*I wrote this in 2017, and as I reflect back on where and who I was then, it makes complete sense.
The place I come from is steeply graded and rocky, fragrant and fraught. It is a land of many shades of green, brown, orange, red and winter white, a place where the best days are long gone and everyone knows it, if even if no one dares say it aloud.
The rich buy homes they use for weekends and summers parties on vast lawns, visiting the declining Main Streets as if touring a broken down zoo, ‘Look at the lion whose teeth are gone! Does anyone in this town have all their teeth?’
The other place I come from – we all come from – is mother and father – grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, neighbors, priests and ministers, teachers and bus drivers and the woman who cleaned your teeth twice a year, making your gums bleed, all the while talking to your mom, who never takes her coat off.
And I come from my father’s place of work, the scent of one-hundred plus years of dry goods, sundries, solutions, pills, remedies, ice cream sodas and condoms in special wrap, drawn from the back room where he would, laughing, take the men to make their choice.
I am my mother’s work too: text-books and mimeographed sheets of paper, Cicero, Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, and the sonnets of Homer – poems by Keats, Byron – and other books too, histories and essays, Etruscan art, and Shakespeare. These are from worlds beyond the rocky valleys her marriage brought her to, the dark places and lonely hours while my father peddled drugs, hair gel and porn but most of all kindness and humor – the dark hours that led her to overeat and read her own version of porn: bodice rippers filled with buxom virgins, blond, brunette, chestnut sirens who were instantly orgasmic, saved by Rex or Colt, or Steel or Thor. Yes, fucking Thor.
Most of the time I’m just mystified I survived. But I did. Most of us do, one way or another. All those children born in the prosperous, hopeful 50s and 60s of Eisenhower, Kennedy and even LBJ. Kennedy quoted Frost, got us further into Vietnam, and LBJ and Tricky Dick led us further down the rabbit hole, typifying, embodying a new America split in two, each side taking one of both roads the twentieth century poet described and that has made all the difference.
All the things we didn’t talk about: everything. Almost everything. All the things we didn’t know or acknowledge but mostly didn’t know were there sitting next to us in class, or at the church picnic: beatings and child abuse, incest, sexual abuse, alcoholism, suicide, depression, key parties and drug abuse. La-la-la-la-la-la-la. If I can’t hear you, or see you, if it hasn’t happened to me, it’s not real, it can’t happen, it doesn’t happen. Not in my world, not in my backyard, not in my lifetime.
