For Walter Butts
The fathers are waiting with their cigarettes and big stomachs for us to arrive. The place where they live does not have time, only space, and they fill it with talks of shortstops and bars, drill sergeants, meals remembered from the days of appetite. Worn jokes about drinking too much and who cares if smoking takes a few years off your life since those are the last years anyway? They talk of their sons, joggers, salad eaters, their strange music and soft hands, the angular jargon of their professions (not jobs). Most will nod, say grudgingly that the kids seemed to come out all right after the crazy stuff with drugs and hair. One will admit he laughed when his son said the kids were driving him crazy.…
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—My cat yowled on the roof. I dragged the ladder from the garage.
—“Mimi,” he said. “Mimi.” He meows my name. Nobody can believe it.
—I crawled after him, afraid to stand. He sauntered over to the edge, stepped
gingerly onto the limb of the tree he’d climbed up, and slipped down to the ground
with ease.
—Below, square houses on square lawns spread out in square blocks. I was boxed in,
in a box full of boxes.
—The woods and river were visible beyond the subdivision, though, and birds chirped
in the dryer-sheet scented afternoon. I decided to stay.
—Two of my four teenagers came out. The boy said, “Are you gonna jump?”
—“Hush, smarty. Bring your mother a pillow and blanket, my cigarettes and lighter,
and an ashtray, please.”…
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The Scent of Style
We all write with the same words available in dictionaries but what makes writing styles so different, the words put together in sentences go through sea change used by different writers? Cooks work with often the same recipes but we have no trouble identifying the food as Aunt Mary’s.
One of the reasons style is so unique could be related to what John Galsworthy noted in his preface to one of his novels, Fraternity: “A novelist, however observant of type and sensitive to the shades of character, does little but describe and dissect that which lies within himself.” Octavio Paz, on poetry: “Poetry is not what words say but what is said between them, that which appears fleetingly in pauses and silences.”…
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There are secrets to how things are made, and they hold the world together. Learning these is part of what keeps us alive. How to clothe yourself and fry an egg, how to wash your clothes and show up on time. I thought about this today while I hung a pair of folding doors and decided, for once, to follow the directions. Then it was process, not mystery, and soon, I had two doors opening nicely, then closing again.
I had never heard of a trotline or seen one run until my roommate and his fishing buddy, an overmedicated vet, decided to run one in the mud-colored river that cut our town in half more decisively than any set of railroad tracks ever could. In two weeks, they snagged only a few catfish.…
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Bleak frozen landscape of a northern U.S. state along the Canadian border, flat and poor, my first job in a county mental health clinic, where teenage mothers sat in the waiting room feeding babies from bottles filled with Coca-Cola and Group 13 was filled with the unluckiest women in the world. I sustained myself by thinking of myself as an artist first and therapist second, but I couldn’t help giving my patients my best self, with little left for anything else. They had so little. The children seemed lost entirely, but the teenagers were hungry and a little attention went a long way in changing the course of a life or so I thought. I wanted to believe I had that kind of power against the elements of the weather and all the other oppression these young women had faced.…
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