Selected Writings From "Everything Is" 

                                                                                                           ~ NOTE ~   
    
      As a highly sensing male, complete with all the gifts and curses that come with being so, navigating life as a man living within an aggression-encouraged male culture has always been challenging, made worse by the increase of dehumanizing male political leaders. Compounding that has been the inundation of a male-dominated corporate structure whose technological innovations and devices have made life feel far too fast, complicated, and soul-crushing for me, as I suspect it has for many.
     “Everything Is” is a memoir of poignant short essays about ideas, events, and experiences I believe all people universally share. Seen through the eyes of one who sees differently, the memoir explores the calamity, hilarity, and wisdom found within life’s events, and how, in the end, I came to find the light and my own renewed structure to live by. Below are the first five essays.




 

                                                                                                    ~   SIMMERING   ~


 

     Sitting on the front steps of our new house, I was pleased to experience the current hush in the air after all the commotion that had come earlier from the street – the shout-outs from the old man pushing his cart down along lengthy Whitney Street, yelling “Straw … berries, straw … berries,” the constant jingles from the Mister Softie popsicle truck making its usual three o’clock rounds, and even the far-off screech of cicadas that gripped this neighborhood during the summer. But I knew I would miss these sounds soon. The first Tuesday after Labor Day was approaching, marking the beginning of another school year being stuck inside a dreary classroom.    
By the end of October, though the summer sounds surrounding our front porch had left, my imagination had not. There, between the street lamppost and stop sign, I imagined roaming woolly mammoths crushing the underbrush. There, crossing the asphalt were bison and reindeer trampling the cat-tails, berry bushes, and fallen acorns. And over there in the Bennett’s yard, wasn’t that a scruffy, bearded man bending over, scraping the grass with his hands for seeds? Mrs. Clark, my third-grade teacher, had just taught us about people called hunter gatherers, nomadic, fire-loving people who had not only hunted and farmed for centuries but lived healthy lives just by eating meat and wild vegetation. To think such creatures and people once roamed this very spot on Whitney Street as freely as Ford Mustangs, Chevy Impalas, and Buick Wildcats drove it now.
     But these were modern days with new-fangled electronics and fancy plastic appliances that replaced the heavier, time-honored metal ones. Some of these things were good, some not. Earlier in July, Mom couldn’t wait to get the “New and Improved” Mirro-Matic steamer for the house, but after using the fancy machine just once, she yelled, “This cheap thing is aluminum, not cast iron, and I want my money back!” There was the day she took me with her to the Sears furniture floor room in downtown Silver Spring to look for a modern couch. The salesman said, “Madam, what I always say is ‘Show me what you have and I’ll tell you who you are.’” All I knew was that he had bad breath. How could Mom not smell it? It nearly knocked me over. “And once I see this sofa in your home, then I’ll know you truly are a smart and sophisticated lady.” Mom not only bought the stinky sales pitch but the couch as well. Weeks later, however, she appeared no more sophisticated to me, and no one thought the couch placed in the living room was particularly suave either – not one family member or visiting neighbor chose to sit in it. Why did people call it a living room then? And why did adults say newer was always better than the old?
Lazy autumn afternoons sitting on the front steps gave way to the bleak and wet late November weather Maryland was known for. The basement was the place to be now, the musty dwelling where old things like Mom’s sewing machine passed down from her grandmother and the beat up Silvertone lived.
     On one drizzly, Sunday afternoon, I sat on the floor watching The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn while Mom darned clothes on the sewing machine. She hated that contraption. It never worked right. Wouldn’t a needle and thread have been easier to stitch the holes in our jeans and socks?
If only Mom smiled more. Her face was just as pretty as Maid Marian’s in the movie. Even though Marian and evil Prince John had just been captured in Sherwood Forest by Robin, Marian’s smile shone through. But how could she love a mean man like Prince John who’d nearly taxed the poor, downtrodden villagers to death? Why did all the prettiest girls at my new school always seem more interested in the bad boys than the good? And, despite Mom’s slaving to make our new house a castle for Dad, why did he smile even less than Prince John? Even now, Mom was doing double duty, steaming Brussels sprouts in the Mirro-Matic up in the kitchen. Inhaling the sprouty stench invading the basement might now meant it’d be only a matter of minutes before the Mirro-Matic’s whistle would scream for Mom to let the pressure out or it’d explode. But, as usual, she’d keep her composure, hold her frustrations in, and dinner would once again be waiting for us on the table.
Sort of.
“You’re all late. Do not sit down yet. Do not speak. I have an announcement to make.”
That we were moving back to the old house, the one in Takoma Park we all liked better?
“From now on, we will eat here at exactly six o’clock, no later. And we will have good family discussion around the dinner table, even if it kills you to do so. So, that’s that. Let’s eat.”
     Everyone sat – Dad to my left, Mom the right, twelve-year-old, Cathy, and sixteen-year-old twin brothers, Don and Doug, across from me – but no one within the circle said a thing. I, however, detected little noises going on everywhere, weird ones like Don’s knife squeaking against his plate trying to saw some fried liver in half, the bell on Dexter’s cat collar jangling as he dashed after a rock-hard pea Cathy’d dropped under the table, and Dad’s fork tapping against the glass cup filled with vinegar to soak another scorched Brussels sprout in – to think that repulsive vinegar was the same stuff Mom used to clean our bathroom drains with! She cooked all our food as if seared in a vat of acid. Beef, once pink and plump from the market, was always fried to a third its original size after her new electric fry cooker got done with it. Broccoli, once green as grass, was boiled gray every night on the range of her fancy, cutting-edge stovetop. Our breakfast eggs were fried so hot on her contemporary, deluxe oven that the egg whites turned clear as glass. How I missed the old house’s kitchen, the primitive pots and pans, how vegetables were actually colorful, yet no one in the family ever said a word about her near total destruction of food, that is, until tonight, when I let it out that the liver was, “Well, kinda dry, Mom. I mean really dry.”
“Why, you ungrateful, eight-year-old little …. Growing up on our farm, we were thankful for anything we could get our hands on. We didn’t waste a scrap of vegetable or fat of anything. We ate strawberry stems if we had to! That’s all we had, just our meager house, our bit of land, our crops, and my father’s spare income. How dare you be so ungrateful.”
     Had Mom once been a hunter gatherer? Had she really grown up living on mere vegetables, stems, and animals to eat – and liked it? Learning to live and eat off the land is what got Mom here and she actually turned out okay.  
Sort of.

                                                                                                             ~   INSIDE    ~


      It was the coldest day of the year so far, something Mom said after reading the icicle-laden thermometer hanging just outside our frosted kitchen window. I especially needed the warmth from Cookie on this early morning, his beagle body lying next to me on the floor beside the living room heat vent. His ears were like velvet, and petting them nearly lulled me back to sleep. So soothed in peace this morning, violins were playing, but it was merely the opening music to Captain Kangaroo’s theme song playing in the basement.
Wandering down there, Cathy had already beaten me to the Silvertone and taken the space on the floor directly in front of it. Today, I would sit right next to her anyway.
I guess I got too close – a static electric spark exploded within the paper-thin space between our bare elbows when they dared to connect.
“Ow!” she yelled.
“Hey, say it, don’t spray it.”
“Get away. Cooties, you pervert.”
I had been told many times before I was a pervert and had cooties but still didn't know what they were. What was so wrong about touching someone in the family?
“Michael, give your sister some room,” Mom said, standing over by the washing machine.
"Hey, Dad, it's doing it again," Cathy said, trying to nudge his attention away from tightening a pipe under the wash basin. “The picture’s rolling over and over and over.”
When a charged whisper came out from under the basin, Mom looked down at him as quickly as Cathy and I swiveled our heads in his direction. Dad had to know his whispers were a dead giveaway he had cussed. Why was it when someone whispered something you weren’t supposed to hear only made you want to hear it more?
Crawling out from underneath the basin, Dad walked over toward the TV. There was a big screwdriver in one hand, a heavy wrench squeezed in the other. He wasn’t going to hurt the Silvertone was he, the cherished seventh member of the family?
Actually, Dad was very gentle. In carefully taking off the set’s back panel, he had his hands all over the Silvertone, not only the wood exterior but the mess of wires and weird, glow-y glass things deep inside. I leaned in close to get a better look.
"No, don't get too close! This is dangerous. Go out and play. Both of you."
"But Mom won’t let us out," Cathy said. "Mom, we're bored when we can’t go out.”
"I said no, and that's final. Twenty degrees is dangerous. You’re all staying inside."
“Damn horizontal hold.” This time, Dad’s words echoed from inside the set.
Sitting back down alongside Cathy, but not too close, I stared into the screen and watched Captain Kangaroo’s body rise over and over again. Up, up, and up he rolled. I felt as if in a trance from it all.
     Then, down, down, down came footsteps. Or was I imagining them, those slow and steady steps getting closer to me, ones like Frankenstein’s boots shuffling forward, or the webbed feet of the ugly gill man’s in Creature from the Black Lagoon?
Turning around, it was Doug’s silhouette approaching! That look in his eye, the weird smile on his face, all a sure warning of impending attack. Cathy ran off so fast she even touched my elbow passing by.
"Douglas, leave your brother alone," Mom said.
"Stop! Stop!" I said.
"I'm just tickling him," Doug said.
Fingers up my belly, up my chest, like ants crawling all over my skin!
"Douglas, I said stop."
“I’m not hurting him.”
"I’m going crazy, Mom! Tell him to cut it out."
“Douglas? Douglas?”
“Mom … Mom … Mom ….”
"Stop!" Dad yelled.
All went quiet. Dead quiet.
Doug had gone finger crazy. Why?
“God, Mom, I was only ….” Doug whispered to Mom.
“You need to be careful when touching people. Always,” she said.
Cathy was about to cry. Dad’s stern voice always scared her; me too. Wanting so much to make her feel better, I closed in closer.
“Michael, leave your sister alone. And all of you – behave today. Find something to do inside.”
I would not be denied going outdoors. Mom still hadn’t learned that whenever she told me not to do something, it only made me want to do it more. But it wasn’t easy slipping upstairs when no one was looking, getting into my winter clothes by myself, or buckling the last toggle on my black rubber boots, but I did it.
Outside, snow was falling everywhere. The world was covered in white. The woods and the ground were one in color. Traipsing through the drifts by the fence, working my body against their weight, my body got so hot I felt as if I were inside a sauna.
Yes, I said to myself, go ahead and pull off the gloves, the scarf, the cap! Go on and catch flakes with your tongue, flick bits of snow off dangling leaves, and rub your hands across your face! Out here, I can do all the touching I want.
But, oh, how quickly I got cold again. Maybe the truth was I didn’t want to be outside as much as I just didn’t want to be inside.

 


                                                                                                           ~   NATURES   ~


With one succinct snap of his fingers, we all gathered around Dad and listened in.
“Okay,” he said, holding a Budweiser in hand. “Your mother and I think it’s time for a change. We’ve decided we’re all gonna loosen up a little, unwind out in wild nature. We’re going camping this weekend.”
“Where, Dad, where?” I said.
“Out at Crow’s Nest Lodge in western Maryland. Since you’re nine now, you’re going, too, Michael.”
He had all four of us kids in the palm of his hand, excited, thrilled, and anxious to go. But Dad, as he often did whenever he actually chose to speak, especially when drinking his Budweiser, had a knack for overdoing things, or “stretching the damn truth” as Mom called it, and he was doing it again. “Long, flowing streams, stars galore, and views of the mountains as far as the eye can see.”
If he’d been smart, he would’ve kept it short because the more he expanded on how fantastic the views were going to be, the more I doubted whether our family, especially one with three teens would want to spend a weekend on one spot of dirt, let alone cramped together in any spot. The more Dad failed to keep it short, the more I felt my body shrinking in.
The moment we got to our sunny campsite at Crow’s Nest on Friday afternoon, the entire family went right to work: I collected firewood; Cathy set up the kitchen with Mom; Dad rigged up a big plastic tarp over the kitchen with rope in case it rained; and Don and Doug assembled the big, green box tent. But after all the chores had been completed, everybody went right back to who they were before we got here: Dad sat in a folding chair and read the newspaper; Cathy sat on the picnic table and listened to her transistor radio; Don and Doug disappeared into thin air; and Mom burned our hot dogs until they looked like Tiparillo cigars. Meanwhile, by evening, Crows’ Nest campground had completely changed, becoming filled to capacity with people, their cars and trailers crammed with so much stuff it was as if they’d never left home at all.
Even nature changed. It rained during dinner. Lightning flashed nearby. Wind kept blowing the gas stove out. I got cold and wet. Everyone snarled and bickered. Then, as we sat around the campfire roasting marshmallows on sticks, wet wood made the campfire smokey. Eventually, only the stick ends that poked and tapped around in the coals spoke. Orange embers faded out. Some crackled upon their last breath. One ember popped so loud Mom jumped right out of her seat. And after the fire was done, Dad completely exploded when the kitchen tarp fell down.
     Living in nature was supposed to be fun, but this wasn’t anything like the mild and cloudless outdoor Westerns I’d seen in Sugarfoot, Wagon Train, and Daniel Boone. I felt stuck in no man’s land somewhere between real nature and television’s portrayal of it. After I wriggled into my sleeping bag Friday night, positioned by Mom and Dad directly between theirs, I grew more and more restless, dreaming of lying on my bed at home, not a musty canvas floor on top of rocky ground. It might take hours to get to sleep tonight.
By the time I woke in the morning, everyone had left the tent. When I tried to wiggle out of my bag, I couldn’t. It was strapped all around with rope. Mom, Dad, or some boogeyman had wrapped me up during the night. Don and Doug used to sleepwalk when they were young, but I never had. Had I become numb from all the twisting and squirming to finally get out from the bound bag, or was I in some kind of shock?
In the morning, as I sat alone in the drizzle, staring into a new campfire, I waited for an explanation from someone why rope had been wrapped around me. After no one spoke about the lassoing issue as if it never existed, I threw the rope in the fire when everyone’s backs were turned. As it burned, I marveled at how fascinating flames were, solid and powerful one minute and gone the next. If fire wasn’t solid, could it be I wasn’t solid either? Was the log I sat on solid? Did this weekend even happen? Did the crashing waves on the Delaware shore we visited last summer ever exist? All I knew was that campfires, waves, and even drizzle were the best things on earth. But I also understood how the raw outdoors brought out the true nature in everyone, for better and for worse. It’s just the way it was, the way people were. Maybe that’s why Saturday and Sunday were no different than Friday.
     As we drove back late Sunday afternoon, I thought back on the weekend. I learned that too many people in nature wasn’t a good thing. It even made some people turn into Sasquatch overnight. And once we got home, it felt like there were too many people in the house, too – a crowd around the refrigerator, a rush to the radio, a line for the toilet. Once I made it into the bathroom and cleaned my face and hands with soap, something Mom demanded I do, I got that dreamy, fiery, beachy feeling again. There in the mirror, a big bubble rested peacefully on my forehead, reflecting all kinds of colors on its soapy exterior, projecting beautiful scenes of nature and loving people. But then, just like a dying, fading ember, it popped. 

 

 
                                                                                                         ~   FAMILY LIFE    ~


     Did birds love? Could birds love? Was such a thing possible? In time, I thought the question stupid and stopped asking it.
For weeks, I’d been keeping a keen eye on the finches who’d built a nest in our backyard oak, how the mother sat so devotedly atop her blue speckled eggs, how the red-headed father risked all life and limb chasing birds away who flew too close to the nest. It seemed the parent’s work might never be over, that is, until today when the newborn’s chirps and peeps put me into a kind of trance listening from below the nest. The mother’s care had paid off and the father’s war against potential invaders had been won. Maybe birds did love, and this family loved each other.
“Michael,” Mom shouted from the porch door. “Come inside and join the family.”
I walked down into the basement where Don, Doug, and Cathy were already flocked around Dad.
“Okay, Michael, gather round us here. Look how beautiful this cabinet is. Feel that grain. All ash. And I know a lot about wood, kids.”
Even though my siblings rolled their eyes, I enjoyed how Dad stood closer to us, how eye contact was longer than usual, that he was so excited, excited about anything, this time, to show off our new Motorola Quasar color TV. As I walked with Dad closer to the set to feel the smooth texture of the its shiny, shellacked cabinet, Mom stepped in between me and the beloved, glowing Quasar.
     “Eric, put another beer can down on that set without a coaster and I’m going to brain you,” she said, hovering around the Quasar like a hawk.
“Dad,” Don said, “the picture’s rolling.”
“What? Not again,” he said, pounding one side of the Quasar with his open fist.
“Eric! Don’t you dare.”
“I can take care of this.”
“What, by pummeling the set? That’s what happened to the last TV you broke.”
“Yeah, Dad, what happened to the old Silvertone anyway?” Doug said.
“You kids watch too much TV. When I was a boy your age growing up in Maine as a dirt poor immigrant from Finland –”
     “Oh, Eric, please. When my great grandparents immigrated to America, they had to live in ice cold caves in Minnesota where Indians taught them how to hunt and forage for food. While the women reared the young and did all the cooking, the men were busy all day hunting and collecting firewood and protecting the area from invaders. It’s a system that worked, Eric, one that’s worked forever because they all worked together. You would’ve clubbed the natives to death with a nine iron. And failed.”
When he drubbed the set again, I tried to stand in his way.
“Michael – out,” Dad said.
“That’s it, Eric. I will not let this mechanical box of wires and damn fool technology get in the way of our family again. You three, upstairs and finish your homework. Michael, go up to your room. No more TV. I swear someday you are going to pay for being glued to a screen all day long!”
On her squawk, Don, Doug, and Cathy scattered. Mom angrily turned off the set and Dad went straight to the band saw to cut wood. Cathy yelled from atop the stairs that Cookie’s leg looked hurt and Mom ran up to the kitchen. Left alone, I realized this was just part of the system that existed here.
I stayed in the basement and pondered how Mom, like the finch, was just doing all the work she was supposed to as a mother. The finch, however, unlike Mom, always seemed so peaceful and calm after she’d birthed her young, basking in the sun and chirping away on sunny days. So did the father finch. Maybe they really did love each other. After having watched Mom work around the house for years, now I wondered just what it was that Dad did. Exterminate the menacing house bugs with Raid? Drive off predatory neighbors from parking in his space on the street? Provide a warm house by burning stacks of weekly coin and stamp collector newspapers in the fireplace that Mom complained he spent too much money on? Except for the work he did holed up in his carpentry room, they only thing I saw Dad do was drive his car to someplace during the day and drive back at night. And I didn’t know what he did there either.
“Michael, what did I tell you? Get up to your room this very instant,” Mom yelled from the top of the stairs.
“Okay, I’m coming, I’m coming.”
As I entered the first-floor hallway from the basement, Mom was doing her usual routine to blow off steam by standing in front of the bathroom mirror and doling out gobs of cream from the blue Noxema bottle, then slathering the goop all over her face.
As I turned the corner, Dad had gone to a bottle of beer to blow off his steam. There, nestled in the living room chair was an extended newspaper, an ottoman, a pair of legs stretched upon it, and one hand holding a Budweiser. No head, no body, just the face of Ford Frick, the commissioner of baseball, spread across the sports page.
With every claw dug into the rug, repeatedly clutching, then releasing fabric as if kneading bread, Dexter sat like a sphinx below Frick’s face, just waiting to attack. At the exact moment Frick shook his head, Dexter thrust his spring-loaded body up onto Dad’s lap.
Not one for cats, Dad swept Dexter off his lap.
Not one for rejection, Dexter jumped back.
Not one to be thrown off balance – ever, Dad swiped back.
Not one for Dad, Dexter leapt back.
“Goddam cat,” he said, sweeping Dexter away so smoothly the newspaper barely moved an inch. What control Dad exhibited, done with such Fred Astaire flair. I, too, barely moved an inch, standing so still in the corner of the room that Dad never spotted me or my four-inch-wide smirk.
     The undisputed king of the castle – that’s how Dad saw himself. But poor Dexter. He still had so much more to learn about Dad, that in being the man of the house, no way he was ever going to surrender his aloof time, his man-being-a-man time. Today was just one example how he shielded himself from a world so chockfull of personal difficulties, not to mention a universe of technological booby traps such as those that lurked behind the Quasar’s glittering screen. That’s what Dad was good at – protecting himself, and, I suppose, the family in general. But, upon understanding Dad’s nature better today, I felt Dexter was lucky he hadn’t been strangled to death or clubbed senseless by a nine iron. After all, a wild and unpredictable predator, this time our house pet, had been acting up. That was just part of the system in our house for Dad and, from time to time, showing us the beauty of things like the nature of different kinds of wood.




                                                                                 ~   BEHIND EVERY CORNER A ROSE   ~


With one look at my red, watery eyes, Mom slapped the eyeliner pencil down on her vanity table.
“You’re still crying over him? Do you know how convoluted this makes my day to miss work and stay home because you’re still upset? No, I won’t. You’ll stay home from school on the stipulation that Rose will keep an eye on you while I’m gone.”
      I was only ten and didn’t know the words “convoluted” and “stipulation,” which made me uneasy not knowing what she meant by using them. But as I headed upstairs to my bedroom, just thinking about Rose made me feel better. She’d always taken the time to answer my questions. When I’d once asked why there weren’t more colored people around our neighborhood, she replied, “Your street filled with hard-working, colored cleaning ladies, jes that nobody sees ‘em.” When I’d asked why that was, she said, “We come here after y’all leave in the mornin’ and we’re gone before y’all get back. We got the four o’clock bus to catch back into DC.” But when I’d queried why cleaning ladies were always colored, and why colored ladies were cleaners and not something else, she didn’t respond. It was the only time Rose failed to answer one of my questions.
      Despite being here only on Mondays to clean the house, Rose seemed to know everything that went on in our home, as if she was with you wherever you walked, her dark skin a calming shadow looming around every corner. She knew what to do and what not to do, like avoid vacuuming in the basement when I was there minding every word of an I Love Lucy rerun.
Finally, after Mom had left for work and Rose entered the house, I left my room and flopped myself on the braided carpet below the dining room table where Dexter and I used to loaf after school. Whenever I’d played with him, it stopped my knee knocking straight away, a fidgeting habit I had that irritated Mom. Tossing one of her big, colorful yarn balls ball at Dexter had always made me laugh out loud – how quickly he unraveled her skintight sphere into smithereens. But Dexter wasn’t here today and my mind wandered back to Saturday’s visit to the vet clinic with Mom.
“More than likely your cat died from septicaemia,” the vet had said, a tall man dressed in a lab coat that turned blinding white set against the sickly, pea-green-painted walls behind him. “Either that or acute bladder cystitis or bacterial kidney pyelonephritis.”
“He’s just saying Dexter’s bladder became infected,” the lady vet assistant standing next to me whispered, rubbing my drooping shoulder.
“What? Why’d it get infected then?” I asked.
“We don’t know, Michael,” Mom said.
     “We do know, from too much sand grit. Friskies are a killer to urinary tracts, ma’am. Flat out poisons the animal.”
From that moment on I cried, and I cried most of the weekend, and I cried this morning until my eyes became noticeably red again.
Under the table, without Dexter today, my knees started knocking. As I smoothed away some cat hairs from the rug, I wondered if Mom had mentioned anything to Rose about Dexter’s death. I drew in closer, investigating her face as I never had before. Had Rose always had such dark brown eyes?
After she pulled out the vacuum cleaner cord from the outlet, a rhythm arose between the beat of my knocking knees and her wrapping the cord around and the beastly machine. Being a long cord, it made for a long song, and when that was done, there was a long silence before Rose spoke.
“So quiet today, Michael. A weight like the Empire State Building top ‘a your head down there. You all right?”
I picked away at stray threads that held the carpet’s braids together when her shoes stepped in closer.
“What?” I said.
“If you’re sad, then you just gotta keep the pot boilin’ any way you can.”
“No, things are fine.”
“What, stickin’ yourself down in that hole? Leave that string yarn alone an’ come on outta there, ’cuz your show’s on now. Go on downstairs an’ watch. Smile again.”
     “I don’t wanna watch Amos ‘n Andy now.”
“What? You wanna miss George and Sapphire goin’ at it again? Why, that George such a stupid and bullheaded man. If only he stopped shoutin’ an’ hollerin’, he’d be better off – Amos, Andy, Lightnin’, all those men. Jes little boys, really.”
As she picked up the heavy cleaning machine extra-carefully with both arms and rose to standing position, I could tell it was hard on her back to do so.
“Do you like cleaning our house?”
“I most certainly do. An’ time to clean the basement now. Comin’?”
     “No.”

     She placed the vacuum cleaner gently back down on the floor. Leaning in toward me, she said, almost in a whisper, “He was such a good cat. I miss him, too. Need someone to talk to?”
     “Mom’s always busy. Dad’s not home.”

     “I mean me.”
“Oh.”
“It’s okay, Michael. When you’re ready.”
“Why did Dexter have to die?”
“Well, it’s a very sad thing, very sad, but I think it’s good it happened now, while you’re young, a lesson that’ll remind you the rest of your life what’s important.”
“Like what?”
“Like how change is inevitable and valuable. Did you know that? How loving all people and creatures is important. I see that in you, Michael, an’ I think you knew Dexter had a spirit. Most people won’t, never will. I see how you take the outdoors as your own, how you’re in touch with things, an’ you’re not afraid of silence. Keep these traits. Remember them all your days, ‘cuz one day when you’re as old as I am, you’re gonna need ‘em. We all need ‘em, if we ever had ‘em, now more than ever.”
     Cradling the gigantic, bullet-shaped machine in her arms like a baby, Rose cautiously walked toward the basement stairs. 

     “I think I wanna watch Amos n Andy now,” I said.

     “Well, all right then. Let’s go on down.”
     With each step I took descending the stairs, I thought more about Dexter and how my world had felt far less complicated with him in it: it was only when people got involved with things that life felt out of control. But not when Rose was around. She used short words, was easy to understand, and used a simple bow to tie her red apron. Other than that, there were never any strings attached to Rose.  




                                                                                                    ~   HUMORESQUE   ~


      Saturdays in our household were Family Night, and the hub of our domestic universe was the Silvertone, beaming out family sitcoms across the basement. As Cathy customarily took to one chair and I sat with Mom and Dad on the center sofa, Don and Doug slouched on the other couch, spinning in their own personal orbit over in the dark space of the basement’s corner. As if the corny theme song to The Donna Reed Show hadn’t already been enough for them to endure earlier, I couldn’t help but notice them rolling their eyes at the flittering violins, choppy piano, and sappy harmonica music to the beginning of My Three Sons that had just oozed out from the set’s speakers.
I, on the other hand, zeroed intently in on popcorn and what sounded like the muffled grand finale of fireworks exploding somewhere far off in the distance, yet something only ten feet from me. There, over on the basement counter, such life existed in that shaking, aluminum Redi-Pop machine, and I just had to find it.
After dashing across to the popper, I jumped up and down in anticipation of the last kernel popping.
“You are such a little spaz,” Doug said.
“It’s just popcorn,” Don said.
There was something about their body language, their snarl that could make any homemade snack taste less appealing, the sitcoms we watched less hopeful. Then, after consuming many bad commercials, I felt sorry for the un-popped kernels left in the bottom of my bowl, those abandoned husks who’d never get the chance to bloom, to explode into who they were fully born to be, even if that meant being eaten the very moment they’d come alive.
     Soon after, with nothing left to eat, my mind wandered back to The Donna Reed Show and the scene when little Jeff’s teenage sister had boyfriend problems and decided to give up on boys all together. I wondered what I would have said to her if I’ had been Jeff. And now, focusing on My Three Sons, I imagined myself as the youngest son, Chip, and what I’d do after he'd just found out his older brother had eloped with his girlfriend.
     “How fake,” Doug blurted out. “None of that stuff in My Three Sons ever happens in real life. What a bunch of bull!”
     “And Donna Reed was too corny to believe. I’m going upstairs,” Don said, whereupon both my brothers took to the stairs.
I supposed they were right. After all, it was pretty unrealistic how all the sons on these shows had girlfriends and the daughters had great hair. It was pretty fake how every kid got good grades and the boys were all in sports and girls were class presidents. Don and Doug were ready to take on the real world now. They’d done everything Mom and Dad had asked and kept their noses to the grindstone to get good grades for college. All throughout their time in school, they’d steered themselves free of distraction from community and neighborhood events, not to mention extra-curricular school activities and athletics. Aside from being Boy Scouts, they had very few friends to divert themselves from their studies, and the last thing they had time for were girlfriends.
     The next day, the casual stroll I took around our neighborhood turned into a family sitcom all its own, as if experiencing my very own episode of Leave it to Beaver on Whitney Street: little kids playing in the yards, teens washing cars, fathers mowing lawns, and that love-smitten Mason boy hanging around the oldest Gesford girl like glue.
Before re-entering our house, I gazed up at our two dormer windows seated like bookends atop the slippery slope of the roof. The dormers framed two silhouettes, one of Don inside on the left, the other of Doug inside to the right, slumped motionless over their textbooks: such unreal, black shapes my brothers were. If they headed off for college right now, would they leave the house with nothing but good grades?
Minutes later, holding on to one of Dad’s familiar luggage cases, I burst into their room.
“Good day, sirs. I see you are doing homework, but this will only take a moment.”
From their separate desks, the twins eyed me as if a total stranger had entered.
    “So,” I said, passing by Doug toward Don, “I see you’re reading History of Man and Civilization there, Mr. Don. That’s a lot of wars, death, and destruction –”
    “Hey, we’re busy. Beat it –”
“Just lemme take a minute to open your eyes up to the fine bargains I have here in my –”
     “Out – ”
     “Oh, come on, just feel the fine weave of these slacks,” I said, laying the opened suitcase on Don’s desk. “Here, feel that texture, that wool,” I quipped, smoothly gliding the suitcase toward Don for closer inspection, “and all handcrafted by an Amish family, made in old-fashioned and traditional ways that will one day be gone. You need that.”
“Need what?”
     “Old, traditional ways.” Don’s old, traditional eye roll returned. “Okay, okay, then how about these fine pressed and starched shirts?”
“Those’re Dad’s, and so are those cornball Mantovani and organ albums you got in there, too.”
     “What, you guys don’t think any of these’ll impress the girls? Hey, you listening over there?”
“We don’t need girls,” Doug mumbled from his desk.
“What? Love works in mysteriously ways, and with these finely pressed shirts and a little candlelight music…. Okay, if slacks don’t float your boat, then how about a bouquet of flowers for her?”
“Go away!” Doug said.
Leaning in closer to Don, I whispered, “Hey, no need for him to know. I could send these out special COD just for you. I can even get them free for you at half price.”
     From right outside the closed bedroom door, Mom’s laundry basket clunked on the floor. We all turned our heads and listened, anticipating the exact order of sounds to come: the familiar squeak of the hamper lid opening, Mom’s throaty growl, the hamper lid banging shut, her feet thumping down the stairs.
     “My goodness, fellas. Who was that? What’s with your family, anyway?”
     “Knock off the act. That’s Mom and you know it –”
“No, my mother lives in Burbank, and these slacks are brand new. Scout’s honor, Sam.”
     “You’re worse than television. You are television.”  
“Guaranteed to make girls flip.”
     “Out,” Doug yelled.
“Love is in the air –”
“Out,” Don said.
     It was that smile, that tiny little grin on Don’s face when I whispered, “I can even get them free for you at half price,” that compelled me to stay longer. I just had to hear some kind of pop, see some sort of bloom, or smell some hint of fireworks or perfume in the air before they ever left this house.