Many thanks to Marc W. for "Stairway to Heaven," covered on the early 90's Australian TV show, The Money Or The Gun, by Australian Beatles tribute band, "The Beatnix."
If ever I were wilful-negligent,
It was my folly; if industriously
I play'd the fool, it was my negligence,
Not weighing well the end; if ever fearful
To do a thing, where I the issue doubted,
Whereof the execution did cry out
Against the non-performance, 'twas a fear
Which oft affects the wisest: these, my lord,
Are such allow'd infirmities that honesty
Is never free of.
“Camillo,” in The Winter’s Tale, I,2,350. Open Source Shakespeare.
The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, is the healthy attitude of human nature. How is a boy the master of society; independent, irresponsible, looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift, summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, about interests; he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You must court him; he does not court you.
* * * * *
I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous henceforward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle from the Spartan fife. Let us bow and apologize never more. A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to please him; I wish that he should wish to please me. I will stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor moving wherever moves a man; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the center of things. Where he is, there is nature.
From 'ESSAY II, Self-Reliance,' in “Essays: First Series,” (1841) by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson Texts.
And now has commenced the tubby season.
My sainted wife would argue that like the old adumbration about Kid’s Day, every season—for me– is Tubby Season. Yet the period between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day at the Chicago-based firm where I work is conspicuously zaftig. We conduct business in the money markets, so in the grand holiday tradition of conspicuous expenditure associated with Wall Street the brokers, dealers and partners we know send us tubs of guacamole; handcart-loads of barbecued ribs, cole slaw, and pork chops; pizza and salad; cookies and fudge and cases of wine. Even in the Dark Night of the Credit Markets endured since September, in this festive season the grub rolls in, and like Sin Eaters we gobble it up.
Christmas, the central religious and secular holiday of the West, has of course long been attainted for its contemporary incarnation of cynical connaturalization to commerce, and unsanctified, unspiritual, worldly avariciousness. This is an old drum, that has been beat to smithereens. The birth of the Christ has ranked ever lower in the estimation of the media and academe. Installations of the traditional crèche are nullified by the ACLU, and the PR departments of big-box retail chains sweat through the pre-season to come up with pleasant holiday constructs inoffensive to multi-cultural sensibilities: “Holiday Tree,” “Seasonal Wreath,” and according to the Kansas City Star banning, in Australia, the enunciation of “Ho-ho-ho!” from the oratory of in-store Santas because according to Sydney’s “Daily Telegraph,” the phrase “conjures American slang for a prostitute.”
What more, after this, can be said? Such benighted contemporary manifestations of the Christmas spirit serve heroically to kill the traditional love, hope and charity in my own heart. One finds one’s lip involuntarily curling, the spark of cynicism rising in the eye, the deep breath of patience with foolery being taken unto hyperventilation. As far as Christmas, and how it may make me “cross,” only this may possibly serve, and as an apostrophe and apologia for old Ebenezer’s irritable dismissal of his nephew, who, if he had to read news stories like the one above, may be forgiven for giving it all up:
‘What else can I be… when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will,’ said Scrooge indignantly, ‘every idiot who goes about with “Merry Christmas” on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart… !’
‘Uncle!’ pleaded the nephew.‘Nephew!’ returned the uncle, sternly, ‘keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.’
‘Keep it!’ repeated Scrooge's nephew. ‘But you don't keep it.’
‘Let me leave it alone, then,’ said Scrooge. ‘Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!’
‘There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,’ returned the nephew. ‘Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round -- apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that -- as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!’
The clerk in the tank involuntarily applauded: becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.
‘Let me hear another sound from you,’ said Scrooge, ‘and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation. You're quite a powerful speaker, sir,’ he added, turning to his nephew. ‘I wonder you don't go into Parliament.’
This year my beautiful, kind and talented wife Lisa solemnly said to me, “We bought that fancy new fuselage for the aircraft, and spent all that money on those two young Ayrshire bulls—we have spent enough; we should not get anything for each other this Christmas.”
If you, dear reader, are not married or in a committed or somewhat serious relationship with a significant other, you may not be able to fully and immediately appreciate how my eyes got wide as fried eggs, my hands began to tremble, and how I reflexively backed away from her. The pact she suggested was a pact with Darkness, but after years of a deep and loving connection with this woman, I know that in that instant she was not herself. She wrapped her lamb’s-wool muffler around her throat, and put on a matching toque.
Smiling, I agreed. “That’s perfect, honey,” I managed to stammer out. “That’s what’s best!” I hoped the pallor of my face did not betray the monstrous but necessary deception in my heart. The door slammed, and a wisp of wintry wind, like a tiny cyclone, whirled around my slippers and dissipated into the branches of our Christmas tree, the faux icicles jiggling. Before her mother’s little white sports car had fishtailed away down the snow-tossed street I had donned my duck-boots, jacket and coonskin cap and set out, in search of spousal gifts. To be no fool is to be a fool for those you love.
In my misspent youth I still had time to read and fully digest the immutable laws of The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry; lessons I wept honest, although adolescent tears, to learn, and which I have never forgotten:
The magi, as you know, were wise men-- wonderfully wise men-- who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. O all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
_______________________
Of all the Christmases I have had, two stand out, and they are, even as they are remembered as Christmases, Christmases past, really; not quite Christ’s Day of Mass, exactly, but near enough in chronological proximity to count as Christmas in my memory. Like Dylan Thomas’s A Child's Christmas in Wales, the first had to do with fire, and the second, like Eliot’s The Journey of the Magi, with some things else.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?
In each, the holy day itself was passed, and I suppose to a strict sensibility the events themselves were unrelated to Christmas, happening, as they did, each in the new year shortly after; but these old memories I feel and recall as gifts, and are as such forever associated in the spheres of my sensibilities with Christmas, the time, as I am fond of saying, of giving, not getting. Furthermore, these gifts were of the kind that release their qualities over time, so that in the moment of their receipt they seemed not gifts at all, but the opposite of gifts, takings-back, or worse, injury. But in the distorting lens of time their qualities of light, and quantities of precious store, have been made manifest.
For you who know me well, the stories I will now relate on these pages may have the familiar tang of a home-brew well-tasted before, the back-sagging ease of a chair time and again occupied; the contours of a familiar lawn so often mowed that the warp and woof of its cutting could be duplicated at midnight, if it wouldn’t wake the neighbors. But for me, these anecdotes are evergreen, the heart of knowing, of giving, of change and (since the mission of the blogger is writing publicly to obtain private self-knowledge, if not to indulge in self-expression), realization, in this season.
When I was a little boy, we lived in a big limestone house on a tree-green street with chalky white sidewalks that reflected the light and heat in summer and filled with snow in winter.
In 1967 our house caught fire, and my sister and father were severely burned. Counting heads after opening the door, my father found my mother and me, but Karen gone missing. The opening of the door fed the static heat accumulated in the house with clean, fresh oxygen (it was early February), and the resulting explosion engulfed everything in flame: the wreaths still hanging above the fireplace and on the foyer door, the curtains, the carpets, and the furniture. My father threw us in the snow, feet deep, and went back into the inferno and retrieved his daughter, who was then to spend several months, if not years, recovering from her injuries.
“Powells! Powells!” my father shouted, beating on our across-the-street neighbor’s pre-dawn door, the burned skin flaking from his face, as my sister lay panting, charred and steaming in the snow, and my mother held me to her, shaking, in her nightgown. After the door opened and the ambulances took my family away, I watched from the Powell’s plate glass front room window as the fire-trucks filled our house with water, and the flames licking from the windows subsided.
Many weeks later, we had rented a bungalow on the river, as our old home, gutted by the fire, was replastered, refenestrated, and refloored. The bungalow was adobe, and had thick columnar walls. My father joked with me that was where the previous tenants had hid “the bodies,” and I was so jarred by this and every other circumstance I began sleepwalking. I would awake on the kitchen floor when my mother came in to make the morning coffee, in the basement at the foot of the stairs, under the desk in the unoccupied bedroom, which awaited my sister’s release from the hospital.
Late at night my father, George, would sit at the undersized escritoire in the bungalow’s dining-room and calculate our losses for the insurance company, and one gray-bright day approaching March asked me if I would like to come with him and look at “the house.” I agreed immediately, thinking of the excitement of haunted houses and spooky revelation.
As the bony black trees on Lincolnway waved against the silver sky, though, another unbidden thought came, about Petey, our parakeet, who lived in the kitchen in a hanging steel cage on a chrome stand. His perch was within sight of my mother’s magnolia tree, the summertime branches of which waved their thick pink-and-white leaves at us when we sat at our dinner table. Through the kitchen windows, with my father raking leaves in the backyard in the fall, or helping hang the awnings in the spring, I could hear my mother talking to Petey, saying “Pretty bird,” and “Gimme a grape,” and “Good morning,” and then laughing while she ran the water and opened and closed the cupboards.
He could have burned, or starved, or been merely injured, dying a lonely lingering death, because of my negligence. A nervous gnawing began in my chest. I had forgotten him. When we passed the high-school’s concrete WPA stadium and started up the windy street toward the blackened shell of our house, I began to stiffen and grab the armrest. When we pulled up in front I did not want to go in, and when I got into the foyer I could see the icy sunlight stream into the kitchen, and the faint vertical rail of the cage-hanger, and I could not will my feet to go further.
“Come on, young man,” my father said, his red-and-black checked Mackinaw open to his shirt. As he leaned over to look me in the eye, in his shirt he had a pocket-protector containing a Bic pen, a mechanical pencil, and a pocket CO2 gauge (my father owned and operated a lunch-counter with a soda-fountain).
“Why, what’s wrong, Fireball,” he asked, as I labored, failing, to scrunch up my eyes so tight the tears would not fall. His heavy, strong hands, with the clean, blunt, square fingernails were on my shoulder. I could hear my Dad’s big silver Timex ticking in my ear. “Come on, now, we’re OK, Mom’s OK, Karen’ll be OK, and all this,” he swept his hand to the blackened walls, the burst light fixtures, the kitchen linoleum just down the hall licked up into curly, burnt-edged leaves, and overall that special smell of conflagration, "will get fixed."
Taking a deep breath I tried to speak up, like a little man, to be strong and say it right out, like I was taught, but the clench had come too far up my throat, after being held, writhing, in my stomach for so long, and I could only get out the name, “Petey,” before having to take a big gulp of air, my eyes crinkled shut, my face red with the exertion of keeping it in. Up in my Dad’s arms I was a little ashamed, being almost ten years old, to be such a baby.
The front door, ajar, receded, and soon I could see the blistered paint on the wooden frame of the pantry door as we entered the kitchen. The room swung 'round as my Dad put me down on the uneven floor, the buckles on my fireman’s boots jingling. He still held my hand while, remorselessly, relentlessly, helplessly, my eyes, wild with fear of what they would behold, tracked inexorably to the chrome stand, the silver cage, the burned and scorched flowered pillow-case that covered Petey’s suspended home while he slept.
In rapid succession I saw the bottom of the cage dangling free, the spring-loaded metal wires that held it distended, the tiny, barred, cage-door open, too. My father’s face was turned toward the light, and in the same instant I saw the kitchen window, open, the screen gone, and the tensely-waving, empty limbs of the magnolia tree beyond, and behind them the orange-red sky receding into evening. The scratch of a match and my dad lit himself a Lucky. On tiptoe I inspected the cage, the floor, the corners of the room for the tiny avian body, but like Margalo in Stuart Little, Petey was gone. Wondering, I looked at my dad’s face in the fading light, lit, as so often, with the waxing orange glow of his cigarette, his blue eyes steady and serious.
“You know, Charles,” he said, picking a flake of tobacco from his tongue, “it’s a known fact that in times of intense danger, wild animals often call upon vast reserves of strength to save themselves.” We both immediately eyed the broken cage, the open window, and the cold world beyond.
“It is winter. It is cold. And of course as we both know Petey was a bird from south of here, a little ways,” he said. He walked over to the window and with a couple of expert twists had cranked it shut.
“But you never know,” he said. He guided me toward the dining-room. “C’mon, let’s take a look at the piano,” he said, “Your mother wants to know if it can be salvaged.”
_______________________
At the University I learned how to smoke both legally and illegally, learned it was actually possible to pass out after drinking too much, learned that although it was easy to have sex with girls, my Old World grandmother’s adage that “a promise is always made in bed,” was for the most part, true. People want sex to be easy, they want it to just be fun, but by the time they are old enough and tough enough for it to be merely both, they have also learned it is not either.
In high school I grew my hair long, drag-raced on the local country roads, tried to make it with the local girls, stole things and got in fights, neglected my household chores, and fought with my father nonstop. He would leave the table fuming and take a walk; I would leave the table yelling, and lock myself in the finished basement with The Stones, Pink Floyd, and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Starting with the driver’s license trouble ensued. The wider, driving world took me to places and people I didn’t know before, and beckoned to even wider open spaces, far removed from my parents’ coffee at the dinner table, relaxation watching “Laugh-In,” or “Happy Days,” or reruns of “Gunsmoke,” (my father’s favorite). Just over the state line I could pass for a legal drinker, and there were three broad strips of two-lane county-road blacktop, besides State Route 31, that could get me there. Even though my buddy Ken Grimm killed himself on U.S. 31 (6) days before graduation, topping off a utility pole with his Olds 442 twelve feet above the ground, “Thirty-One,” was the highway that rifled past the state line, the old drive-in movie lots, bowling alleys, and roadhouses to liberty.
By the time my Uncle Jim and my father drove me south, to the state university, my dad and I were barely speaking. He would still offer sage advice, cloaked in an ironic, “I know you won’t listen to me, but,” that telegraphed to me not that he was trying his best to help me and I was not responding, but that he was a relic of a bygone age, intolerably backwards, immaterial, and old. My Uncle Jim was an ex-vaudevillian, a tenor soloist who met my Aunt Blanche, a chorus girl, in a Chicago music-hall during the First World War, when he was sixteen and she was fourteen. They married, and had three children, all of whom died of leukemia before adolescence. They had adopted my Mom and Dad in later life, when their Michigan summer home was next to our vacation cottage, on a small lake near Buchanan. Uncle Jim smoked a pipe, and his comments to me, made between long draws on it, made my father’s remarks by comparison seem mild and tolerant.
“So you want to be an actor, huh,” Jim said. “Why in hell you think a college education will make an actor out of you I can’t tell. Why, you’re just a goddamn idiot,” Jim would say, and I knew better than to tangle with him. I would just smile. “You smile like a goddamn monkey,” Jim said. “Why don’t you make something of yourself? Become a lawyer, you’ve got the brains and the language skills. What the hell’s wrong with you,” he’d say, and grumbling, fire up the pipe and look out the window, my father making no comment, expressionlessly driving.
After we unloaded the U-Haul trailer of all my stuff, we took the trailer to the U-Haul place, had a carbohydrate-rich dinner at a restaurant called the Wagon Wheel, and Jim and my Dad drove me back to the quad. We solemnly shook hands, three men at three stages of life; Jim, white-haired and tanned to a leathery finish, wearing a cabana shirt from his native Florida (where he had eventually made millions in offset printing in the 50s), the ever-present pipe in his hands, and my Dad, still blonde, then, but his hair going to a sandy gray, square and strong, and me, thin and long-haired, beardless still, a beanpole with an agenda.
“Later,” I said, and they drove away north. It was dusk and over the late summer leaves of maple, ash, and pine of the campus the horizon crept away into night.
I was free.
Making the Dean’s List my first semester and gaining a spot in the honors program in English surprised me more than it did my parents. My freshman advisor was a rail-thin blonde ethnic German with a hyphenated name who had been eight years old when the Second World War ended, wearing the uniform of the Wehrmacht and carrying a Mauser rifle taller than him. He could read and write Greek and Latin on the chalkboard as he translated, extempore, and referred us to the textbooks in front of us. Coming from an actual “culture,” howsoever distended and warped it had been by National Socialism, he had no understanding of the free-love and antiestablishmentarianism that pervaded what we were beginning to call our “counter”-culture. He was intellectual and a little bit sad, and fired my imagination to discover my way, my own way, and to open my aesthetic sensibility beyond the Midwestern bourgeois materialism, ironically, that my parents and grandparents had labored so mightily to enjoy.
Bidding farewell to my friends, the pot-smoke and beer-fumes nearly dissipated from the rehabilitated 1939 Willys hearse we drove upstate for Christmas vacation, I stood on the sidewalk in front of the house I grew up in. Although it was only late November, the streets were already covered with snow. The little squat metal lights my Dad and I installed cast little pools of light on the wide steps leading up between the evergreen bushes to our porch, and the big blue Christmas lights surrounded the plate-glass front window.
This was the same window through which I fired a sprinkler-head the summer before I left for college, by running it over with the power-mower. My dad and I had installed an underground sprinkler system, and I built the little control-box for the valves we buried in the ground, from leftover redwood from the deck he and my two sisters had built years earlier. We had cut trenches in the lawn, carefully removing the rectangular pieces of sod, laying in black polyvinyl chloride pipe, that angled up at last to ground-level, attaching to copper fittings that fastened to the pig-iron fountainheads, that sprayed an inverse cone of water when the valves in the control-box were opened.
“Make sure you trim around these before you mow,” my father said, after we had replaced the last strip of sod. “You don’t want to catch one on the blades of the power mower.” After a few times mowing the lawn of course I thought I knew where they all were. When I heard the mortar-like ka-chunk! I knew immediately what I had done. I switched off the motor on the mower and inspected the grass-catcher. The canvas was ruined with a foot-long hole where the metal head had shot out. When the front door opened I saw my Aunt Palmyra (who helped my mother with the housekeeping) looking at the double-paned plate-glass window in the front of the house, which had two parallel six-inch holes in it where the three-inch head had penetrated both panes.
I thought I was in for it.
My mom said to leave everything exactly where it was, so when my dad got home he sauntered out into the yard like a general inspecting a battlefield. He reviewed the mower with its blasted grass-bag; the decapitated sprinkler-pipe with a transparent crown of leaking water; the double-thermal-paned picture-window gleaming like a square, shining pool but with a jagged hole near the top, like a double-halo, sparkling in the evening light. The sprinkler-head, along with the beaded glass shrapnel of the safety-glass it carried in with it lay on the living-room carpet within.
Unexpectedly, I felt my dad’s hand on my shoulder. Looking up, I saw a faint smile on his face, his eyes with that unexpected twinkle, unlike the stormy Atlantic darkening they wore when he was angry.
“That bag can be replaced,” he told me. “That window can be replaced. But if the circumstances had been a little different, if the geometry of this accident had been something else, you could have been badly hurt. If Pal, or someone else, had been in the way,” he said, and his expression was suddenly grave, “the outcome of this accident could’ve been a lot more serious.”
“Do we understand each other?” he asked. His hand was still on my shoulder.
“I’ll be a lot more careful,” I said. “Thanks, Dad.”
“Please see that you do,” he said. “And you’ll work off some of the costs of these repairs, does that sound fair?”
I nodded, and then we went into dinner.
All this seemed, to my Dean’s-listed self, wise in the ways of co-eds and tequila, smoke-veteran and sophisticated, to be far, far in the past. I trudged up the snowy steps to my parents’ arms, had some coffee, and then came back out to shovel snow.
In two week’s time I was bound back to the University. My grades had come in, and my father had attached the card to the refrigerator, with the words, “Good job!” in pencil, in his spiky draftsman’s block-lettering, written across it. I was full of home-cooking, happy, and looking forward to getting back to my friends, my advisors, my classes. I had found myself. I had impressed my unimpressible father, brought a tear of appreciation to my mother’s eye, and gained some ground toward adult respectability.
Back at the quad, we were having some drinks. I had been up on the roof with my typewriter, alone, working on some story. In and out of each other’s rooms, we paid little attention to phones ringing, and I was flushed with gin-and-tonic, and TV news. Agatha Christie had died; Ray Kurzweil, along with leaders of the National Federation of the Blind, announced the Kurzweil Reading Machine at a press conference; three pipe bombs were found by a Transit Authority employee in a subway emergency exit shaft under an exit ramp from FDR drive next to the United Nations and disarmed by New York City police, set, according to the Associated Press, by the Jewish Armed Resistance Strike Unit, which was associated with the JDL; down the hall a group of my floor-mates were watching the M*A*S*H episode where Hawkeye is taken in by a Korean family (who understand no English) after a jeep accident far from the 4077th. Alan Alda is the only cast member to appear in the episode, and he delivers a 23-minute monologue in order to remain conscious.
“It’s your Mom,” said Bill, my room-mate. He majored in trumpet at the music school, never washed his sheets, and went on to play at the Cleveland Symphony.
“Hey, Mom,” I said, taking the phone and swinging the door shut.
“Oh, Charles, Charles,” she said, and her voice was choked and ragged. “Honey. Oh, honey, your dad’s died.”
For a moment I was stunned, as if I had lost my balance on a slippery deck and grabbed a post just in time to save myself from falling into the dark water, and slammed into the planks; as if I had unexpectedly walked into a low bridge, stars in my eyes; like I had fallen out of bed in a dream, and was falling, falling, with no end in sight, no bottom.
Later he lay in a box, still and massive. In the moment I been given alone with him, I slipped the note into the breast-pocket of his suit, and decided to test his chest, and although silent and granite-solid as ever, I could feel its immobility against my face, and the sterile and chemical smell of its fabric, not the sweat, tobacco, and Old Spice I had grown so long used to. I was weeping, there, for quite a few moments when my brother-in-law touched my shoulder. I had not heard the door to the chapel open, but my family was there, then, and I was not alone with him anymore.
None of my friends had been free to drive me back for the service, but they could drive me to the next big city, north, where I caught a Greyhound bus the rest of the way. That night the biggest snow-fall in twenty years fell, and I sat alone in the bus-station for (5) hours waiting for the delayed express-bus. The ceiling was high and lined with cold fluorescent lights, the floor streaked, ivory linoleum. At last the bus came and boarding I saw I would be alone except for a massive, angry-looking black man with a purple velvet fedora and matching Chesterfield overcoat, and a handsome middle-aged woman with dark hair. I approached the middle-aged woman, and said:
“My father’s died and I am going home. I see we are both by ourselves and I wonder if you would mind if I sat next to you.” I am sure I must have looked pale and desperate, for she responded, “I don’t think so, no,” and turned to the window and the snowy depot outside.
Staggering back to a seat, I watched the swirling flakes and black empty prairie roll past, and at the bus station met my cousin Don, who took me home. It was the same bus-station from which three days previous I had bid my parents good-bye.
It was sunny, then. My dad wore a gold Arnold Palmer zippered jacket, grey slacks and wingtips. My mother had her hair up in a chignon, wore a light coat, narrow stirruped pants and fur-cuffed boots. They both had steaming cups of coffee, and were waiting, with me, for the bus that would take me back to school. I emerged from the men’s room, and they, my parents, appeared to me so different from the swirl of bus-station people around them. They basked in the only sunlit table in the whole vast waiting-room, and as they looked up to me, returning to them in my buckskin coat, university sweatshirt, and moccasins, they seemed ethereal, forever young, and permanent.
As the bus circled the parking lot on route to the highway, the ice sparkled against the wet asphalt, and I could see them walking towards the car. He opened the passenger’s-side door for my mother, who gathered her coat and slipped into the seat, and as he came around the car, before putting on his sunglasses, my father caught my eye in the bus-window and he waved a little, seeing me, in pride and benediction.
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