Photo by Christopher Jug George

Family Drive

We went over my Dad’s place because his car was dead. He needed to go to the supermarket. He sat in the front seat next to mom. I could see their breath but there wasn’t much because they were quiet.  Dad did say it was twenty below zero as we drove through the city. I noticed the Christmas decorations had disappeared from the light posts. I couldn’t stop smiling during this little family journey.

Enter, Delete, Return

You wore a yellow silk blouse on that first night back. You were typing on what looked like a robot’s head. I could see your cheek bones reflected in the green screen of the computer. You said, “read what I wrote.” I bent over your shoulder, inhaling your flowery perfume.

Photo by Christopher Jug George

We Are Not Simply This

Nothing. No. Oh. It’s nothing. “We are simply this.” It can’t be.

The eyes opened up to the world like a vision from without. Outside of you. The whispers in the wind. The locked images flickering among us. There was a time there was no Moon. Then the Moon was made of cheese. Now the Earth and Moon were both created in synestia, a new word that has a red line under it as I type.

Funhouse

Walking in and out of it there, you know, the many its of us. Stumbling or graceful. That silly apartment. The glow of the TV, static and garbled. Your laugh and ice cubes cascading. Our sad faces sometimes in the reflection of the TV. 

It Never Leaves You, and That’s OK

He never got better. I left that version of myself in his rubble and became a damaged version of him.  

This is my life with him here. My wife is in the bedroom sleeping; my children are in their rooms sleeping. We are talking about the kids. He adores them, he sees himself in them. I see myself in him. I’m old enough to know him.  I’m old enough to realize the parts of me that are him. This is life if he never died.

My family had pulled the car over in the country to see reindeer in a valley. It made me think of Christmas and all the stuff I would get. The reindeer dawdled around a feeder, and I realized they were big deer. Then I remembered the day I saw a dead deer strapped to the roof of a car in the driveway next door to our house. I will never forget the way those eyes didn’t look at me.

Those little ships, constructed in the bottle, how small they seem, how free they roam the sea. She is beauty in a bottle kept in my mind. She is free in the sea, taking on waves by waving back.

Photo by Christopher Jug George * Brugge, Belgium * October 1996

I walked along a canal in Brugge at a crucial moment in my life. I was swallowed up staring at her. There were people there, somewhere, but then they went home. The treetops leaned across the canal and met in the middle. The green and the water and the stone bridge became a room. I’m still sitting in that room. It’s so obvious now.

I may be most like my Grandma. I can’t really say because I hardly knew her but I know she was a seeker. I’m flopping through life as if it doesn’t matter but it’s only because it matters too much.

I saw a child’s bike lying alone in a field next to some woods. It made me think of a neighborhood girl I liked as a kid.  I was with her and she said something about hating her home. I told her she could come live with me. She said that she didn’t want to be in any homes. She left her bike and walked into the woods. Before she did, she kissed me on the cheek. I remember thinking that at least it was summertime and she’d be warm in there.

I remember the way my Grandfather used to look at me sometimes. Penetrating my mind with a laser beam of unspoken thoughts, ‘This will all sink in someday,’ is what I think he was trying to say.

Like boxers the people remain in their corners, sometimes peeking out windows at each other. There is tension when two people arrive at the same time in opposing driveways, how they have to figure out if they are going to acknowledge one another. The world has changed and getting inside quickly has become the fad, as if the air is poisonous, the trees are scary and front porches shy from contact.  They run even when the world is warm and beautiful and green. They no longer need one another.