Steve, one year later. March 2024.

 Watching scattering snowflakes from the passenger window, they swirled and looped, taking their own time to land. The dance they performed was a gleeful dance of teasing the brown dried husks of corn, bending down to touch them, then letting the wind carry them back up and around, a bait and switch that nature plays with itself. When they landed, we are already  further down the state route, onto the next corn field, the next barn emblazoned with fading Mail Pouch Tobacco signs, another trailer park on the road from the parsonage I lived in, mostly by myself that final school year of 1985-86 to my mother’s new house with her boyfriend in Galion, Ohio.

I was in that difficult space between childhood and manhood, where I was not quite ready to be on my own but so close I could taste the freedom that eighteen brings but still dependent on people I was still angry with. This predicament made me angrier, more resentful as I most did whatever I wanted to do but when there were times I couldn’t, when my mother would wave her wand of matronly responsibility, I would seethe inside. A blend of anger mixed with a yet-unknown silent hurt of her abandoning me once more. She had picked me up in Catawba, my stepfather back in the psychiatric hospital 50 miles away from home, she wanted me to see her new house. A condo she was renting with Steve whom she had met at Maryhaven a rehab center in Columbus. She an administrator and he an alcoholic/drug user who was trying for what felt like the hundredth time to quit. I had never met him and was none too pleased to be meeting him this weekend. 

She talked to me from her side of the car while I stared outside the window at all the things that make an Ohio winter something that is as desolate and terrifying as the dead-end future can be for kid that only wanted out of everything that small town Ohio could offer. All of which was basically fuel to want something different. My eyes burned, there wasn’t a catch in my throat but more of a fireball that I kept inside lest it erupt into the front seat of that blue Chevy Cavalier and turn my mother into a stammering, crying puddle. I knew her limits. I just listened and looked. We arrived in the small town of Galion, in the center a  small courthouse, gas stations, hardware store, a feed store at the edge of town my thoughts drifted to my girlfriend who I would have to wait to see in a few days. I pined for her. My mother brought up me moving up for the rest of the school year, “no way,” I replied, “I’m not living in this shithole of a town. I’m almost done with school, so I’ll just finish it out.” Sighing in a way that she perfected, she put her hand on the back of my left hand. I flinched, taking her hand away she softly asked me “think about it. I think you will like Steve.” I rested my head against the window, feeling the cold glass against my forehead, “Jesus Christ mom, you are still fucking married” in a whisper she would be able to hear. We drove the final few minutes in silence.

Steve opened the door to their new condo, it had new furniture and Native-American art on the walls, and Steve had a small stereo in the corner next to it was a large wooden cassette holder and a stack of worn LP’s underneath it. This caught my attention and Steve came out of the kitchen and shook my hand, “I’ve heard a lot about you, your mom says you are pretty funny and like music.” “Sure” I headed towards the bathroom with my lungs in my throat and heat rising in my cheeks. The bathroom was decorated with a candle, sea shell molded soap and new hand towels. This was nothing I had ever grown up with. It smelled like cherry blossoms. As I splashed water on my face, I noticed my hands were shaking, I wanted a beer but they wouldn’t have any. Steve was sober. 

That night we went out to eat in nearby Mansfield, to a chain casual dining place—maybe it was Applebee’s, TGIF or something like that, it was the sort of place I had never really ate at as we were poor, going out to eat was only done if we drove to Columbus to see my grandparents and uncles. It was small talk, Steve mostly remaining quiet while my mother asked me about school, my girlfriend and filling out college applications. “I dunno mom, maybe I’ll go to someplace near Columbus.”  “I thought you were going to go to OU, that is what you have always said, to go home to Athens. You could live with the Zudak’s” The Zudak’s were my middle school best friend, Eric, his older brother and sisters and his mother. Eric’s father had moved out of the house a few years before and I would go down to Athens on most of my spring breaks throughout high school, wander around town, hitting the bars and drinking in shitty cars. “I’m not sure”, I wanted to near Jennifer who was going to Ohio State. “You could move up here with me and Steve and go to a community college?” “Mom, stop I’m  not going to live with you.” The rest of the dinner was quiet and when we got home, I went to bed. Over pancakes as we went out to eat (again!), Steve talked about music not really asking me what I liked but sharing how much music meant to him. “When I moved to Columbus, I probably spent more time going to concerts than I did in class.” “Oh, who did you see?” This was a test, in retrospect it was really a test by Steve to try to understand me, not win me over—he never tried to do that. His goal was to identify with me, he understood I was deeply wounded in my childhood, much of it by my mother even though I had very little insight into this hurt which at this time in my life mostly manifested itself as anger, frustration, and quiet rage. “I saw Lou Reed at the Agora, he had bleached hair and wrapped the microphone cord around his wrist like he was going to shoot up some dope. I thought that was the craziest thing I had ever seen.” “Steve, he doesn’t need to hear that” my mother piped in. Rolling my eyes, “mom I know what dope is, and Lou Reed is one of my favorites. Who else did you see?” I was impressed. “I saw the Rolling Stones in Cleveland on Mick Jagger’s birthday and they played so long they cut the power on them, I thought there would be a riot. There was a giant inflatable penis that went over the crowd.” Many years later he told me he was on acid at that Stones concert. We talked a little bit more, he had seen The New York Dolls, the Velvet Underground, Kiss opening for the New York Dolls, Neil Young, Dylan;  so many artists that I had discovered during high school. That day we went for a small walk around the town, I begrudgingly realized I liked my mom’s new boyfriend. 

On the way back from walking my mother and I argued, “just take me home.” Feeling like a dog in a cage, trapped and annoyed that I was helpless and at her mercy. “I don’t want to be here no matter how much you think I will like your new life, I don’t give a shit. Take me back.” In her bedroom I heard my mother cry, mournful wails and I felt no pity for her, no remorse. Eventually she came out of her room, face flushed, eyes reddened from crying. “Steve is going to drive you back, I don’t feel well enough to make the drive.” A part of me felt a tinge of being abandoned  yet again, “Ok.” But what I was thinking was, “fuck, you are going to have your boyfriend drive me back to the empty house I share with YOUR husband? You are kidding me?” I swallowed that thought and fetched my clothes from the spare bedroom. Steve had a small pick-up truck, we rode in silence except for the tapes he let me feed into the dashboard, John Prine’s first record, David Allen Coe’s greatest hits, Dire Straits, and Lou Reed. He dropped me off in the alley next to the parsonage, snow gentling falling around me as I got out of the truck. Steve leaned over, “Nice to meet you Bela, your mom really loves you.” He drove off as I turned towards the house, darkened and empty, a place that was home but never really felt like it.

Over the years as we all worked our way into time as if it were a field of sawgrass, cutting our ankles, a slog into middle age for me and a slow sunken decline towards death for the generation before me and my siblings. There were break-ups, fuck-ups, children and my own struggles with misty sorrow that has seemed to follow me like a sick-feral cat. A walking disappointment was what I felt like much of the time, even though I had enough confidence in myself to live the kind of life I desired (mostly consisting of music, drinking and laughter). But  when it came to my family, I would have sooner not have to let them into my world. The fact that I didn’t really attend college but opted to work in a record store, which didn’t seem like work at all—either to myself or to my family. My mother, father and my brother would pine for me to try college again, Steve never did, just encouraged me to do what I liked to do, “Susan, he will figure it out for himself and if he needs you, he will ask you.” This was as true a statement as has ever been said about me, Steve was the wisdom of our family. A solid towering tree that stood tall in the middle of our brushfires, he felt the wind at the top of his branches and the cold of the winter in our lives, I was gifted to come and sit among the wooden limbs without ever feeling judged. I never heard him raise his voice and living with my mother was a way to practice dealing with frustration on a daily basis. 

Time is tracked in various ways, tracking the stars in the universe their flickering light coming from billions of miles and billions of years from the past and as their lights land upon the eyes of stargazers many will have ceased being billions of years ago. Their sparkles a sort of gravestone etched in the sky for us to gaze up. We mark time through the books we read, a collective history made from the drawing in caves, on stone walls, through the ancient Egyptians  utilizing papyrus over 5000 years ago, to the development of papermaking by the Chinese to the present where digital pixels contain the entirety of humankind at the touch of fingertips. I tracked the age of my children by pencil, every six months they would stand still against their bedroom wall or against the door in my bedroom apartment while I drew a straight line at the top of their head. These inch increments showed them how age can be measured, they quit doing it a few years ago and my son, aged 15 is now taller than me—it is as if the tracking is no longer needed; he has won the contest. Boxes of photographs fill my basement and in corners of my house, shoeboxes, wooden boxes and cardboard boxes carry the information of my past, the past of my ancestors stacked upon one another as if they were ping-pong balls in a lottery machine. Black and white, Polaroid and faded colored photos from the early 1970’s that have grown their own age spots, blotted with fuzzy white and yellow globs that may overtake my siblings, myself and Santa. My whiskers are mostly white now, if I don’t shave then I will look my age so I run the razor over my skin, the skin that is not as tight as it once was and with that razor I make myself younger, anyway this is what I believe. So many ways of tracking time although in my mind I see the universe swirling like a giant whirlpool swallowing up everything all at once, and in this grand whirlpool people are smaller than a droplet of water rushing over Niagara Falls and then become mist. And when I die, my memories die with me and perhaps for one or two generations I will be remembered for a few things in my life but not for the mundane or what my daily interactions were like, not the cuddling of my dog nor the pride in my children or the laughter I was a part of, so much laughter that it caused people’s head’s to turn. I track the days of Steve’s death by my memories of him, there are moments when I breath in and at the bottom of my breath in the tiny flicker where it stops before turning inside on my out breath, it is in that speck of time where I feel a panic and I yearn for him, for my mother the most. 

I have a dream, a recurring one that sometimes comes in different scenarios, always weird because dreams are strange, baffling, and weird, it is the very nature of dreams. As if reality is witnessed through a cracked kaleidoscope. In the dream I am leaping into the ocean, sometimes I’m wading in with the sun hot on my face, other times I am heaving myself into the water from a dock or a boat both and sometimes it is from a cliff like the Mexican divers who hurtle themselves over the rocks below to split the waves in half. The split is spitting into death’s face, “take that mother fucker.” I leap into the water and break the waves and then the waves break me, so they think but I’m already broken. Not whole. Not half, but a million shards of me, each one reflecting something else and in the ocean, they look like diamonds scattering in every direction, carried away. 

Steve lives through my body, my thoughts, this is what I like to believe and when I play the music, he so cherished I feel him in the notes, the yelps of the singers and the bubbles of sound that carry me to a place where I usually feel safe. I know he listened for the same reasons I did, for comfort, for connection. Nobody dies instantly, we all die and live by degrees. Some are just closer than others, some can taste the bitter richness of whatever that unknown darkness carries. I miss you Steve, perhaps more than ever.

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.