To My Left

Everyone in the church is quiet except my mother to my left who is moaning softly. My father, to her left, is dry-eyed and straight-backed, a different man now. Two nights ago when the news came, he was slumped over the ktichen table, weeping long after my eldest sister switched off the lights, closed the curtains and shuffled me to bed. My mother smoked on the porch.

My sisters sit in the church pew to the left of my father in dark purple dresses, three plums in a row. To their left is Oscar, our yellow lab, and Simon, the stray who simply walked in the front door one day and never left. My sisters insisted we bring the goldfish, and the three of them bump against the glass in their tank to Simon's left. The ant farm is here too, with several dozen sugar ants tunneling, hauling dirt, ceaselessly moving. Farther down are the dolls, fourteen of them in their Sunday best, hair combed and bowed, cheeks rosy. Then there are my Lego-men, seated properly on a bench I made out of red bricks. Circular nubs stick in their would-be buttocks and would-be calf muscles.

There is a teddy bear, passed down from sister to sister; my mother's baby-blue bicylce; our favorite old Monopoly board; my bottlecap collection; a tin of paperclips; my father's pocket knife with worn Boy Scout insignia; an apple that had been rotting in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator for a month; the week's recycling, sorted correctly; a green canteen; a high school algebra test with a B+ on it; a college acceptance letter; a pair of red winter gloves; a toothbrush and half-tube of toothpaste; on and on and on to my left.

To my right, with his hands crossed on his chest and his camoflauge shirt neatly buttoned, is my brother resting in his black box, an American flag draped neatly on top. The preacher clears his throat into the microphone.

The last time I saw my grandmother was in a cold hospital room in tiny Sandstone, Minnesota on Christmas Eve. I was thirty-five and I was late. There was snow and most of the family had left to go to their homes, their warmer beds, their vanilla-scented kitchens, their children's stockings.

"Gram," I said.

"John," she wheezed, calling me my father's name.

"Merry Christmas, Gram."

"Is it Christmas?"

On the aluminum tray hovering over her frail body there was a small paper cup with two orange pills, an empty water glass and a rosary. My aunt Barb touched my shoulder. "She'll be in Heaven soon. Are the roads bad out there? I've got to get the roast ready for tomorrow. You'll be there won't you, Peter?" I nodded.

The lines on my grandmother's face were deep and many, dug in like trenches. She fought this world bravely, and these wrinkles were the scars to prove it. They sliced and crisscrossed, wound and unwound, spiraled, danced and wove the history of her life across her face.

On her forehead were the worries of child-rearing. There was the story my father told of falling down the stairs when he was six and Gram finding him in a pool of blood in the foyer. There were the countless bruises, cuts and kisses. There was the first stillbirth. And the second.

Around her eyes were the anxieties of love. William, my grandfather, carved deep purple valleys under her eyes when he left and took all her tears with him. Her eyebrows hung low from all the sleepless lonely nights, praying the children would never grow up.

My uncle Frank helped chisel the gridlines on each cheek and widened the dimples that came with her laughter. He was good to her, and once he took me deer hunting. I held the .22 to my shoulder and he said, "It'll push back hard, but hold on and aim for the fuckin' heart."

The grooves in her chin were from the looks of disapproval she gave the passing decades. Women who showed too much leg. Men who encouraged it. Pants pulled too high, then too low. Music, awful music everywhere. In the end, she wasn't very friendly. But she gave us life. And $10 checks at Christmas until she couldn't hold a pen anymore and that was why I came back, why we all came back. To hold her until she let go.

I picked up the rosary off the aluminum tray and tried to remember the Hail Mary. I kissed her lips, dry and wrinkled like everything else. "Merry Christmas," I said again. My Gram, full of grace.

In My Refrigerator

I've found it's best to eat something with my coffee in the morning. Otherwise my stomach just feels acidy all day, and the caffeine kicks in way too strong making my hands shake like I have some kind of early-onset palsy.

One summer in college I worked as a soccer coach at a sports camp for kids. These kids were eight and nine years old, and they were just as tired as I was at 8 AM when camp started, so I began every morning session by making them run laps around the field to warm up. One morning of the second week of camp, a camper named Riley complained that I was lazy for not running with them.

There's something about being called out by a little kid (because, yea, I was lazy) that kicks in an ego-driven primal defense system in each of us.

"Are you calling me lazy?" I stepped closer to Riley and pushed my sunglasses to the top of my head.

"I bet you couldn't even make it once around," he said, stepping closer to me and digging for a booger in his left nostril.

"Time me," I said. "I'll run it as fast as I can, and if any of you beat my time by the end of summer I'll give you a prize." Little boys love two things almost more than anything else: being timed in a race and guessing a secret prize.

I gave my watch to James, because he was the only one I hadn't seen scratch his nose or his butt yet, and when he said "Go!" I took off running. I rounded the first corner feeling great and hit my stride about midfield of the first length. But then, as I passed the goal at the far end of the field from the kids, I felt the coffee start to turn in my stomach. There was nothing in there but hot water, coffee grounds, a spoonful of sugar and some bile, and I was shaking it like a paint can with each lanky stride. I swallowed hard, but tasted the nastiness in the back of my throat with 50 feet to go. I held my breath with 20 feet to go. James high-fived me as I crossed the finish line, and I heard the beep of my watch as he stopped the timer.

I turned to the kids, my lips pressed together in a tight smile. "How did..." was all I managed to say. As soon as I opened my mouth, the wave of vomit rushed out. Brown and red and liquidy on the ground between me and a dozen eight year olds in shin guards and oversize jerseys. The girls shrieked.

"Eww!" Riley said, and flicked a booger off his finger.

"One minute eleven seconds," James said with his eyes squeezed shut.

The camp director insisted I take the rest of the day off. Eating a peanut butter sandwich in a lawn chair that afternoon I thought, I can beat 1:11.

Rectangular

Sometimes we all feel trapped. Sometimes it's as though you're in a room and it's like a riddle; there are no windows or doors and somehow you got inside. Maybe there's a giant block of ice melting in the center of the room, or there's a bird flying in circles around the chandelier--round and round and round. Maybe there was a hidden staircase that brought you here, that you climbed step by step and you entered this room and closed the door behind you and the door disappeared.

Maybe there is someone else in the room and she is pacing back and forth and running a boney hand through her long grey hair and muttering to herself in a language you can't understand. She moves from corner to corner, her eyes to the ground, muttering all the time. You try to talk to her, to stop her for a minute. You reach out to touch her shoulder but your hand swipes straight through thin air and she is no longer there. There is only the bird circling the chandelier.

You wonder if this is a prank. If this room, fluorescent lit, is some joke put on by your friends who all think you're a little crazy anyway. They joke that you should be locked up. They joke that Angela never should have been hit that hard, that you should have taken her to the hospital. This white-walled room is their kind of joke. They are probably laughing about that time you shattered the glass on the bar and held the shard to the bartender's neck until he promised there would be no jalapenos on your nachos. They are probably laughing about the time you tossed Angela down the staircase and she hit her head on the banister and you got the jar of spaghetti sauce out of the fridge and poured it on her and said, "Bleed now bitch." Yea, they're laughing with you.

Your fists punch but don't dent the white walls here. No windows. No door. How did you get in? If you get out, Angela will pay. The bird flies round and round the chandelier.

A Sad Place

"It's been a long time since I've used calculus," Professor Tallon coughed from the hospital bed. He had always said, "used calculus." The way a magician uses misdirection, or the way a carpenter uses a measuring tape. "We don't do calculus," he had begun the first lecture of every course he taught. "We use it to understand our world. Calculus, like physics, allows our minds to explore the bounds of what is earthly possible." I had scribbled these words frantically on my yellow legal pad, my roommate Todd yawning next to me.

"Please, professor," I gripped his frail hand in the hospital room. The skin was papery; it felt like it might peel off right there in my palm. "All those years ago, before you went to Washington, you were on to something." I leaned in closer to him, and my pen slipped out of my shirt pocket.

"I won't be made into a news story, Peter"

"You won't. I won't even mention your name."

"An anonymous source? You'll take on the Department of Defense with an anonymous source?"

"It's been done before."

He coughed hard, one of those coughs that comes from deep within an aged body. There is something desperate and ancient about such a cough. A horn blowing to beckon open the gates of death ahead.

"You can use my name," he said finally. "But I haven't entered that corner of my brain in decades. I'm a poet now, Peter."

"I know professor. But please, anything you remember."

Professor Tallon sighed and looked sideways at the glass of water on the bedside table, as if he may conjure up the energy for a small drink. He didn't.

I flipped to a clean page on my legal pad and picked up my pen off the floor. "Let's begin at Stanford," I said. He closed his eyes, and opened up the corner of his brain he had left unused for so many years. The place was sad, silent, dusty, long fallen into disuse and disrepair. I had no story.

A Key

Gretta is the plump woman who runs the market around the corner from my apartment. She wears a red apron and always checks my I.D. when I ask for the whiskey behind the counter. She has seven keys on the key ring she keeps in the front pocket of her apron. The big silver one is for the front door of the store, the littlest one is for the cash register and the one with the most teeth is for the back room which looks like a liquor cabinet. The long skinny one is for her husband's pickup which hasn't run since Clinton was in office. The two gold ones are for the deadbolts on the front door of her house. The last one, the rusty one with the very jagged teeth, is for the small wooden box on the top shelf of the cupboard above the stove.

She has to pull up a chair from the dining room to reach it, but first she has to make sure her husband isn't home. On tip-toe she can just grasp the box, it isn't heavy. She sets it on the counter and puts the key, the rusty one with the very jagged teeth, in the keyhole and she steps back to catch her breath.

"I can't. I can't. I can't." She says quietly. A trickle of sweat runs beneath her loose blouse, down the thick fatty rolls of her back.

"I can't." She hates her husband in this moment. She hates her ballooning body and sagging breasts. She hates the red apron.

She delicately pinches the key, the rusty one, and removes it from the keyhole. She climbs on the chair and, on tip-toe, slides the box back onto the top shelf. She slips the key ring back into the pocket of the red apron, slides the chair back under the dining room table and lights the stove. It's spaghetti tonight. He'll hate it.

I Am Walking

For three days, we watched the news reports of the hurricane sweeping up the coast. My sister, my father and I huddled around the television set in disbelief. It rampaged across Florida first, I remember laughing at the weather reporter in his blue windbreaker screaming into a microphone through sheets of rain. "The governor has called for an evacuation of the entire greater Miami metro area," he shouted. "Get inside!" we shouted back.

Next the hurricane hit the Carolinas, then Virginia and Maryland. We caught a train out of the city to my aunt's house at the top of a hill in a little town in Westchester. The red and blue swirl on the television screen wasn't getting any smaller. We wondered, could a hurricane really hit New York? A day later it did.

It was as if someone grabbed the whole island of Manhattan by its roots and pulled it three feet down into the Atlantic. The streets were flooded chest-deep. Taxis were turned over against bowing lamp posts. School desks floated single file out of classroom doors, down the halls and out to the playground where they bumped against the top of the monkey bars and tipped arithmetic books into the murky water.

The rain that drenched the little town in Westchester seemed to start at the top of the hill where my aunt's house sat. I remember the day after the storm moved on, causing a small downpour in New Hampshire and southern Maine, my sister and I went walking down the hill into the damp town. The sun was out, and there were birds everywhere. Sparrows, crows, ducks, nuthatches, bluebirds, warblers, woodpeckers, and my sister swore she saw a bald eagle swooping around the church spire. The birds were gathering up sticks and small branches, rebuilding their nests. I thought, "That is what we will do, though not as quickly." I pictured our living room flooded up to my chest. We will need to get a new TV, so we can know when the next hurricane is coming.

Cinnamon

Someday I hope you find your place to get away to, a little home somewhere on a quiet lake in an endless summer. A chair is there on the porch, and you can just sit and sit forever and no one will ask "Why?" or "What are you doing next?" or "Did you hear about...?" Of course you didn't hear. All you hear are the loons calling to their mates across the lake as the sun sets. The stars come out and the insects, but they don't bite or fly too near. This is not that kind of place. You can just sit and sit.

The moonlight on another endless summer night dances on the water here, a white shimmer stretching right up to your wiggling toes. There is no need for shoes because the grass is soft and warm at night and thistles jump out of the way when you are about to step on them, unless you want to step on them just to remember how it feels. But for now you can just sit and sit.

From here the constellations are in reverse, you're seeing them from behind. It's like watching a play through the back curtain or developing a photo backwards. There is earth, the bright yellow speck straight in front of you, and there, just there, are those three stars in a row, blip-blip-blip, Orion's belt. Is it Orion's belt? You aren't sure, so you turn to ask him, "Is that...?" But of course he isn't there. This is your place, your one chair, your one set of wiggling toes. Alone to breathe and watch that little yellow earth weave through the stars and you can just sit and sit and sit.

Each species of bird has a wingspan developed for its unique method of flight. An eagle has a great wingspan to support hours of circling, hunting for prey, and to support the load of the fish or rabbit it brings back to the nest. An eagle is a powerful bird. A sparrow is a small bird with small wings made for quick cuts, dives, swoops, switchbacks, tight and precise aerial maneuvers. It can dodge predators and snatch a mosquito straight out of the air, but it tires easily. It's hard to say whether over the course of evolution the birds have adapted their habits to their bodies, or if the bodies have adapted to the habits of the bird. If a sparrow suddenly sprouted eagle's wings, would it clumsily try to catch mosquitos or start hunting its own kind?

First thing they do once you strip down to your underwear is cut your hair. "Bald, buzz or a little on top?" It's the only choice you'll make for the next two months. Maybe for the rest of your life. After they weigh you, they measure you. The doctor said I had an unusually long wingspan for my height. "Like an eagle," he said and stretched the measuring tape from my left heel to up under my nuts. "I guess those arms make up for your legs," he chuckled. "Go get your shots."

I heard him say the eagle line to the next three recruits behind me, and I guessed it was something some sergeant once gave him to help "ease the process."

That's what the recruiting officer kept talking about to me and mom, all these concessions the Army was making--changes to "ease the process" for the new generation. He said I was going to have a transformation, to go from one of the best and brightest of America's youth to one of the strongest, the smartest, the finest soldiers on the planet. But, he kept reassuring us, the Army was changing too. "Military service will transform you," he said, "but you kids are transforming the Army too." When he smiled, he showed his whole bottom row of teeth like a mad dog on a chain.

"That sounds nice," mom said. "Can I smoke in here?"