The Sheriff

As usual at our monthly staff meeting, two or three people were talking at once. A man walked in the door, smiled affably and passed our conference table in the front room to head down the hallway. He wore a modest, unwrinkled dress shirt and had neatly trimmed, greying hair. He spoke no greeting, but gestured toward the back of the offices, as if he had business there.

Conversation dwindled, and the eight of us stared at each other, raising eyebrows and puzzling over which one of us was expecting this visitor. Was he inspecting the HVAC system? Did someone call for a courier? Eyes turned toward our boss, who arose: "Can I help you?... Excuse me, can I help you?"

The man, whose eyes had seemed focused and sharp, began to explain that he was running for sheriff of the United States, that everyone wanted him to be sheriff and that he had a watch to prove it. His voice was clear, but he never quite finished any of his sentences.

I wanted desperately to hear everything, but he was on my periphery and N- began to talk to me directly, unnecessarily loudly, about something, a nonsequitur. I realized later that she may have been trying to protect the man from our undivided, baffled attention.

M- engaged him in conversation briefly, then managed to steer him toward the door. Some people wished him good luck on his campaign. He left the building and we could see him through the windows, walking toward the street.

The meeting went on. I still wonder why I didn't insist that we call the police. I still worry that someone was missing this man, or that someone nearly wrecked a car trying to avoid hitting him as he crossed the street (I imagined) oblivious to traffic signals. I wish I had not sat back in my chair, waiting for him to leave.

Distant Song

I wrote this poem 4-some years ago, when I was pregnant with 2 and the U.S. was preparing to begin war on Iraq. I have not been very outspoken against the war, and I regret that.


The Unborn Child Hears a Distant Song

One ear to the wall, she’s been listening
for months, the world concave around her.
This is what she knows: the world is dark,
it makes noise. So mysterious, so familiar,
what each grain of sand hears
as it rushes toward the neck of the hourglass,
what a bullet hears as it lunges down the barrel,
aimed for something it will never see whole.
In her chambers, she tucks her head
and dreams in sound.

The round
repeats, the parts
stave each other off,
the music shudders
and contracts, the child is
born screaming the same song.

Subtle Use of Incurable Romanticism

I have been educating myself over at the school of Pandora. I am an appreciative student, having had virtually no education in popular culture and its varieties of music for the years spanning 0 to 1989 and 1992 to 2007.

Yet I'm not sure I approve. Really, the Music Genome Project is to music as lepidoptery is to butterflies.

I type in "Cesaria Evora" and get an entire channel of music sung in nothing but Portuguese; I was looking for music that makes me feel wild with longing for something that's slipping from my fingers, a feeling which is not stirred in me by the Portuguese language in particular.

Or say I want a channel called "Music That Makes Me Weep." Pandora doesn't give me that option. I have to settle for songs with "mellow rock instrumentation," "subtle use of vocal harmony," "use of a string ensemble," "prominent organ" ... wait, that's not what I had in mind. (Pandora has not heard of double entendres, apparently.)

In theory, I despise the MGP for sucking the soul out of music, but I still listen to my Pandora channels. "What will they think of next?"

Walking without the cart

I tried to go to a weekly writing group for a while, but I never caught on to the performance aspect of it: everybody writes in each other's presence for 20 or 30 minutes, then reads aloud and... then things are said.

Here's something I wrote then. It's loosely based on reality.

----

Jimmy had a shopping cart. He kept it in the empty yard beside his house, and no one ever took it. Mostly he carried aluminum cans in it, sometimes glass bottles if they were pretty blue, then he’d take them to his sister-in-law over on Pine Street.

Every morning he’d shake the fog from his eyes and eat a bit of bread and peanut butter, then head over to Pine Street for some coffee with his brother, pushing his cart. Roger had a nice house and a clean old car; he was a deacon at the church. But Jimmy just somehow couldn’t do those same things Roger did, have a job, get married. He knew he wasn’t smart, he just didn’t know why. Things were harder for him. And recently his insides were hurting a whole lot. Roger’d taken him to the doctor once, but the medicine cost so much.

This old cart was getting pretty stiff and squeaky. Roger let him put some grease on it any time he wanted, but something gets so old, grease doesn’t help. But Jimmy never had to be anywhere fast, so he just walked slower. When he had a load of cans, they rattled around anyway, so it didn’t matter about the squeaks.

People all around the neighborhood would put their cans in a bag for him, tied onto their front gate or looped over a picket of a fence. Mike Wilton’s boys just threw their coke cans out in the yard. They just didn’t know it was getting harder for Jimmy to reach down and get them.

It wasn’t a big neighborhood, but it took Jimmy a couple days to get through the whole thing. In the summer, he also went down to the playground where kids hung out at night. Usually they just left 40 ounces, but sometimes he found a pile of cans. When his cart was full, Roger would haul him over to South-Central where they paid 42 cents a pound for aluminum.

One morning, early fall, Jimmy hurt worse that usual and he didn’t feel like eating breakfast. He left his cart in the yard and walked over to Roger's house. It took him longer than usual. He didn’t walk so much without the shopping cart anymore and he wasn’t so steady on his feet, first thing in the morning like this.

The dark criss-crossing of moss between bricks in the sidewalk looked like letters on a big sign, Jimmy thought. He didn’t usually see the sidewalk straight on like this. What would the sign say? Jimmy, you old man. Jimmy, what will they say about you when you’re gone?

He saw a Dr. Pepper can up ahead, but he figured he could leave it be until later, when he was feeling better. Or maybe someone else would get it, those other guys who came into the neighborhood with their big bags, picking up cans.

Just beyond the can, the sidewalk hit a new patch. The moss left off its scrawl. But Jimmy was still thinking about letters, and he was thinking that he wanted to write something. He thought he’d ask Roger to write down a few things for him, about how he appreciated people saving their cans for him. About how he still thought about his mother and the day she put her hand on the top of his head and told him he was God’s child. About his idea for a new shopping cart chassis that made it easier to get over curbs. Yes, he should get Roger to write that down.

With a capital S

It's spring and the edges of buildings look crisper, the colors cleaner. 78 degrees. I feel a tickle of pride when the guy on WCLM says "...right here in the capital city." Yes, it is a capital city.

The birds are proud, too. I didn't realize I missed them in the mornings until they began singing again. On S- St., A woodpecker surprised me with enormous sound, but when I watched and watched to catch it in the act of hammering--can it be true that a small bird and an old tree makes such a resounding racket?--it just hopped around the branches looking for insects.

Driving east, toward the sun, I saw a man toss his spit in a silken ribbon on the street. I spent four hours at the coffee shop banging through the April calendar and my car didn't get ticketed. As the sun went down, I played soccer in borrowed shoes. They were wrapped with duct tape around the ball of the foot and a teammate said I looked "bad-ass." Didn't help much, but we had fun.

This is the first day in months that I've felt so at peace with my life... though peace isn't really the word I want. I don't feel pacific. Actually, I feel aroused by life; that's what it is. But to say more would require reflection on the months past.

Letters of E. B. White (a reminder to self to check book out from library)

Library: A few weeks ago I took 1 and a friend to a branch library, one I had not visited for several years. Even though this branch is more convenient to our daily paths than the main library, I avoid it because the children's librarian there brings out the absolute stark raving misanthrope in me.

She calls me "ma'am" and I want to grab her upper arm, dig in my fingertips in the fleshy underpart and hiss inarticulately. (This is a woman who lives in my neighboorhood, not 3 blocks from my house.) There are other reasons, but this is the one I had forgotten: within 10 minutes of my entering, she approaches me with a book and tape case I returned three years ago and asks me if I've found the cassette yet. A little yellow sticky note with my name is affixed to the cover, still. Possibly she hears the repressed fury in my voice--I try to sound reasonable as I explain again that the cassette was in the case when I returned it, admittedly to the wrong branch, three years ago--and she backs away quickly. (The backing away part is not unusual; she's the kind of person who keeps talking, smarmily, as she backs away from one, so as to always have the last word. The quickly part was unusual.)

I wait a few seconds. After all, I don't want to appear petulant. Then I slam my magazine shut and gather up the girls and leave. Quickly.