Fireworks

The sound comes; a distant thumping, the dull falling of running feet, a low voice barking, then feet on the veranda, then John exploding out the screen door slamming:
“YOU COMIN’ OR NOT!!!”

I lean awkwardly into the heavy wooden lawnmower and turn to watch John vanish around the side of the house. I look back to the veranda, half expecting to see the old man’s chair roll up but no one comes. Sweat streaks down my red face, my stiff stubby fingers tight and cramping on the handle. The lawnmower sits silent, patient in the morning heat, its shadow long on the grass and dandelion. Above, the sun burns a white coin.

Down the lane, I catch up to John. He’s stopped to pick up small red racket that has fallen from his pockets. The air smells of mint and over-packed garbage cans, the heat of the day starting to take hold of the waste.
“You got matches?”
John pulls a small box from his waistband and hands them to me.
“I brought this too,” he says.
He holds out a bright yellow pool ball. He presses the side. A spark. Again. A flame.
“Pop’ll kill ya if he finds out.”
“He woan,” John says. “Here, I got some string too.”

We cross the road to Higgins field and wade through the waist-high grass, thistle-burrs hitching to our socks and jeans. We climb a long slow hill. Below lies open land, sporadic trees to the west, the town a brown cluster in a wheat yellow patchwork. We lurch in the morning heat, and then come to Pinkers, the stink smoldering at the top of the hill. Somewhere off, a dog barks but nothing else stirs. We kick through fly mounds of trash and debris, old furniture, boxes, paper, black plastic.
“Here,” John says. He picks up a cracked glass jar. Inside are a few green plastic soldiers, a blue bowlegged cowboy, a faded gray aluminum horse, stubby bits of used crayon.
“Yeah these. Let’s do these.”
In a shallow dirt ditch next to the field, he dumps the contents of the jar in the dirt. I sit, pulling the box of matches and string from an oversized pocket.

We blow up everything. John handles the fused red shells with precision, his hatchet face shiny, jubilant, blasting foam cups, tin cans, soldiers, and crayons. When the matches are done, we switch to the pool ball lighter, its flame orange and pointed. We set fire to a small village of milk cartons. We watch an old cigar box full of derby ticket stubs burn and smolder. We blow apart a bald plastic doll. Later, with our artillery exhausted, we lay still in the ditch, surrounded by mangled Marines and a now blackened horse. I flip through the odds and ends of bundled colored paper from the cigar box; quinellas, exactas, stained paper like a foreign currency.

“We goin’ to the parade?” I say, handing John our spoils of war.
“Naw. There’s not much of a show ‘less you like lame fireworks. It’s the old man’s thing down at the firehouse anyway.”
The heat of the day simmers in the dirt around us. John paws the sweat from his thin face. He slowly rotates the lighter in his hand. “You ‘wan any of this stuff?” he says, nudging one of the fallen green Marines with his toe as if it might be somehow alive.
“These here ain’t too bad. I used to like them. Tough guys.”
I pick up the plastic cowboy. A leg has melted to a twist. “This one’s pretty banged up. Kinda like Pop’s.”
“Shut up,” John says. “It ain’t like that at all.” He stares at the lighter. “It ain’t.”

We sit in silence and watch the horizon. A light wind now moves over the wheat fields below. I cup a hand over my brow and squint at the sun.
“It’s gonna be some h…”
WHUMPT!
The grass behind us suddenly shoots up, orange and white crackling fast. Fat smoke plumes gray then turns black. The wind picks up and the fire explodes. I jump, stepping back as John leaps away, dropping the lighter.
“Pop’s gonna kill us.”
“He woan find out,” John says. “We weren’t here.” The flames leap higher.
“Ya hear’n me. I wasn’t.”

I watch as John races down the hill, his own shadow chasing after him as he plunges and disappears into the tall dry chaff. As I turn to run, I step on something hard. The lighter. Jamming it in my pocket, I run into the dump, a shadow myself, quickly swallowed whole by Pinker’s smoldering landfill.

On the road, the engines go up the hill, their red racket rumbling, their sirens blaring around the melting morning sun.

Tropical Depression

It’s starting to rain. Not much, just a light pattering. In the distance there’s another sound, a continuous whoosh of air like waiting planes on a runway. It’s the gulf churning. Hurricane Ida is creeping in the Gulf of Mexico. According to The Weather Channel, it’s expected to make landfall as perhaps a Cat 2 somewhere here, along the Florida Panhandle, more likely further west, probably Pensacola. My wife curiously tracks Ida’s slow movement. Her own tracking models have it roaring through our living room around noon tomorrow. “Better tie down the cats!” I’m more optimistic.
We’ve experienced Mother Nature’s wrath before. We used to live along the earthquake prone San Andreas Fault in California. The occasional arrival of a moderate earthquake was disconcerting at first. The majority of these disturbances were quick and minor, occurring in a matter of seconds but aside from some rocking and rolling, we went relatively unaffected. We lived just outside of San Francisco during the major Loma Prieta quake in ‘89 and though it affected much of the area, we escaped virtually unscathed. Here in Florida, we’ve been through several hurricanes and tropical storms. We stayed for Dennis and Katrina but ran from Ivan. No damage to report here from any of them. Perhaps all this experience and luck has lulled me into a false sense of security. Luckily, we have the experience of the Weather Channel.

It’s now approaching dusk and the rains falling a little harder and the wind’s picked up a bit. I’m looking out of the kitchen window and I see a 1000 ft. wave looming on the horizon. No, wait a minute; it’s just a change of darkening color on the horizon line. “It’s okay honey, my mistake! You can put the cat’s back.” Really, there’s not much to be concerned about. To be safe, I turn on the TV and see that the Weather Channel is going Cat 5. Their studio is swirling with charts and graphs, paths and projections, videos and feeds of rising water and bent palm trees. Their models (newscasters) indicate that they’re keeping a close eye on things. They’ve brought in their science teacher-looking meteorologist, Dr. Steve to “break it down” for us nail-chewers. Reporters vying for their own shows are sandbagged down in Pensacola and the surrounding areas. One guy is being peppered with beach sand but he’s wearing a cap and hood, wisely avoiding the sandblasting of skin and bone from his bald dome. Another guy, hunkered down where Ida is expected to make landfall, is really being whipped and pummeled by rain, sand and his producer. It’s a surprise he still has facial features.

Watching it all, I’m relieved. My wife is jubilant. Our cats are frowning. Everything the Weather Channel has shown is an indication that we are going to be okay. We’re not running anywhere. “Honey, you can untie the cats! This is nothing.” The ‘tell’ is the lack of flying debris whipping by the second reporter’s head and more importantly, that the reporter still has a head. No careening Stop signs, palm fronds, lampposts, snakes, gas station signs, cows, cars, boats, bodies etc. It’s a non-event. Yes, we endure some high winds and heavy rain that lasts maybe an hour or so but our household sleeps soundly through it all. Really, it was nothing. It was rather obvious if you looked carefully at the data. We don’t get hurricanes in November; the gulf waters are too cold. It’s the beginning of winter and Christmas is just around the corner!

Ultimately, Ida did make landfall as a tropical depression. Probably how the people over at the Weather Channel felt after all the hubbub. They looked rather glum. Ida just ignored it.

House of the Rising Son

Well, it’s finally happened. That number we were betting on has at long last come up. It sure seemed to take its time but well, we finally hit it. Eighteen! What a great number! All it took was a roll of the dice, some risk and a little luck.

No, we didn’t win the lottery. Something better happened. Our son turned eighteen and we, his exceptional parents have won a long-standing bet. What we did was play a long shot on that giant spinning roulette wheel, THE UNIVERSE. We bet we could get our son safely to eighteen without hitting any of those ‘negative’ odds which included specifically- smoking, drugs, alcohol, a pregnant girl, tattoos, holes-in-body and Mohawks. Yes, it was a tough bet and the odds it seems were stacked heavily against us. In the ‘Grand Scheme of Things’ sweepstakes, many kids don’t get to thirteen, let alone eighteen without acquiring at least two of those universally kid-friendly prizes. But, we did it. We won! And what did we get? A payoff every parent would eagerly want: Simple Relief. Who wouldn’t be grateful to have a child still in one piece with no apparent addictions, piercing or squalling little ones? Yes, it’s an extraordinary feat and we, the proud extraordinary parents, are very pleased!

I suppose we can’t take all the credit. The boy ultimately had to make his own choices and decisions along the way. From what I can see, he made some good ones. Certainly there were pressures from his peers with all the smoking, alcohol and odd hair styles flying about and he may have tried some things that had unforeseen consequences, but the barber was never ever far away.

Now, we’re not expert parents by any means even though the Universe in its wisdom insists otherwise. I tell myself I’m an okay father and my wife is an even better mother. Perhaps we’re just a bit unconventional, that’s all. We started out like most novice parents following tried and true parental techniques such as mindless kindergarten, cliché summer sports camps, and “high-income family” friends. We then endured the many years of floundering through the long and painful journey of adolescence, guilt and denial. But now here we are at eighteen and the boy, though not perfect, has arrived on the brink of manhood virtually unscathed. He is not I and he is not his mother. It’s a win/win pay-off.

I can’t speak for my wife but I can easily take claim to something else here, the ‘Ignorance is Clean Hands’ award. It’s a consolation prize that many parents accept which releases them of their guilt for all the things they “could have, should have” done, all the things that would have helped propel their child toward becoming the person the grandparents always envisioned. It’s the “my god, if I had only known?” defense. I accept this prize gladly. I still wear so many blinders; I might be wise to carry a cane.

During this journey to manhood, we taught him basic “common sense” common sense: honesty with one’s self, kindness to others and staying clear of religion but it turns out, much of his outcome was influenced by random spins on that universal wheel. It took a lot of faith and luck but as every parent learns, there is a point when you just have to let go. We let go between fourteen and tomorrow. It wasn’t a real ‘letting go’; it was more of an unleashing.
He’d be gone half the night, disappearing with ghostly friends and acquaintances to who knows where. Thanks to the cell phone, we still had contact even though it was just a message to “CALL US, GOD DAMN IT!!!”
It wasn’t easy, waiting for a phone call or staying up until three in the morning to actually witness him walking safely through the door. The sleepless nights were difficult but that was always part of the deal; up with feedings and diaper changes, up with last minute homework and school projects, up with “it’s time for that person to go home.”
Yes, it’s been a long dream, a nice dream and it continues to unfold.


It’s three a.m. and I awake abruptly to the sound of tapping and music. It’s drifting from our son’s room. I go immediately back to sleep. I’m in that dreamy mode where my house is on fire but it’s perfectly okay. I’m burning up but it may be just the dream. I’m drifting back to Kate Beckinsale in black leather and me howling. I awake again at four to the sound of different music, without a smoking Kate. The music sounds a bit louder and familiar. Perhaps he has left his computer on so I lurch like a zombie to his room. Ironically, it is the Zombie’s Leave Me Be playing on his I-Tunes and there greeting me with a euphoric “What’s up” is my bushy-eyed son, tapping away at his computer.
“Well, besides me and my blood pressure, you are,” I say. “Why are you still up?”
“I can’t sleep.” I can tell he’s all jazzed up like a night-vapors cat on mescaline.
“You’ve been up for… like, thirty-eight hours!” My timing and reasoning skills barely register before noon but his don’t either, so we don’t argue the point.
“I know, I know. I was just about to go to bed.”
“Better leave me a-lone… you’d better leave me a-lone” the Zombies croon.
“Alright. Get some sleep then. You can’t be up all night like this.”

It’s four in the afternoon when he finally rolls out of bed. This has been going on for the past year now, up all night creating music while in between, silently tapping what seems like Morse code to friends on his I-phone or computer. Apparently, there are a lot of speech-deprived teenage insomniacs out there. When we were kids, we’d be asleep before midnight unless it was a weekend. Of course, we didn’t have any of the technology these kids have today. We were burdened to communicate with pen and paper or actually perform the rare act of ‘voice speaking’. Not much of that these days.
“You’ve got to get to bed earlier.”
“I know.”
“That’s what you said last night.”
“I know.”
“But you didn’t?”
“I know. I will.”
“When are you going to bed then?”
“I don’t know.”

It’s not lost on me that this is just the beginning of a new game with a new bet waiting to be made. He’s now technically a man, a semi-responsible adult, driving, looking for work, functioning in a jungle of tapping woodpeckers and all-night night owls and searching out his future. I‘d be happy to bet on this next phase. All we have to do now is settle on the next magical number, which I believe is twenty-one, another milestone to manhood. He’s matured quite a bit but I’m betting that some of those same pitfalls of late nights, smoking, drugs, alcohol, a pregnant girl, tattoos, and holes-in-body are still lurking and in play out there somewhere.

My wife and I are up for it though and I know he is too but I’m hedging my bet a little that he probably won’t be up before three.

Short Circuits

I have a friend who recently asked me to do him a favor. Jim, my ‘very good friend’ had just purchased a brand new 42” flat screen and needed my help in setting it up. I say ‘very good friend’ because he gave me a free TV, his old Sony 32”, which weighed as much as a Panzer 38(t) tank but worked just fine.

Jim has a nerve disorder that limits his legs, arms and hands from operating in a way he’d like them to. He can drive a car, do his own shopping and cook his own meals but his balance and mobility are severely challenged. Little tasks that require dexterity such as screwing in a light bulb or changing a battery are annoyingly impossible. Every six weeks, he drives himself to the hospital a hundred miles away for a blood transfusion.
I’m not an electrician or gadget geek but I can open a box and lift things so I went over and helped him set up the new flat screen. All I really had to do was plug it in, secure it to a console, adjust the viewing distance to his living room recliner and put batteries in the remote. He programmed the rest.
“I don’t know why I got this damn thing,” he said, flipping quickly through the channels. “There’s nothing worthwhile to look at. It’s mostly crap.”
A few weeks later, he ordered another one for his bedroom.

Jim’s interests lie in simple day-to-day retirement living. Nothing complicated. His home is a single level townhouse, clean and uncluttered for easy maneuvering and carpeted throughout to reduce his risk of falling. Even the tiled kitchen floor has bathroom rugs strategically placed to avoid slippage. There are handrails along some of the walls and he can go from one part of the house to another in a few short steps.
He spends much of his time reading, watches cherry-picked TV shows and dabbles around on his computer. His family visits periodically and he has someone who comes in to clean. I visit him every couple of weeks to see how he’s doing. With the flat screen on mute, we’ll sit and talk for several hours about the community, politics, work, religion (in our cases, lack of) and life in general.
I assume he likes his quiet independence but I wonder if he gets bored living this insular life.
“Have you ever thought about doing something creative,” I asked him, flying an ill-thought premise that the physically challenged were looking for something to do. “I’m participating in an art show in a couple of weeks which might be fun. Ever try…you know… painting or sculpting? As soon as I said it, I cringed a little.
“I paid a guy to come in here and paint that wall orange,” he smirked, and then added, “Nope, I’ve never really had an interest in creating art, not that I don’t appreciate great works by others. Honestly, I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”

There are a series of art shows that happen a few times a year in our resort community and local artists and wannabees are encouraged to pony up around a hundred bucks to acquire a space and partake in the humiliation. The show I entered was swarming with art enthusiasts, crafty crafters and bargain hunters. Like a kindergartener’s Parent’s Night, our proud inspirations were arranged on tables and hung about on makeshift screens. Every kind of creation was displayed for the uninspired to critique and then hopefully consume. Candles, jewelry, pottery, soaps, T-shirts, belt buckles, driftwood sculptures, paintings of every kind; all of it spread down a sunny lane of white-tented booths where inside, the artists primped and fawned over their wares. It was hard to tell who the actual artists were, as some seemed to hang back, mixing casually among the customers or slumping in nearby chairs, nonchalantly ‘fake-talking’ with friends. It’s a ploy we artists use to protect our egos and red faces. Only when someone lingers more than twenty-four seconds around a piece does the gifted one jump up and act like a used car salesman in order to close a deal and make a buck.

The booth featuring my own clever gems was directly across from a senior women’s group; a gaggle of women painters who seemed strangely comfortable wearing sunflower sunhats and cheerful vests. Slumped in my chair, I watched as they urgently set up their creations on racks and along the front of a long collapsible table. They were very excited and hopeful, praising each effort of their large and small original paintings featuring mainly two themes: abstract floral and abstract fish. Our resort community has an insatiable appetite for this look. The ‘beach’ look. Everyone wants art with at least one of these elements portrayed: any kind of exotic flower, any kind of multi-colored fish, any kind of multi-colored sunset, any kind of boat, foamy wave, pelican, dune landscape, seahorse, mermaid, cute kid with pail, or any blinding wearable top featuring galumphing words such as ‘LIFE’S A BEACH or ‘LIVIN’ THE DREAM!’ splayed across it.
The senior women had this look down, from hackneyed attempts at orange mauve sunsets to exploding green and yellow palm trees. I did observe some good paintings though, interestingly thought out and competently rendered and quite surprisingly, a couple I could imagine hanging in the Louvre.

My own grid-laden booth displayed non-painted digital prints of local iconic architecture I had created on my computer. To my mind, they were very ‘NOW!’ I had been inspired by the “you’ll sell a million of these” refrain echoing around in my head. “You’ve got to do the art shows down here,” I was told by my supportive friends and family. “This shit will sell like hot cakes!”
By mid-afternoon, the painterly women’s booth was teeming with salivating buyers, humming and hawing over the golden sunflowers brightly slathered in oil and the figurative fish heavily filleted by palette knife.
“That painting of the flying fish?” my friend Frank said, nodding at an over-sized acrylic of what was either a sparkly fish jumping or a giant white-foamed wave cascading. “It’s $400! That’ll never sell.”

Four hours later after sitting in skull peeling heat, we dismantled the booth in relative silence. During the day we had watched the person next to us sell a ton of inexpensive pre-wrapped soaps (a good ‘beachy’ buy), a booth down the way rid themselves of over-priced mobile-art driftwood (good for stoking the old beach bonfire) and a gentleman take possession of the infamous ‘Flying Fish/Cascading Wave’ piece, eagerly handing a check to a befuddled still-life Grandma Van Gogh in Sunflower Hat. Maybe it was the sunstroke, but I swear I saw some guy leave with a painted piece of recycled plywood with ‘I’M A BEACH BUM & LOVIN’ IT’ scrawled on it.
As for my sales, they didn’t come close to what I had laid out for the booth, frames and digital prints.

It’s tricky, the art show circuit. Trying to guess the aesthetic tastes of people and their appreciation of art is an art in itself. I keep forgetting that this is a beach resort and those coming here are looking for three things: the beach, the beach and the beach. It’s not complicated. Perhaps I should play it safe and create something, dare I say it, ‘beachy’. I’m sure I can be inspired if I can find just the right hat.

“How’d the art show go?“ Jim asked me on a later visit.
“Not bad,” I lied. “I might do another one. Maybe. You want to try it too?”
“I probably mentioned this to you before,” he smiled, shifting comfortably back in his recliner, “but I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”
There was a moment of silence.
“So, what’s on the set?” I said, couching back in my own chair.
“It’s the same old crap. Nothing much to choose from.”
He plucked at the remote and proceeded to methodically punch the buttons; each channel quickly skipping by like capricious viewers at a resort town art show.

Some Loose Screws

If I’m lucky (or cursed) enough, I may get to live for thirty more years or so. That would put me well into my eighties. Along the way, my skin and bones will wear and tear and I’ll drop an occasional screw or two. Teeth and eyesight will crumble and fade. Memory, desire and reasoning will exit the body. Eventually it will all collapse completely. Like all things fallible, I will just stop.
That’s okay. Nothing lasts forever. But while I’m here, I’d like to pass the time in relative ‘togetherness’. I don’t want to end my life, a limp limbless vegetable in some aseptically clean setting. That’s week-old asparagus in a Publix produce aisle. No, I’ll be happy to keep my upper story in tack and my lower framework functioning for as long as I can.

The human form is a complicated entity. Some believe an “intelligent designer” created us. If that were true, our teeth would be made of titanium, we’d have Clark Kent eyes and the words, ‘hemorrhoid’ and ‘erectile dysfunction’ would not exist. I’m not buying the intelligent designer thing. I believe in the theory that we are evolved beings with questionable parts, all different yet somewhat the same. For instance, I barely have enough hair on my face for a decent beard but there’s a haystack of it rising above my skull and plenty sprouting from my shoulders, upper arms and ears. This useless growth doesn’t do anything to enhance my jaw line. I’ve got friends who can grow full beards in minutes but they are completely bald on top. Questionable parts? Toenails. Why do we need nails, other than for scratching that partial beard? I find them uncuttable and recently, unreachable. Eyebrows, ear lobes, male nipples, the appendix; I could go on.

As for our minds, it’s a bit simpler. Thinking gradually slips away. I’ve noticed my memory faltering the last couple of years. It’s disconcerting. Yes, some of us will fare better than others. My neighbor is in his nineties and functions quite well living on his own. I’ve seen him struggle to recall a person’s name but after a week, he does eventually remember it. I’ve also seen him carry a bear of a microwave oven into his house. I can barely take out the garbage and I’m thirty years younger. He’s a leathery old man, impeccably clean and organized. His home smells floral; a pleasant fragrant smell of a popular air freshener. He’s always on the move, going either on long foreign trips or short self-driven excursions north of here to see family and friends. “I’ve got to do it now,” he once laughed. “It’s now or never.” For him, never is just around the corner.
It’s logical that a sense of humor can lead to long life. It signals to our consciousness, ‘a happy mood!’ which can be as simple as a light amusement to a cracked buffoonery.
What is laughter anyway?
I’m beginning to believe, at least in my case, that it might be insanity. It’s a fine line.

When our mother was dying, my siblings and I had the all-too-common occurrence of falling into fits of laugher. That may sound crazy and cruel but it was never on purpose. Laughter was frightfully spontaneous for us growing up, as my sister, two brothers and I would react to ‘any event’ that would suddenly start us all giggling. My dad was an easy participant too, fracturing into hysterics over some long lost recollection. He wouldn’t (or couldn’t) even finish the story. He’d sit for five minutes in his chair quivering, tears on his cheeks. Then he’d start all over again. My mother would giggle at the laughing hyenas shaking at the dinner table and tell us to stop, then, continue her quiet sniggle. My grandfather was the happiest old person I knew.

We would laugh anywhere and at any time; in church, in an elevator, on the phone, at visiting relatives, at the delivery guy delivering pizza, and yes, even in our mother’s palliative care hospital ward. Why, I don’t know. I’d defend it as a crazy response to an awkward or stressful situation. We most certainly didn’t want to laugh; it would just turn on like a tap and once started, wouldn’t stop. I would panic with the sweat-soaking realization that I might not be able to stop no matter what the consequence. I mean, what kind of person laughs hysterically while their mother lies dying a few feet away?
It may have had something to do with borrowing the chair, sitting next to our mother’s elderly sleeping roommate. Cramped at the foot of the bed, I slipped over and wrestled up the chair and in doing so, rang it loudly on the woman’s bedpost.
BBOOOOONNNGGGG!
That’s all it took.
‘Earndt…earrrndt…earrrrnnnnnnnnnhhhhnnnn’, my sister, the sound of a cold engine turning over, her rumbling laugh erupting. I could sense my brother Mark’s shoulders already shaking in the dimly lit room. My older brother, George who desperately tries to control his laugh by holding it in, started with a rhythmic chugging. When hysterical, I ‘m the sound of pinched air leaving a balloon. ‘hhhhhhhaaaaaaaaasssssssssssssseeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!’
There we were, a hissing cacophony of big air exploding out of the room. I dropped the chair and buried my face in my mother’s robe hanging on the wall. George, with a finger to his mouth, managed a shaking “shhhhhh” which did nothing to stop us. Mark and Simone stumbled into the hall. In the distance, I could hear my brother’s snorts and my sister’s barking echoing down the corridor. I expected my mother to sit up and tell us to stop. That would have been sobering. Neither she, nor her roommate moved. I wondered what the staff might think if observing such a thing. “Are they laughing or crying? Or are they crazy?” They’d probably seen it all.
Five minutes later, after we had all composed ourselves, we quizzically wondered what had been so funny in the first place. Nothing really. It was always like that.

As kids, we used to tease our sister that the folks had adopted her from the local mental hospital on the hill and we’d all have a good laugh, well except for Simone. Now I wonder? Perhaps with my faltering memory, I’ve forgotten the real story. Maybe we all came from the hill; four tittering loose screws that the parents heard as they drove passed one day. “They sound like a happy bunch of imbeciles, don’t they? Up for a good laugh dear?”

Even now, when I call one of my siblings, there’s a ninety-nine point nine percent chance that the conversation will include at some point, hearing the phone drop on the other end, followed by the echo of a far-away airless howling.
I pray for relief that I will stop but while in the middle of it, there is no mercy. Not for anyone.