Well, the rodeo won out, with Shel­ter Island view­ing com­ing in on Mon­day instead of today. We’re going to the Bob Mar­tin Agri Cen­ter and I’m hop­ing the sights and scenes will pro­vide much artis­tic fod­der. Artists and writ­ers must get out of the stu­dio and observe, duh… of course you know that, but for me the real treat is in observ­ing and pho­tograph­ing those who dwell out­side my com­fort zone.

Horses were a part of my life for many years.

think­ing about horses, rodeos, Arkansas, and pecan groves makes me melan­choly. I dug through my 1990s writ­ing files and found this:

The Airstream and the Suburban

Part I

At first I con­sid­ered com­bin­ing lives I knew with lives I’d imagined.

I would make a kalei­do­scope of characters,

mir­ror­ing one seg­ment into another,

form­ing new

images

of

scat­tered

frag­ments.

Then I real­ized the peo­ple I made kept turn­ing true;

fic­tion left the room.

In my twenties,

with tod­dlers scrib­bling non­sense papers

attach­ing them with mag­nets to refrig­er­a­tor doors,

I believed the notion of another to be greater

than the real­ity of myself.

Twenty-​four hour days,

three a.m. silent walks to and fro,

self-​analysis required infin­i­tes­i­mal retrospect.

A mother,

a wife, a daughter,

a sim­ple life

some­how filled with a sense of grace,

taken for granted.

And it went on for years, qui­etly tak­ing up space.

I knew it for the short breath that it was.

I felt and mourned it.

Babies learn to walk,

chil­dren dress themselves

leave for school,

and even when they don’t take the bus and you drive,

you’ve lost control.

I fought becom­ing a cliché’.

I would not grieve for their independence,

I would exalt in it.

But still–

I kept them with me as long as I could,

not even allow­ing kinder­garten to take one away.

But I couldn’t slow them down,

make them play My Lit­tle Ponies,

Straw­berry Shortcake,

or dress up in their grandmother’s pre-​war clothing.

They left with­out me…

We moved from the com­fort­able womb

grand­par­ents,

aunts and uncles,

friends from high-​school and college.

When we started this new thing,

this cliché’ of upwardly mov­ing careers

fast-​paced transitions,

we

lost the continuity

became

frag­ments

our­selves.

Pieces

began

to

fall

from

the care­fully glued

puz­zles

my father put together.

Every­time we moved I tried to recon­struct the secu­rity of those puzzles,

until at last,

they couldn’t

be

whole

any more.

I stopped try­ing to over­come my father’s leav­ing me.

His death,

the pivot point for every­thing lost,

assumed more respon­si­bil­ity than it ever should have.

Part II

I am

a car­toon character

with a thought bub­ble over my head.

What he says

and what he means,

two dis­tinctly dif­fer­ent con­ver­sa­tions always go on when I talk to Frank.

He thinks mad­ness aligns him with us,

puts us some­how on his side.

He couldn’t be far­ther from reality.

“Judi­cial Ethics Com­plaint Board…

they thrive on this kind of thing…

got her ideas from Lois who issued one last summer.”

Now I begin lis­ten­ing in earnest.

“Lois claims I hit her,

phys­i­cally abused her when we were married.

Now she’s writ­ten her own letter,

Eliz­a­beth has.

Told the board she could not,

in good conscience,

let me con­tinue in the man­ner in which I lived my life with­out report­ing it.

Eliz­a­beth says the boys wit­nessed me hit­ting Lois.

…claims that she can’t be hyp­o­crit­i­cal while teach­ing Emer­son and Thoreau to young minds…

they learn eth­i­cal behavior,

she wrote that in the complaint.

Accused me of bet­ting with bookies,

using cam­paign funds to go to the horse races…

I don’t deal with bookies,

I just send bets with friends,

you know that…

and I con­verted my cam­paign funds to pri­vate income

and paid income tax on them.”

Frank’s voice becomes plaintive,

almost whin­ing.

He thinks I’m sympathetic,

this man who rep­re­sents all that is despicable,

loath­some

in the universe.

“It’s strange,

the com­plaint is dated August 11,

that’s the same day I filed against her

for vio­lat­ing the cus­tody agreement

because she wouldn’t let me see Bobby this summer.”

I notice my hand shaking,

the one not hold­ing the phone,

so I start mak­ing the bed while I lis­ten to him.

I keep hit­ting the phone with my chin

and it beeps

as I try to bal­ance it with­out hold­ing on with my hand.

Any­thing to keep moving…

I fold clothes after straight­en­ing the covers.

I talk to Frank,

“I haven’t even laid eyes on Elizabeth

since two days before Christ­mas last year.

I can’t tell you any­thing about her.

I don’t know what she does

or how she spends her time.

Bobby is afraid to talk to us,

he hides from us

even if he’s in the same gro­cery store.

This town has only 9,000 people

and I never see her…

I don’t even catch a glimpse of her,

let alone talk to her.”

I sensed he wanted some dirt on her, wanted me to tell him she was a drunk or some sort of fallen char­ac­ter. He ram­bled on about small towns and his dog hav­ing puppies…I thought about Elizabeth

and the abyss.

Some­thing in his tone of voice caught my atten­tion again.

“Lucy talked to Tiffany,

you know,

my new wife.

It seems she spoke with Eliz­a­beth recently.

Well, she told Tiffany that when she asked about your mother,

Eliz­a­beth said

‘Flo has out­lived her usefulness.’

Lucy,

tough as she is,

couldn’t believe it.

Lucy gets along real good with Tiffany, they talk a lot. A lot more than Eliz­a­beth ever would talk to her.”

I begin load­ing clothes into the washer.

Try­ing not to think of Elizabeth

and the abyss.

Take a load from the dryer

I fold,

then

walk to the bedrooms

put the clothes into drawers

that I straighten as I put away.

Phone on my shoul­der, neck crooked,

bas­ket on my hip.

Still lis­ten­ing.

And think­ing of Elizabeth

and the abyss.

Frank kept on talk­ing for a while longer,

I’d fin­ished listening

way before he hung up.

I thought about Elizabeth

and the abyss.

Fell straight down into the chasm,

rec­og­nized reality,

saw truth,

and wept

because

my sis­ter was still in the abyss

and I wanted to crawl out with her.

Part III

The con­ver­sa­tion hung around me for hours.

Just two days before,

as I drove home from work,

I’d had an imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tion with Elizabeth.

I thought of myself

dial­ing her phone number

and when she answered

I’d just say,

“Do you ever think of me?”

She used to have an answer­ing machine,

back when they first separated,

in Arkansas.

Cir­cles,

more cir­cles

thought spi­ralling out from the past,

and Arkansas in the middle.

You never saw the word Arkansas around here until Clin­ton began campaigning.

I don’t think any­one really knew quite where it was.

Didn’t Bush think the state between Okla­homa and Texas… or was that some other con­fused politician?

Spi­rals of con­fu­sion, try­ing to fig­ure out where the cen­ter begins, my life’s grace has become a double-​helix with no end and no begin­ning. I trace the pat­tern and get con­fused, I can’t find my ori­gins anymore.

Daddy died in 1987,

must have been,

we bought a mini-​van to drive from South Car­olina to Arkansas for the funeral.

We knew it would be soon,

his leav­ing us

and we sold his Chevy Sub­ur­ban because it had over 160,000 miles on it.

We got rid of it for more than just old age,

it sat in my driveway

like an open wound,

mute tes­ti­mony of every­thing my father could no longer be.

The trailer hitch left vacant with the sale of the Airstream,

the Yukon Ter­ri­tory license plate,

and the com­pass from Brookstone,

bit­ter mon­u­ments to traveler’s dreams.

I drove from Arkansas

to South Car­olina in the Sub­ur­ban when we moved.

I drove the Sub­ur­ban back to Arkansas

to live in my in-law’s motel

while I helped my father for­get he was dying.

But the Airstream and the Suburban

seem to have become symbols

of my parent’s generation,

of snow­birds dri­ving south from Chicago to Padre Island,

from New Jer­sey sub­urbs down I-​95

to hun­dreds of thirty-​foot slabs of con­crete nes­tled side-​by-​side

some­where in Florida.

My par­ents never joined the snow­bird set.

Instead

they trav­elled by flat-​car through the Baja Peninsula,

sit­ting com­fort­ably in lawn chairs

as the train car­ried Airstream and Sub­ur­ban through Mexico.

The dog, Barney,

on my mother’s lap as she smoked Winston’s

and waved at locals drink­ing grape Nehi’s while roost­ing in the door­ways of aban­doned boxcars.

My father cov­eted Alaska and my mother gave him his dream.

Mount McKin­ley,

the Bering Strait,

and huskies pulling sleds,

they walked on glaciers,

ate bread baked in kitchens beside the Alcan highway,

and saw the things my father knew he’d see…

Mr. National Geo­graphic with his Minolta.

The Airstream and the Suburban

and my dad,

thirty feet of sil­ver bul­let housing

and one deter­mined man,

trav­el­ling together through Nova Scotia

and across Canada.

They drove on.

I bus­ied myself with babies and pre-​school.

Every few months,

my par­ents would camp at Lake DeGray, some 45 min­utes away

and we would go down there.

Load­ing up strollers,

dia­pers,

God knows how many boxes of Cheerios

and gra­ham crackers…

and spend the day watch­ing my father and baby Caroline

lying in the ham­mock together,

a six-​week old human

fit­ting in gen­tle repose across a sev­enty year old chest.

He had a brief affair with a small sail boat,

a Fol­boat,

and he’d take then two-​year old out for short rides.

They’d stay in the shallows,

she wore a red hat and big orange life-​jacket

and he wore brown sad­dleshoes with white socks

and under his shorts

flashed freck­led legs.

I could hear them laugh­ing and eat­ing apples

while they drifted slowly around,

close to the shore.

And I remem­ber this

no one else is here that saw it,

because Daddy’s gone

Jane’s the player in the play.

Par­tic­i­pants in the scene don’t remem­ber the same way the audi­ence does.

Look­ing in,

instead of look­ing out,

changes the shape of things.