Mom is coming back from Florida with my sister Beth
and we are picking her up at O’Hare.
While in Florida Mom and Beth went to Disney World. This is the longest I
have ever been without the woman who gave birth to me.
I am five years old. It has been a week of pedaling
up and down on my bike with the banana seat and training wheels in the side
alley abutting our house. It has been a week of vacation bible school in
Bartonville. We drive late seventy
station wagon that always seems to be in the shop. On the way to the vacation bible school
church service where the kids sing in front of the adults my dad makes a right turn off of Cedar onto
Moss and the passenger door where I am seated inexplicably swings open like a
chrome wing and I find my half-decade old body tilting out the passenger side
door, my kneecaps and arms flung out in front of me. In a second my eyes
register the smudge of concrete below and I can feel the movement with my left
foot.
I am wearing
my seatbelt. I am still strapped in.
Father immediately halts the vehicle, crunching the
shifter in P. I am bemused. He asks me what happened.
“The door just flung open. I don’t know what
happened. You turned and the car door flung open.”
Dad again tells me to be careful. He tells me it is
a good thing that I was wearing my seatbelt or I could have fallen out of the
moving vehicle and Lord knows what might have happened.
He tells me that I could have died.
I was strapped in by the umbilicus of a
late-seventies safety belt.
For a moment it felt like I was going to fly.
***
“I used to go to stage two all the time back in the
late 80’s only I was too shy to dance and the and the only song I would dance to was just
can’t get enough by Depeche Mode. Every time that song came on I somehow just
exploded.”
***
He had died before. The circuitous snake-like emblem
encapsulated in an upside down diamond on his chest had failed to register the metronomic pulse of
his heart ticking in superior syncopated measuring the catered career of a
super man.
He had died before.
He walked into a room of gold Kryptonite never and
was stripped of his powers, never to be seen again.
He had died before, DC had re-launched their series
in 86. He had died numerous times and always been resuscitated. He had been
brought back as a robot. He was found in another dimension.
In 1992 he was already 52 years old, yet perennially
stranded in his mid-thirties.
And in New York, after he exposed himself to Lois
Lane, after he got down on one knee, it was somehow decided:
“Let’s just kill the son of a bitch. Let’s kill ‘im
for good.”
***
The Pinta was the second smallest of the wooden
flotilla Columbus employed to traverse the nautical film of the Atlantic It was smaller than the size of an avg
suburban domicile with a length of around 55 feet and a width of that of 18.
The ship was a caravel and was the
swiftest of all the triumvirate
bark-hewed vessels of Columbus’s fleet. On October 12th, 1492 at
approximately 2am the ruffled
archipelago coastline of the purported New World was spotted from the prow of the Pinta by Rodirigo de Triana who purportedly
shouted "¡Tierra! ¡Tierra!" upon the sight of
land.
Cannonballs echoed, reverberating into the
nothingness of the find.
***
Everything is wet. The paper is dripping like a
diploma momentarily placed inside of a fishtank and then removed.
“I wish our paperboy would just place the paper on
the front porch instead of hurling it from across the street.” Dad adds, noting
that it is the third time this month that he has had to look for our paper in
the front lawn or that our paper has been extremely soaked.
Mom says that dad should call the journal Star. Dad
says that if it were Sunday he would call. Instead Dad rattles the shell of his
orange coin purse, pinches out thirty-five cents and says that he is walking
down to the gas station to buy a copy.
***
“What are you doing grandma?” I inquire. I have
experienced eight Christmases so far.
She is still in her pink house goat. Her teeth are
out of her mouth resting in seltzer water next to her bed.
Grandma almost always refers to herself in the third
person.
“I’m going to tip the paper boy.” She says. I ask
her why. She holds out an envelope.
“Because it’s Christmas and its cold and snowy
outside and Grandma almost always receives her paper before work and it is
still nice and dry.
***
“Oh he was nothing like that,” Harmony tells me,
eleven years later, over the phone, from three thousand miles away.
I am sixteen years of age and a sophomore in high
school.
“He raped the natives. He disseminated Syphilis. He appropriated
the land. He was nothing like that. He found absolutely nothing.”
***
Later that week on our way to pick up mom at the airport
in Chicago dad tells me that he has something for me. Because he is anxiety-riddled and even when
the door is locked he feels that if might flail open I am seated in the back
seat of the station wagon. Dad even said that he wished he had a football
helmet I could wear just in case the door flings open.
He pulls out a Thompsons shopping bag where father
has packed and stowed at the bottom is
my taupe-flavored Fisher Price tape recorder, the tape player that always looks
like it is masticating the cassette every time I press play.
I ask dad what is it. He tells me to press
play. The moment my uncalloused fingers
press down on the center of the tape recorder my mother’s voice
reverberates like a bird breaking
flapping out of the latitude and longitudinal vectors of a pet cage. I smile. Dad reaches down and hands me a
book, with the title THE VALUE OF CURIOSITY. My mother had recorded herself on
the tape reading the book before she left for Florida and I am to follow along.
I ask dad what it means to be curious.
He says wanting to know all about something that is there all
along.
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