Category: 20 Minutes

Like An Unwanted Chore

It seems that each time I return to use the platform on which this website is built (i.e., WordPress), it is in need of an update. Although the update should be automated, that has never worked, and still does not. The reason for this is lost on me, and I don’t care to take the time to find out. Instead, I’d prefer to write and to think about what I am writing.

I am contented to say in this post that, at least for the time being, I am more interested in writing to write than to share with you. When I started blogging in 2004, and in each of my restarts since then, I have felt the need to reach out to an audience – even if that audience was a limited few. Writing publicly allowed me to share many thoughts and visions that I otherwise wouldn’t have had occasion to share. And I received feedback from some folks that they liked what I write, or they found it sad. Most often, people wonder if what I write is true. They usually wonder this about those entries that blend what is left of the truth when it’s pecked by my fingertips with the thoughts dangling about in my head like cured meet in a butchers meat locker.

I want to write short stories now because I have many ideas to write about. They’re bigger than blogs, and will take more time. They’re bigger than me, and that I don’t mind. They are what they are, and they’ve been sitting around like pickled eggs in a jar. It’s time to go down, go ’round, go back before I forget what I’m good at.

Dinner With Dad

I sat across from my dad in an armless, white, wooden chair with loose joints that creaked and rocked each time I shifted my weight from one butt cheek to the other. His chair was the same.

While eating leftover meatloaf and waiting for mom/wife and sister/daughter to come home to give us something to talk about, we started laughing at the noises emanating from below.

It got to the point where we co-ordinated our weight transfer such that the chairs would groan in unison under the weight of our not-so-fat asses. Then, as one of us should have anticipated, the predictable happened, and the front right leg of my chair shattered at the joint where, only moments prior, it met the seat portion of my chair, and, now, was ninety degrees away from where it should be. I fell hard and I fell fast until my butt met the floor, the back of my head hit the shoulder of the chair, and my chin slammed against the edge of the kitchen table.

This was an instance where the outcome was greater than the literal summation of the individual parts. Sure, my tailbone, cranium, and chin hurt on their own, but the combustion of pain synapses firing simultaneously caused the blood vessels in my eyes to burst.

I laugh when in pain, and was now alternating between giggling uncontrollably and yelling at the chair while looking like the Virgin Mary crying blood on the eve of a miracle.

Looking back, I have no recollection of what my dad did in the moment after my collapse. I have a hunch that, prior to lurching in my direction, he took one last bite of ketchup-covered meatloaf because it was excellent.

Written from 9:05 pm to 9:35 pm on Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at home in Traverse City, Michigan.

In the Absence

I am sitting it church like the good young man (I never was). The pew beneath me is padded and covered with fabric of a course texture. It is twill-like, designed, I presume, to keep the young and old, alike, from slipping onto the floor during the lackluster sermons that bridge the seasons of our many different lives. In the absence of miracle or tragedy, there is simply existence, friendship, the smile of the nearby aging, the antics of the far-away youth, and the faint smell of Potluck wafting from the bowels of God’s station.

I look across from my balcony on the right side of the dimly lit sanctuary, which flows with dark, blood-red carpets, to see a man so fat that, if the raven behind him were to sneeze, he would tumble forward over the polished brass railings, installed to keep the problem children from playing and the tired husbands from resting, and smash the birds below.

I can’t help to think that church is for the old. The lonely. The single. The abandoned. The desolate. They congregate beneath me. Their comb-overs and permanents swept and teased, respectively, into positions marginally acceptable for social presentation. I wonder, when I look across at the fat man and down at the crippled birds, where they look for the hour we sit together and listen to the choir sing and the preacher preach. Who fills the choir? And where do they look? Where does the preacher go when away from here? And where does he look?

I grasp the collection dish and pass it along. The change slipping through the envelopes and checks jangles against the side of the brass bowl. It’s too heavy for a small child or elderly woman. It’s too heavy for me as I pass it quickly without thought.

The sermon begins and I listen for a message, but my mind drifts to a place I cannot name – cannot identify – cannot connect with. This un-namable nothing moves me to tears that I keep in the bucket of my eyes and, in the absence, I hear, but do not comprehend, the stationary chaos. I feel as though I am seeing myself in a multi-generational mirror for the first time. And to see both my beginning and expiration frozen around me (or am I frozen within them?) is, on most Sunday mornings, too much to keep within my own earthly body.

Written from 12:08 pm to 12:28 pm on Saturday, November 13, 2010 at home in Traverse City, Michigan.

The Mighty Shake

When he stands, it is as a mighty lion stands – a deliberate struggle of a beast battered by carnivorous dreams. Restless and cold, he shifts through the monochrome darkness of night. With each step his paw lands with the thrust of an uncalibrated pile driver trying to beat down the house in which he lives. His good master does not wake; not so for the neighbor girl tumbling beyond the pale green drywall.

He reaches his mirage and begins his inarticulate laps from the cool stainless steel bowl. Water splashes on the wall and the floor and his crusty black nose. When the struggle is over, strands of sinewy slobber drape his mug. The “mighty shake” is coming. The walls recoil in terror. The picture frames fall flat. The clean – the spotless – the untouched – they all post their guard – ready and waiting. His great brute box head turns violently and sets in motion a furious chain reaction of jowl to drool to mid-air acrobats of gelatin-like mouth droppings seeking out the clean – the spotless – the untouched.

Written from 11:05 pm to 11:25 pm on Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at home in Traverse City, Michigan.

Remembering Summer

Gaze about from where you stand. Spin in circles ’til you’re dizzy as a child exiting the best merry-go-round ride she’s ever had. Look up at the humongous sky above and wonder aloud what’s beyond the antique clouds and shimmering stars. Watch the yellow leaves fall and remember it was a hot and dry and brilliant summer that left us with more than a handful of memories. And then, in good time, when the wind blows hard down the paths that we happen upon and the warmth has dissipated, take another moment to wrap the textures of life all around you like a hundred blankets quilted from everything that’s so much bigger than any single one of us could ever imagine. Remember summer. Enjoy fall. And look forward to all that is to come.

Three Lovely Heads

Three lovely heads turned left, looking, not where they must, but where they may. Two of three capped with color. The third: just light brown hair, up and off to reveal a flushed cold ear. The snow on the path whence they came is trampled flat from sporty snowshoes and tender paws.

Maybe, if I were to jump inside a lovely head… maybe each one is looking back at their tracks being eroded by the hill-top wind and wishing they, too, could go on such a wonderful ride through the crisp country air. Up and away, just as a snowflake, as high as the birds until the furiously white sun in the expansive blue sky melted each one back down among naked poplars, oaks full of curled brown leaves, and evergreens with their thin needles wiggling in the wind. They would set down on the diamond snow, yet the only depressions around would be the dimples in six smiling cheeks concealed by three lovely heads turned left, looking, not where they must, but where they may.

Written, for the most part, from 11:05 pm to 11:30 pm on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.

Home Sweet Home

The young boy stood on the dirt shoulder of a rutted country road as an automobile sputtered past leaving behind a cloud of dust. The sun was white and hot, bleaching everything beneath and creating a raw vacancy in the already desolate terrain. The grain of the land stood up to him as he knelt down to it and when he reached his hand down to the dirt, he thought of home and of mama and of the small dog they found one day and kept forever.

The dehydrated crops stretched to the horizon and turned back his eyes and thoughts from any plan he’d ever had to get away from the abandoned details. ‘Look around,’ mama would say, ‘And you’ll see how lucky you are.’ He squinted through the dust sifting down at a another car coming along the right fork in the road. His hand, stuffed in the pocket of his ripped jean shorts, clenched around the natural wood and polished brass caps of his carving knife. He withdrew the knife, pinched open its large blade, and ran the dry skin of his thumb perpendicular to the sharp edge. It scraped his dry skin audibly. Maybe like the tear of paper. Or a mason jar full of mama’s homemade blackberry jam being dragged across their counter top.

Written from 10:00 pm to 10:25pm on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 in my childhood bedroom in Traverse City, Michigan.