Puzzles–new writing.

So many puzzle pieces were scattered on the floor, on the dining room table, stacked on shelves haphazardly against dusty compact disks & half read books, in cardboard boxes that smelled of age and dampness, in plastic tubs filled to the top with even more pieces. They came in the form of conversations with siblings, with partners and family members that were disappearing like steam from a coffee cup. A photo taken from the front yard of a red clapboard house in Newport News, Virginia. Three children ranging from a smallish kid all of eight years old in a red tee-shirt, multi-stripped Brady Bunch Jeans complete with worn out knee, his brother, just one year older wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers the number 32 adorning the front as he would play pick up football pretending, he would be Franco Harris mouth jutting out for the quick and then the old sister. She stork-like, all skinny arms and legs with cut off shorts, long brown hair to her shoulders, she would have been in 7^th grade. Behind them, the mother, short red hair, a yellow tank-top sans bra and reddish jeans, her fingers extended, face serious laying out the ground rules of the soon commencing Easter Egg hunt that was going to be, by all appearances, a throw-down. And finally, next to the mother, standing just inches behind her, but clearly behind her, the stepfather, short but compact and bear of a man whose strength was evident underneath the jean jacket he wore, the one with motorcycle patches sewn on. Eyes on his wife and a small grin on his face, a quiet man who loved intensely. But who took the photo? They were not very friendly with the neighbors who thought that these northerners were interlopers, to be met with guarded suspicion. The neighbor on one side was a gossip who called the mother, Susie, which she hated and dropped the n-word nonchalantly as did most of the neighbors. “The neighborhood has gone to hell since they moved in ten years ago” she had told the mother who promptly asked her to leave, making an excuse that she had somewhere to go.  The neighbor on the other side of their house had four children, the oldest child, a girl went to school with the dark-haired daughter and would baby-sit that youngest child and at times make him take off his clothes and tie him up, telling him they were playing doctor as she took her bra off and rubbing her teenage breasts against him. He never told anyone, he wasn’t scared when it happened just perplexed and wondered what was happening. “Shhh, don’t tell anyone we do this, we will get in trouble.” Who took this picture so long ago? The photo is faded, the edges growing lighter with age, a time when most photos seemed other worldly as if every photo ever taken from 1966-1982 was taken on a soundstage, somewhat out of focus, the colors blurred and in the memory of those who were there, perhaps too, their memories were blurred, the photos directing the past. A soft and faded focus that dulled the pain behind some of these old photographs.

Stretch Armstrong with only moments to live.

            Another photo, three boys almost all teenagers dressed in white blouses, pleated knee length shorts with close cropped hair all parted to the side. In the middle of them, their mother looking over her shoulder and smiling at her middle child, who is beaming a grin back to his mother. To her right, her eldest son, black haired, tall, and handsome, he too is smiling. Leading the front is her youngest son, probably thirteen or fourteen a bit of baby fat on his face, something that he would never quite shed even when he died at the age of seventy-five, a toothy grin looking straight at the camera. They are walking, feet raised and arms swinging. They are on a hill, behind them large parked heavy cars that look like they were props in an ancient noir movie. Palm trees, out of focus in the background informs the viewer of the tropical nature and a large looming mountain sits over it all, lending even more mystery to the locale. The mother’s hair is shoulder length, with artificial curls around her dangling earrings, and a small pearl necklace dips just below her neck. Sober jewelry but showing the importance of looking good, of proper manners. Her dress cut just below the knee, it’s white but it may be yellow, or a light blue—one will never know as the photo is black and white mostly likely taken in 1959 or 1960. Three of them are now dead, all lived to be old; half of them past the age of sixty, and all witnessed the transformation from a black and white world, to the bleached out nineteen sixties and seventies and finally to bright digital world of the 21^st Century. Who took the photo, was it the father, the husband that was not around very often. The head of the household who lived nearly two hours away in a mountain top city near the sea, where he kept a small apartment and worked as an engineer. In his fridge he kept eggs, bread, jam and butter. A case of warm beer on the floor, Nero Wolff books next to his bed. Did he keep other things in this apartment? Other secrets? Did he take this photo of his family who were all smiling, an idyllic nuclear family who just fifteen years prior nearly died from both American and German bombs, making it to an Austrian refugee camp where they barely survived for nearly two years, until getting passage to this small South American country where this photo was taken? He may have, but most likely the mother hired a photographer as she would throughout her life, her growing family of grandchildren and great-grandchildren a testament to survival and, in the haze of chaos some stability. Just who took the photo, what were the color of their clothes? The colors of the bulky automobiles in the background?

            A letter, typed on crispy fragile typewriter paper that feels like brittle parchment paper, if it was near a flame, it would immediately be engulfed in flames like a top secret note in a James Bond film, “this message will self-destruct in ten seconds.” Poof. Words uneven on the page, maybe the “t” and “o” keys were a bit off, as they look like jagged teeth in the middle of the sentences, hiccupping across the fragile page. The letter typed from that oldest son from that black and white photo taken so many years ago  to his now youngest son, who was only six or seven years old at the time, living four hundred miles away on the far end of an island. A world away from the quietness of where this letter was typed, in a Benedictine monastery nestled in southeastern Pennsylvania. It is brief, the words simple but constructed of love and gentleness, where the father tells his son about the beauty and simplicity of picking plums, the brothers in Christ helping one another and laughing. A short description of seeing deer eat from the garden the monks grow, how the father abhors the killing of animals. At the end he asks his son to draw him a picture of flowers, how much he enjoys getting letters from his son. The letter sat silent for nearly fifty years until it was unearthed and given to the son, now middle-aged and over sixteen years had separated son and father since the last time they saw one another. What prompted the letter so many years ago? It was forgotten, a faint scent of the love the father once held closely for his young son who must have been thrilled to get the letter and its accompanying photograph of two young monks pulling plums from a tree. 

            A hole that doesn’t fit anywhere but fills in the large gaps that connect all the pieces, the holes that fill in the memories that are there but that aren’t there. They are not his memories, the boy who is now a man with children of his own on the cusp of their own adulthood, they are all filed away somewhere in the ground, in the ashes of the participants. I arrive in these boxes with my spelunker’s equipment:  a light fixed on my forehead, rope, air, magnifying glass and DNA that can’t be read. Searching amongst these clues for an answer to these holes. So many god-damn holes. 

Tags: Bela Koe-Krompecher, engaged Buddhism, family, memories, mental health, secrets