Early morning

Quiet, strangers in my house.

My daughter and her boyfriend

take over, move my things around

demand attention.

People move

away,

die, leave

things behind, ephemera

to be sorted through

by someone else.

 

 

The photo snapped crossing the bridge

from a moving car doesn’t do it justice;

the Gateway Arch rising

in the indigo sky.  I try to squelch my expectations

of home, carting them out like a girl in a shabby dress

wanting something.  She glitters, ablaze

in somebody’s eyes, promising fruition

through the long lonely stretch of Illinois, flat dry farms

folding out for miles.

 

Waiting for the plane to arrive in Berlin, waiting to get through passport control, waiting waiting waiting.

People who wait: work, read, sleep, text, eat, talk, fidget, pack and re-pack.  Do nothing.

Things that you wait in or for:

Trains, planes, lines, love

someone or something to arrive,

your life to begin.

People moving from place to place, jockeying for

the best position to put them in line

to wait again

for something else.

Nobody wants

to be stuck in the middle or the end, afraid

that something will be left

behind: the baggage compartment

now spilling over with somebody else’s

stuff, someone who somehow snuck past

security, with their overstuffed

carryon, insisting that

it could all fit; people who never learned

to dump the excess

as they go: jackets, shirts, dresses

anything that is not worn more than once

is destined

to be left behind.

My mother often tells the story of forgetting my brother, who was off

doing something: jumping over houses (to hear him tell it); scaling walls bordering vacant buildings with large black signs: Keep out! To be fair, he did crack his head open on more than one occasion; he tells us this now, proudly, at family gatherings.  He doesn’t

look like he is scaling many walls, showing up slovenly in stained, jersey shorts, faded yellowing t-shirts that look impossibly stretched out and worn-

in, just plain weary;  bleary-eyed.  Across from me, an old man on the sagging plastic bench leaning against the peeling wall in the lounge at the airport, waiting

for something.

An English couple scuttle off as the woman yells (in her perfectly British accent); they are off to get a coffee, a drink, something to take the edge off; they give up their seats and someone else hurries over, taking their place,

waiting in line.

 

 

Sitting in a railroad station got a ticket for my destination. . .

Early morning.

Things blend together: historic cities on rivers, rolling hills contrasted with brick and cobblestone and concrete; tourists looking up, down, recording it all.  Locals immune or indifferent, tired or angry or bored.  Something else.  Or: expat life, the small winding streets of Cesky Krumlov, other sleepy destinations far away, quaint towns.  Where I am, where I want to be.

I am quintessentially American, loud and demanding –according to my daughter–always falling short.  My life a ong question mark: resiliency? acceptance? resignation? What do I see?

Yesterday was Father’s Day although it passed without a blip in the home of the family hosting me in Budapest.  His four boys uninterested, disengaged, like  American boys everywhere, disappearing into electronic games–even the five year old –although he jumps around demanding my attention; his adorable lisp marks him as younger than  he is.  His father’s way of communication feels forced, the outsider looking in.

The older boys are gone in a moment, mumbling disgruntled nothings.  Their time abroad seen as a chore, something to get through to make in back to America and home, where the same issues await: the new kid at a new school with cliques already formed.   Years they will not be a part of, lost.

 

Airports are big-city-rushing, anonymous, hidden, blasting something unfamiliar, moving fast down horizontal elevators, conveyor belts pushing people along.  Trains are slow-easy, leaning against the glass waiting for the whistle to blow; old-school reminiscent of times past, watching the world in shades of green.

In the plane outside the window, the long angle of the wing, puffy clouds, dotted houses down below, someone else’s life.

 

“You have to fling yourself at what you’re doing, you have to point yourself, aim, dive” (47 An American Childhood).

The ordinary becomes something else; you, coming finally to fruition.

 

Musty cardboard boxes

empty rooms, something

or someone left, deliberately

or just forgotten.  A jacket

tucked between seats

on a plane somewhere.  A box

in the corner of the basement hiding

childhood trophies.  A friend

or more.  It seems inconsequential

to call out or go back.

We were already

gone, always

closing doors.

 

 

 

When my father died I remember grandma in the pew behind me, her long slow breaths on my neck.  Years later, my brother, who shared his name, died at the same age.  My mother beside me, stoic, looking almost stern.

Dinner at my grandmother’s house: Papa in his chair (looking how I imagine now how my father would look had he grown old) in rumpled t-shirt and itchy cardigan.  He once owned the corner grocer on the street where he still lived.  On some Sundays or lazy summer afternoons, we would traipse (in pairs or threes, there were so many of us) through Tower Grove Park with its fountains and carrousels and admonitions from our mother which areas to avoid on the long way home after dark. The park was our dividing line between an ordinary world and our grandmother’s, an adventure where everything was more: pot roast and mashed potatoes, steam rising, mounds we pressed our spoons into, creating pools with dark brown gravy; even her Del Monte green beans tasted better than mom’s.  Kathy, who wouldn’t touch a bite save the bread, which she rolled into little balls breaking off little bits with her fingertips.  Grandma indulged but chided, mimicking her voice,  I-don’t-like-it Leicht, drawling out the sound.  After supper we trooped to the corner store clutching the coins Grandpa gave us, imagining his days long ago behind the counter, our father by his side.

Grandma pulled us close before we left, nuzzling: A bushel and a peck and a kiss around the neck, burying her face in our necks, tickling.  She smelled of lavender soap and the Werther’s candies she kept in a little dish by Grandpa’s chair.

Years later after Grandpa (and my father) died, I visited her in her apartment with my daughter.  (She had abandoned the old house on Castleman where we roamed in the attic searching through the fragments of our father’s life.)  Emma was only two, watching old reruns on grandma’s black and white set, playing with my father’s trucks, rescued from the attic of the house long ago.  When we left, grandma pulled her close reciting the old refrain.