Some mind authority told me we could give her drugs
Another said you have a right to be mentally ill
Eyes of the lay just dim with incomprehension
Have you seen anyone they all inquire they all ask

What to do what to do what to do a jazz song sings
On foggy days in foggy old towns all upon a foggy night
You need to pay you need to pray you need to let go
You need a miracle you need god on your side

Sighing and giving a retelling of the tale told and told
Went here went there went here and there again
Talked to Dr.X Dr.Y Dr.Z M.D. PhD. D.D. LL.D MFCC see?
First it was sympathy and roses then U.S. dollars

It was kind of fun to see all those alphabeted people smile
The same kind of knowing well well well grin lean in
With the all-knowledgeable looks gravely visaged
Nodding heads all with deep voiced ‘very sad indeeds’

Then came the international internet research buttons
Looking for a magic pill a magic cure a spell
To wave at my sister up and down bibbity bobbity
A guardian angel winged fairy complete with wand

The mystery in the ruin of minds is mesmeric
Those demon guarded intellects draw weaponless knights
From across immense galactic divides to battle
But for the present those fiendish spirits prevail

Remembrance

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2009

A throbbing beat of tropic drums
In sunlight spectrum split on the horizon
Wakes a mysterious green light under stars.

A voice sliding over light glinting
Off the western sea edge, remembers
Friends riding the sparkling edge of earth.

Scattered hither and yon the friends
Like flower petals on wedding paths
Gaze on a passing era conclusion.

Our green light sinking sun slips
Into the rising wind over eyes
Catching final moments of days.

A yearning holds our calm pledge
Inviolate against the way
Anchored in ancient origin.

Five Beer History

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2007


It would be hard to forget that first time
I saw You walking jerkily at the
End of that ‘host’s’ arm like an unwilling
Dog on a leash with your friend and You gig-
Gling into your hands every guy in that
Place following You with his eyes every
Guy except that Southern Boy sitting at
My table he was watching me with a
Deep hunger an appetite my naiveté
Couldn’t recognize at the time and I
Only saw for a moment because I
Was looking at You crossing that room
Like a beauty contest winner Southern
Boy and I both had our San Miguel sit-
Ting in front of us mine with my ever
Necessary lemon and he had sat
Down at my table when he found me there
Solitary sure that I needed com-
Pany sure that I needed his compan-
Ionship he asked so enthusiastic-
Ly if he could buy me a drink just like
I was one of your fellow working girls
Of course I told him I already had
A beer coming while I looked around the
Room for someone to dance with someone the
Most interesting faces the most in-
Teresting posture the most interest-
Ing vignettes and way over on the o-
Ther side of the room I saw Vince the fu-
Ture Mafioso catch my attention
Because he was teasing one of your fel-
Low working girls with slight of hand tricks ma-
King money appear and disappear and in
The darkest corner away from the floor
Show floor the married guys who worked out to-
Gether competed to see who could car-
Ry the most soda cases always want-
Ed to be assigned together they were
Sitting in that dark corner with a cou-
Ple of your fellow working girls who had
Small glasses of something in front of them
And had boredom engraved on their heavy
Make-up probably because those two mar-
Ried guys were fondling one another un-
Der the table that was kind of like a
Great secret little story going on
Which I lost the thread of because the ‘host’
Whom Southern Boy called a pimp arrived and
In an insistent tone asked us if we
Wanted a girlfriend and we told him we
Were having beers and he just repeated
Do you want a girlfriend he repeated
And Southern Boy and I said at the same
Time at the very same time Southern Boy
Said no and I said yes and I laughed be-
Cause it sounded funny so the pimp guy
The ‘host’ said to me again do you want
A girlfriend not like it was a question
But more like a necessary access-
Sory and I laughed and said Okay but
She had better be beautiful … in fact
She had better be drop dead gorgeous and
That guy had a look like you know is that
All? Like Woman Beautiful was in
Every corner and under every ta-
Ble a look that said Too Easy Give Me
A Challenge but I still thought and thought that
It was going to be interesting
To see who he came back with and then he
Disappeared and Southern Boy was starting
To lecture me about how they cheat in
Those places and the girls only drink tea
Instead of alcohol and ask stupid
Questions and want us to buy them stupid
Helicopters and didn’t I want to talk
To him wouldn’t I rather talk to a
Civilized man instead of a monkey
And he smiled and leaned across the table
And put his mouth on the neck of his beer
Slowly and after taking a slug of
Beer looked at me with droopy eyes and beer
Wet lips and then that guy the ‘host’ the pimp
Arrived with You and your friend in tow and
Southern Boy told him I told you I told
You I didn’t want one of your whores and
That pimp guy, the ‘host’ just ignored him and
Sat You down next to me and I couldn’t
Speak You were so beautiful I couldn’t
Stop staring at You and Southern Boy got
Mad and marched away left me alone with
You and your friend and I just kept staring
And that guy the ‘host’ the pimp said buy her
A drink so I asked if You wanted a
Drink and not to listen to that guy the
Pimp because he was a jerk and he said
Again you have to buy her a drink or
She can’t stay here and that was enough for
Me so I said whatever You would like
You can have tea or coke or whiskey or
Water I don’t care and then your friend laughed
And said something in Tagalog and You
Looked at that guy the pimp the ‘host’ and so
Politely said You’d have a coke and he
That guy the ‘host’ the pimp was mad because
You didn’t order something expensive and
I said Here and I handed him a lot
Of pesos and said go buy yourself a
Girlfriend then your friend laughed so loud every-
One looked at our table if they hadn’t al-
Ready been looking at You and You laughed
Softly and that guy the pimp the ‘host’
Was mad but took the money and said it
Was extra to buy the girls out of the
Bar I said I didn’t want to buy the girls
Out of the bar I wanted to drink my
Beer and listen to the band and he just
Flipped the money through his fingers and said
It was extra to buy the girls out of
The bar and your friend laughed and said something
To him the ‘host’ the pimp in Tagalog
And he the pimp the ‘host’ looked mad he looked
Stormy and walked away and that was the
First part of the story to keep and I
Laughed and I don’t know how she knew but your
Friend said to You that’s Gypsy and Gypsy
Was my nickname in one of the bars a
Bar somewhere else in the town because I
Read palms the lines in palms there but that was
Another bar on another night and
You weren’t there but your friend said that’s Gypsy
And You wanted to know why I was called
Gypsy and she told You to give me your
Hand I could see your future in the lines
I would look into the future of your
Lines and even though You looked doubtful You
Held out your hand and it was beautiful
So beautiful too so I leaned in ve-
Ry close so I could smell your scent and to talk
In your beautiful ear with the little
Earring because the band was playing some
Loud rock anthem and I could see your lips
Moving and they were beautiful too but
It was like a dream because they were mov-
Ing they were talking to me and what was
Coming out was loud rock anthem and I
Tried to hear but the band was trying to
Speak for You so I leaned in very close
So I could smell your scent and talk in your
Beautiful ear with the little earring
And said I don’t want to read your palm I
Want to kiss it and I was so embar-
Rassed because instead of something ro-
Mantic or intimate You said really
Loud WHAT because the band was playing a
Loud rock anthem so I couldn’t repeat what
I said because I wanted to kiss your
Palm so I took advantage of your poor
Beautiful hand and ravished it with my
Aroused fingers I reached into every
Line and I ran my fingers around the
Outline of your nails and folded your fin-
Gers together with mine so I could feel
Them touching the webbing between my fin-
Gers and I made your hands and fingers dance
On mine and I could tell You didn’t quite know
What to do so I made up some bogus
Future for You when the band got quiet
And then I was shouting in the quiet
And I kept staring at You and asking
If You wanted another drink and You
Hadn’t even finished the first and I kept
Wishing the band would start up again be-
Cause I wanted to lean over very
Close so I could smell your scent and talk in
Your beautiful ear with the little ear-
Ring and ask You why You were wearing that
Strange prim little blue dress with the white col-
Lar and not what the other girls wore those
Clear plastic shoes with glitter embedded
In the plastic and low cut dresses with
Glitter embedded in the small buttons
And those bright colored stockings I wanted
To ask You why You didn’t wear those things I
Wanted to but I didn’t I just kept fin-
Gering your hands and creating your faux
Future fortune and pretty soon You laughed
At something I said and your laugh was too
Beautiful and when You laughed I could tell
You were relaxing because You gave me
The littlest hit on my hand and then my
Arm and told me I was bad I would have
Bought You and your friend out of the bar right
Then but your friend knew everything I didn’t
And told me if I wanted to leave then
It was more money and the guy the pimp
The ‘host’ would get it and I would have to
Wait or come back later but I was a-
Fraid You were like a rare sale item that
Would disappear if I left so I couldn’t
Think and while I couldn’t think I thought of ways
We could just sneak out or leave that place or
Push that guy the ‘host’ the pimp off the bal-
Cony because I didn’t want to stay there
And I didn’t want to leave and I didn’t want
To stay and I didn’t want to leave and then
The band started playing a loud rock an-
Them and I ordered another San Mi-
Guel and I hated it and I hated
The band and I hated that guy the pimp
The ‘host’ and I hated your friend for being
So sensible and I stared at You try-
Ing to not be able to think and I
Did silly things like looking through the beer
Bottle at your beautiful chin and eyes
Wiping the sweat from the cold brown bottle
Onto the table and writing stupid
Made-up words and stupid made-up al-
Phabets and yelling questions at You o-
Ver the loud rock anthem about where You
Were from and why did You leave and how come
There was a war and did You like this loud
Rock Anthem and did You like the band and
How did You get here and did your whole fam-
Ily come and why couldn’t we just leave
And You were very patient and You answered
All my stupid questions two or three times
Over the sound of a band playing a
Loud rock anthem just like You were taking
A test in school then your friend said we should
Dance and I really really wanted to
Dance and You really really didn’t want
To dance and because I really really
Wanted to do what You wanted to do
I said it was okay but I really
Really wanted to dance with You and I got
Kind of mad and asked your friend to dance but
She said I ought to dance with You but You
Wouldn’t so I couldn’t and I got kind of mad
Because I could still see the married guys
In the dark corner holding hands under
The table and all I could do was play
With your hand on top of our table so
I pulled You toward me like I was going
To talk in your beautiful ear with the
Little earring or tell You something a-
Bout your faux future and I couldn’t help
Myself I kissed inside the crease of your
Right elbow and smelled it at the same time
You jerked your arm a little but then You
Relaxed when I put my head in your lap
And You put your left hand onto my head
And brushed my short hair back and forth and your
Friend laughed and I could see the girls with the
Married guys looking across that room at
Us because they had to keep tilting their
Heads and craning their necks one way then the
Other to see around the crowd on the
Dance floor where I really really wanted
To be dancing with You but You really
Really didn’t want to dance and I really
Really wanted to do what You wanted
Even to the music of a loud rock
Anthem so I had my head in your lap
And your friend was laughing and the married
Guys were feeling each other and the girls
With them were watching us not dancing and
Mafioso Vince was doing tricks and
Then my friend showed up he started looking
At your friend like I was looking at You
And he bought her a drink she said something
In your beautiful ear with the little
Earring I couldn’t hear because the band
Was playing a loud rock anthem but You
Looked at me while she was talking like You
Were afraid I could hear and then You said
Something to your friend in her ear and my
Friend asked what was going on and your friend
Told him he was going to dance with her
And I really really wanted to dance
With You but You really really did not
Want to dance and I really really did
Want to do what You wanted to do if
Even to the sound of a band playing
A loud rock anthem so my friend and your
Friend they gathered the floor under their feet
Under the flashing lights flashing to the
Rhythm of the loud rock anthem and faces
Flashed and feet moved and hips moved together
Then apart and turning and I just looked
At You and asked more stupid questions a-
Bout where and how and who and You asked how
I became Gypsy and I asked when and
How and who and if You liked to read and
You said no and I didn’t care because
I was looking at your beautiful face
And your beautiful eyebrows and your strange
Prim little dress with white collar and
No glitter anywhere I kept thinking
About how your face disappeared in the
Black light while your white collar glowed and my
Black jacket vanished except for speckles
That glowed like my white shirt that showed bright blue
Then the house band stopped playing the loud rock
Anthem and the dancing stopped and my friend
And your friend came back to their drinks and our
Table with the beer bottle sweat rings and
The chairs with padded bottoms and that guy
The ‘host’ the pimp came back and asked my friend
If he was going to take your friend out
‘On a date’ and your friend said my friend was
Going to buy her another drink and
My friend did and then he bought me ano-
Ther San Miguel and asked if You wanted
Something and I said You didn’t then You
Said You did and I got a little an-
Gry because I wanted to buy You a
Drink and You said no and I asked if You
Wanted to dance when the music started
Because I really really wanted to
Dance with You and I wanted to dance slow
But You really really didn’t want to dance
Fast or slow and I really really would
Do whatever You wanted me to do
So the music started and my friend took
Your friend and they danced under the flashing
Lights and they slow danced and I grabbed your hand
And kissed the palm but You pulled your hand back
You pulled the palm back I kissed and picked up
The drink my friend bought and touched it with your
Beautiful lips and put it back down in
It’s very own sweat ring while the house band
Played a loud rock anthem so I said once
Again I begged again I pleaded a-
Gain I asked again to dance to slow house
Band loud rock anthem and your face changed once
To a silly smile and You said okay
But first I had to dance alone You told
Me I had to dance alone so I took
Your beautiful hand again and said and
Then asked and begged and pleaded and pleaded
So really really first I’ll dance alone
Then You’ll dance with me and You said sure yes
Go dance and then dance alone and I will
Really really dance but I really don’t
Want to dance but dance alone and then You
Pointed with your beautiful finger to
Some place under the flashing lights dance there
Alone and then I’ll dance with you and You
Know I jumped up to dance and the music
Changed and flashing lights slowed and on the floor
All the people left the dance floor even
The married guys who danced with the girls who
Drank at their table then danced together
And neither knew who was supposed to lead
But it was funnier when they danced hard
Because the girls got drunk at their table
Then I could hear a Mafioso laugh
And the lights slowed down and the music slowed
Down and the people sweating slowed down and
Everyone but me left the slow music
Dance floor and walked with drinks in their hands or
Hands in their hands or empty bored eyes and
Everyone walked through the slow flashing lights
And back to their tables that were close to
The door or close to the corners or on
The balcony everyone except me
Because You said dance there dance there alone
And pointed your finger and You said You
Would dance with me if I first danced alone
And I really really wanted to dance
With You but You really really didn’t want
To dance then You said You would if I danced
Alone by myself in the slow flashing
Lights to the slow moving music alone
With everyone watching I danced slowly
Like Fred waiting for Ginger I stood still
For a moment then gathered my courage
Because when I finished You said You would
Dance and I danced to slow lights and I danced
In slow motion and I danced alone and
I turned and I made my hands into strange
Monsters and touched the floor that was dirty
And I crouched and I stretched and I
Reached for the lights but I couldn’t reach so
I jumped up and I made my arms swing like
Apes in a forest and I made myself spin
And I almost forgot You were watching
But You said You would dance with me and I
Wanted to dance and the lights stopped flashing
And I stopped moving and the music stopped
And You were looking at me and your friend
Talked in your beautiful ear with the lit-
Tle earring and your friend and my friend pushed
You into the lights and onto the floor
And into my arms and a light flashed and
Some music played and my leg touched your leg
And your beautiful body and I put
My head down next to your head and smelled your
Scent and looked at the floor behind You and
Remembered it was dirty and wiped my
Hands on my pants then put my arms under
Your arms and You hardly touched me with your
Arms or your body but I pulled You close
Because I really really wanted to
Dance with You then the music changed and You
Walked away and went back to the table
Where the beers and drinks my friend bought were there
Waiting in their very own sweat rings and
The married guys were feeling each other
Mafioso Vince was doing tricks and
The house band played us a loud rock anthem

Indolent

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

I was lying there in your light
That warmth you always have
When you grace the known

Dozing through your daydream
Conversation concerning shadows
You asked me to explain

Places alien to your nature
Foreign to your sightline
But how could I tell you

Your bright presence invented dark
Creatures you never see
They shape quick fantasies

Conjuring strange visions
With a memory of your radiance
Swindling the unregenerate

My comfortable luminous torpor
Augment my witless intemperance
Please ask me again tomorrow

Reclining against your day
Those fiends and ogres of shadow
Seem so exceedingly far away

To Float Upon The Sea

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008


To float upon the sea
We must make ready
To leave dry land.

Floating on the sea
Treasure is my vessel
And air to breathe.

Floating on the sea
Storms and current stir
The voyager to alien shores.

Floating on the sea
Cast overboard your coin
Acumen crafts purchase.

Floating on the sea
Answers have doubt
Packed in the hold

Floating on the sea
Needs launch and harbor
A mystery to solve.

To float upon the sea
I do not need a name
But a course wants plotting.

After The Leaves Have Fallen

Photo: Diego Fernandes 2008

One sunny spring day, my brother and I were riding on the open tailgate of the family station wagon, bouncing along the long dirt road that led to our rural home. I remember most of the ride as being like a roller coaster or carnival ride, without the safety bar of course.

The dusty lane was filled with potholes from every preceding winter rain and innumerable automobiles and trucks passing over it. Some family drivers living on that road drove carefully and slowly around the holes, while others simply drove as fast as they dared, leaving great clouds of dust in the dry season.

My father was one of the more cautious drivers. Asking him one day, why some drove so fast, or rather, why he didn’t drive faster, he told me there were two theories of driving over potholes. The first being the way he himself did, driving the road slowly and avoiding many of the holes by driving around them and when that wasn’t possible, driving as carefully as possible through them thereby avoiding possible damage to the car. The second method was much simpler. Just drive as fast as possible, hitting only the tops of the bumps.

That particular day our ride felt more like my father was using the second method, and it was quite exhilarating until we rounded a particularly sharp corner and I lost my grip on the hinge of the tailgate. In turning the corner the car had hit a rather deep pothole and launched me skyward, forcing my hand loose from it’s anchor and as the car sped forward, I merely remained where I was, poised in the deep blue sky for what seemed like an eternity.

Then my electrifying flight ended abruptly as I hit the dusty road, somersaulting endlessly backward in the direction from which we had come. Now a number of things went through my mind as this happened, the first being, this hurts. Another thought was about the steepness of the hill whose downward slope I was traversing rather acrobatically. The last thought was really about whether I would survive my tumble, but that was interrupted by the sounds of my brother and someone else in the car yelling that I had fallen out.

The strangest thing was I don’t remember if my father stopped the car or just kept going. It was only a matter of few dozen more yards to our driveway and it wouldn’t have been unheard of for him to simply look in the rear view mirror, see me moving and think something like, “he’s okay, he can walk home.” He had done similar things before and certainly afterward. I believe he stopped; I’m just not sure. I may even have waved them homeward, or returned to my seat on the tailgate. I seem to remember the car continuing its progress homeward and walking the rest of the way.

What has occurred to me is this: even if he did stop, there was no examination of my possibly abraded body or even a questioning of whether I might be seriously hurt, even while moving. My father did say later while laughing, that he had seen me rolling down the hill in his side mirror.

I have realized watching parents lately that when one of their children, whether self-induced or otherwise, has had an accident, there is at least a cursory examination to determine possible injury. My parents lived by a very different philosophy I think and, while it may have had the appearance of treating their children in a ‘rugged pioneer’ sink or swim manner, as I look back on it, it seems more psychopathic than anything else.

In another incident, as I was coming out our front door one day, the family dog came to greet me rather enthusiastically and tripped me, pitching me into a decorative rock wall erected by my father at my mother’s request. The stones were sedimentary shale with the rocks laid with the layers perpendicular to the ground, giving the edge a scalloped look. The shale’s edges were also razor sharp. Although those walls have since been relayed in a more conventional manner minus the shale, it is clear that at the original erection safety wasn’t a primary concern.

As I fell, my hand slid along the edge of one of the stones, slicing into my right palm deeply. The blood immediately began to flow copiously out of the cut. I ran to an outside faucet and started to wash the hand free of dirt and realized how deep the cut was by how far into my hand I could see, muscle tissue and sinew exposed to open air. What I did was try to pinch the cut closed with my left hand to slow the blood flow, which didn’t work, so I cupped my right hand, which actually seemed to have an effect. I knew, even at the time, I needed stitches.

Since I knew my mother would not appreciate me bleeding on the floor, I tried to get someone’s attention by yelling but that didn’t seem to work. I also knew that moving quickly would increase my heart rate thereby speeding the bleeding, so I slowly walked into the house to the kitchen where the family wall-phone hung near the breakfast table.

My mother was in the kitchen occupied in something like washing the dishes and saw the blood cupped and over-flowing from my hand and asked what I had done. When I told her that I had been tripped by the dog and fell on the rocks, her response was as close to boredom as I ever saw in her. It almost seemed she didn’t believe the cut was deep enough to warrant inspection and that maybe I had been saving up the blood in my hand for some unknown purpose. When she told me to open my hand flat, internally I was worried about getting blood on the floor, and rightly so, because when I opened my palm, the blood seemed to form a waterfall and the cut began to hemorrhage quickly.

Her first reaction was the statement; “You’re getting blood on the floor, close your hand.” Then she said, “You may need stitches.” She edged her way around me and the pool of blood on the floor and picked up the phone to call our family doctor’s number, but as this was the weekend probably got an answering service that referred her to another office. She then called that office and every once in a while looking at my hand, described the situation in tones that sounded to me like I was interrupting her day’s activities. At one point in the conversation she asked the person on the other end, “well, yes the cut is pretty bad, but can’t I just put a bandage on it? Do you think that would do?”

Evidently the answer was that I’d better be brought in so the doctor could examine the problem first hand. We had to wait for my father to return from somewhere and then I was taken into town for a visit to the only woman doctor then practicing in our county. She was an older woman who looked like an owl with large glasses and iron-grey hair piled into a large bun on her head. The receptionist saw my father and I enter and said, “Doctor will be right with you. Sir, you need to fill out these papers.” Then she did an odd thing to me; she requested to see the cut and exclaimed rather excitedly, “Oh! It looks just like it was made with a doctor’s knife!”

After the subsequent five large stitches, my father and I returned home where dinner was waiting. When we were all seated the conversation turned to the event of the day and the only part that my father seemed to remember rather scornfully was the receptionists comment, which he misquoted as scalpel. When I corrected him he brushed it off with, “Who cares? What a stupid thing to say.”

When one of my siblings asked how I was supposed to wash my hands, my father answered. My mother commented after hearing how many stitches I’d received, that, “Your brother needed seventeen stitches in his finger when he got it caught in your grandfather’s saw.” Then the rest of the conversation was about injuries my parents had received, and another retelling of how my grandfather was blown off a truck and burned.

I admit, rehashing an injury is not the most interesting or stimulating conversation but I am still amazed at how quickly the subject turned back to my parents. When I try to remember the initial conversation with my mother, I try to keep in mind that I was probably in shock and maybe the conversation wasn’t as casual as I thought it was at the time. But I am pretty sure I am not misremembering the words she used, or my father’s strange commentary on what the receptionist had said. Were those comments just prompted by panic and used to calm some internal dread?

I sometimes ask myself that if some of the things I saw my parents do I might have given too much significance in memory. Here’s one example.

My parents, I believe had developed a kind of us against them mentality and the ‘them’ was everyone other than themselves, including their children. I state this merely as belief, not necessarily fact, because they are dead and cannot argue for themselves. They did argue between themselves a lot.

After we moved to the Sierra foothills, my mother stated in an announcement whose tones suggested a Sibylline prediction that ‘we’ were going to start a herd of cattle. My father must have agreed because he bought rolls of barbed wire and numbers of cedar fence posts and my brother and I assisted him inclosing about five acres. He also reused some of the ancient fencing already laying about the place and built a ‘corral’, which was actually just a wooden addition to the end of the pasture with a gate made by sliding wood six by two planks across the opening. The planks could be easily removed if an animal needed to be led out or in.

The ‘herd’ consisted of two bovines, which they bought as calves. One was a bull calf and the other a heifer. I don’t remember where they purchased them, but I remember being taken along in the back of the pickup as some kind of wrangler and had the job of steadying them and keeping them from falling out of the truck. Even though the calves were small, they were still big enough that had they fallen on me, or against me (and they did) I would have had difficulty getting them off. I remember they were quite frightened.

Those two cattle were actually terrific breeders and between them had two offspring, one that we aptly named Ribroast. The bull was temperamental and both my brother and myself had run-ins with him where he tried to finish us off. He caught my brother unawares walking through the pasture one day and mauled him. On the day I was caught by him he had gotten out of the pasture and in trying to bring him back, he flipped me into the air and butted my chest with his head, which doesn’t sound bad as I write it, but one thousand pounds of angry bull pushing on your chest wasn’t fun. In flipping me to the side with his head, I landed with my back against some sheep fencing with my right leg twisted so far under and behind me that my foot was pressed between my back and the fence. My youngest sister, who had followed me, saw all this and came charging forward, yelling and waving, what I seem to recall was, a surveying stake like a scimitar.

I guess two against one didn’t seem fair to the bull and he ambled off to return to his previous occupation, watching a neighbor’s cow on the other side of a more escape-proof fence. It was a bit of work but my sister helped me stand and the pain was excruciating. It was like I had done the splits and then some and to get to the standing position I had to drag my leg from under and behind me. I do not know this but it could have been dislocated because I couldn’t put any weight on it without blinding pain and then there was a kind of adjustment and while it still was a ten on the one out of ten pain scale, at least it wasn’t a twenty. Using my sister as a crutch, I limped back to our house and as we were making our way to the door, my mother leaned out her upstairs window yelling, “Did you bring that bull back?”

At that question, I wanted to throw a rock at her head if I could have bent to pick one up. I angrily asked her if she was paying attention and that I could hardly walk. Her reply was to tell me that I needed to go back and bring the animal home, to which I replied, “If you want it so bad, tell Dad to go get it.” I will never forget her very angry response.

“Your father hasn’t had his breakfast yet!”

I was so angry I couldn’t speak but my little sister, bless her heart said, “Neither have we.” In a united act of disobedience we continued into the house. I limped painfully for months afterward.

I try to excuse my mother’s actions and reactions because she spent so much time in and out of mental hospitals and wards, but what I saw my father do, I have no reliable explanation for.

Many years after the bull attack, on a late summer day, the cow had become trapped in some fencing near the house. She had a hind leg entangled in the wire somehow and was bawling loudly and continuously. I think I must have just arrived home from a walk because I heard the ruckus and went to see what was going on. When I rounded the house I saw my father, trying to disengage her leg from the fencing. I ran up to assist but he didn’t seem to want my help much, and when I started to go around to the cows head to lead her forward, which is easier to do with a cow than pushing them from behind, my father became quite agitated, angry even and demanded that I return to where he was to assist.

I asked if maybe it would be easier to cut the fence but he very angrily retorted that he wasn’t going to fix the fence because the cow was stupid enough to get caught in it. We spent the next few minutes trying to get the cow to pick up her hind leg or pushing her to see if she could walk forward and drag the leg out of the fencing but nothing helped. Again, I said maybe if I went around to her head and put a rope on her I could pull her forward, or at least encourage her to come forward, but he got even angrier. There wasn’t any exact thing the cow did or didn’t do differently that provoked him but at one moment he just seemed to pop.

My father habitually carried a Buck clasp knife in a hard leather case on his belt. The case had a snap cover that was difficult to unsnap and the knife itself was difficult to unclasp. I say these things because what he did looked vicious to me. He had to stop pushing the cow or whatever he was doing to accomplish what he did. He had to turn, and using one hand to hold the case and the other to pull that hard snap loose then remove the knife and using both hands pull the blade away from the handle, very deliberately. Then he stabbed the bawling cow in the haunch rather like it was something he really wanted to do, and not because it would get the cow to move her leg or maybe make her panic her way to freedom, but just because he wanted to and could. Because she was already panicked, it was useless as a motivating action, and then he stabbed her again and maybe because that didn’t work or because he hadn’t got the response he was seeking, he calmly refolded the knife, which was even more complicated than unfolding it because a lock button had to be pushed very firmly, and he put it away in the snap case.

I remember watching him struggle a little to close the snap because it was designed, I think, not to open easily, and thinking why did he do that? Why did he do that? I have no answers.

I honestly believe that it was because he didn’t get the reaction he wanted that he said, “Well then, she can get herself out, unless you want to help her. But do not cut the fence! I couldn’t tell if the last was a reminder or a warning to me. He then gave the animal a last disgusted look and walked away. I know I got the cow loose but I don’t remember how, but I do remember him asking, and me just saying ‘yes’.

Another incident of this variety caused me to make up my mind to enter the Naval service.

On the occasion of my graduation from high school, a notice had been sent out from the school that only parents were to be guaranteed chairs in the audience section and anyone else would need to stand, so I invited only my parents. This was in some ways unnecessary because when my brother and older sister had graduated the only other family members to attend was our immediate family. But it was obvious from the crowd that many people other than parents were attending.

During the procession to our seats I was paired with quite possibly the most desirable girl in the graduating class and I received at least a half dozen offers of payment to trade places from male classmates. One so lucrative, I asked the young lady in question if she would rather walk with the fellow who made the offer; I received a resounding negative response and she grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t you dare! He’s a creep.”

When the ceremony was over, my mother’s first question was, “Who was that girl you were walking with?” in a strangely suggestive tone. I know that parents imagine their children with various partners, but this was the first time she had ever asked such a question to me. I tried to laugh it off at the time, but her insistence in knowing also prompted a rather ingenuous addendum to her first question, which was, “Have you had a date with her?” (The only dates I had ever been on had been group dates.) I explained several times that we were simply put in alphabetical order and our pairing had been a complete accident.

When the conversation ended my best friend Mike walked up with his family, including an uncle, aunt and brother, as well as his mother. His mother made the statement that if she had known the true situation she could have gotten a lot more family to show up and made an apology to Mike.

In response, my mother said that it wouldn’t have mattered in my case, no one else would have wanted to come. My father said, “Congratulations, son.” When my father called my brother or myself ‘son’ it was his way of putting us in our place; it was not an affectionate recognition of blood connection.

After saying a cursory ‘nice to meet you’ to Mike’s family my mother said with finality, “Okay, let’s go home.” I must say I did not expect very much but the abrupt treatment of my friend’s family and that ‘we’re done here’ kind of attitude placed another black mark in a book already filled with them. Mike had just previously invited me to dinner with he and his family and I simply told them, “Mike invited me to have dinner with them and I accepted. I will see you later tonight.”

I think it was my father who said, “Well, you’re eighteen, I guess you can do what you want.” They both turned and just walked off. I wonder if they thought I was being snooty.

The look on my parents’ faces was so startling that Mike asked me after a few minutes if everything was all right. I remember taking a breath and saying that even if it wasn’t, it didn’t matter, I’d made my decision, and I have never regretted that decision once.

The dinner was delightful and it was one dinner I remember for the chief reason that there was not even one little argument; it was actually fun. Afterward Mike drove me home and wished me well and told me to keep in touch. I did the same and braced myself for an unknown reaction when I entered the house.

My parents were sitting at the table, drinking the red wine that anaesthetized so many of their nights, when I walked into the dining room. My mother’s first words to me on seeing me enter were, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” That was my greeting.

I know they had not planned any kind of special graduation dinner for me at home. They had not given my brother or my sister any kind of graduation present and I certainly was not expecting one. There was no ‘hello’, no ‘how was dinner’, there were no other words of congratulation, just, “Your dog is dead. You'll have to bury him.” I knew in that moment I had broken through some unspoken and unwritten rule they had about parental precedence and this was a kind of revenge. I could give a number of reasons why I believe this to be so but I will not.

That night I lay in my bed unsleeping, wondering what I was going to do now that I no longer had school as an escape and after hours of thinking of the dog’s bloated body and the efforts made by my two little sisters and myself to transport that corpse somewhere away from the house, and hearing my mother’s words burning in my ears and trying to blot them out with the rock-and-roll of Wolfman Jack, I finally changed the station to listen to KCTC.

KCTC was an easy-listening station, elevator music, that I hoped would put me to sleep, and the inspiration came from there. As I listened to the boring violins of Mantovani and Hugo Winterhalter into the night I counted bars of music and tried to breathe quietly to avoid bothering my brother. At around two or three in the morning, a rather insipid choral version of a Noel Coward song played that I had never heard or known of:

Matelot, Matelot,
Where you go my thoughts go with you
Matelot, Matelot,
When you go down to the sea.

I do not even remember what the rest of the song was about but in that moment I made the decision to enter the navy, and for that night at least, gratefully entered sleep.

In the years since my mother’s suicide and my father’s slow death from alcohol, smoking and pulmonary emphysema, I have asked myself many times what kind of people were these? I still wish to know.

I haven’t forgotten that both of them liked to laugh, and were creative, gifted, intelligent people, neither have I forgotten nor forgiven their cruelties, and this is what I wish and seek to do.