In Memoriam

The road was flat cement going down a plunging neckline hill revealing miles of smooth cement skin. Driving down this brown road staged before me, a penny colored world unraveled a considerable distance of sounds and strikes against the car. The wheels’ bounce unevenly under a slow torture raged against any rolling intruder. The stabbing tar and stormy brown mixtures create a crooked brow and twitching eyelid looking out at this unusual universe before you.

When revealed, the sides of the car looked like a saw’s sharp edge. The serration to the metal coming from the car’s insides out, known as the “hacker’s way out of a car,” I surveyed the shredded car leaning too close to the sharp damage and abandoned the idea of avoiding this roadway by fishing for local trout or eating at Papa Michelle’s Cafe. I got back on the mink colored highway to finish the long ride home, under the weight of the super-massive-mess hitching itself to the car.

As I pulled away a dog came up behind the bumper trotting as long as his tongue would go. He stared at my marbled metal damaged car, woofing and trotting, woofing and trotting. He escorted my exit that included a drop into a pothole requiring a skidded puff of dirt to get out of it. The road unfolded in the same fashion I left it. I saw the remains of my wheels press against the flagstone tar and push my view up and down.

Most of the landscape looked fossilized. The colors resembled meat cooked to leather with millions of rocks and clay colored dead weeds intermixed. These lands were suffering under the sun and speaking to the sky about the stupidity of being here. The seasons changed under the tribal demands of the hot, yellow suns and bone colored snows. I was driving through, and soon to be exiting, the part of the world that throws its sequenced sunshine over the dirt when you’re not looking and squints to see who you are as you drive by, alone and half asleep.

I was traveling to live with my mother in a small town out-skirting this coffee grounds landscape, its roots familiar to this learned alumnus. She lived in a tear-drop shaped town just past the narrow valley I had finished driving through, just before it finished me. The valley was known to locals as the Can Opener. It had certainly opened me and my car like a tin of jam, ridges and all. I knew better than to drive through Can Opener, but it was a good shortcut, and the sweet sounds of the guitars of home would play well to my lyrics of navigating the road home. I couldn’t resist because while driving I wrote the lyrics, they were southern accented and unrequited.

It’s not the kind of land you’ll love and my mother’s home is not the kind you’ll find in your dreams. I was not seeking the landscape or to leave behind my love for loneliness. It was under the cruel announcement she had made recently, she was ready, “to go to Jesus,” I was here to help her live there, later than sooner. An attempt to knit the threads of a loose life, based mostly on memories that trailed me all the way here, together with my lonely lifestyle would have been of great reward, but of little consequence and energy, to me.

Her home was at the end of the Can Opener valley, straight through and direct, to a back section of the city known as Knife Sharpener. The local high school, where I graduated from many years ago, was called Sharp High School; the people had taken a short cut to Knife Sharpener by calling it just, Sharp. Not much else was around, but the folklore that buzzed well from the local’s lips. My favorite one is short: some blue-eyed people had come but found they yawned too much here, and left soon after. Or how the early settlers who lived here saw the henna colored trees catch children in their branches like nets, and held them until their limbs and torsos grew as big as trunks. And that is why the friendly people here are as big as the trees with very small heads, and consequently, small smiles.

Pictures of me are framed and placed on the mantel. The nick-knack shelf with gifts my mother got from her wedding to my Dad. I faced the door thinking about the limited wisdom needed in life. How it’s filled with stacks of reminders, love coming with flowers delivered by a guy under a hooded sweatshirt. The Misgivings Highway turned cold-to-shiver blowing behind me; I reluctantly knuckled a rude sounding knock.

In I flew to find Mrs. Olivia Grosvenor-Trap, being her daughter Kelly Trap of the famous Mole Trap Trail founded by my father, Cole Trap and his brother, Butch Trap. Now rented out to the state and locals at a handsome monthly price and owning most of the surrounding block to her house. I entered a gray tone to my skin, a throat-annoying rasp to my voice I’d taken on since before the Can Opener valley. Mother sat silently crooked in her expensive wheelchair watched over by her companion for many years, Maria, who was placing a shawl around her shoulders leaning against a blanket.

“She’s tired and old,” Maria said, “taking antibiotics for some pneumonia.”
“But never to be discouraged,” I replied leaning down to kiss my mother’s forehead.

I felt like the new girl at school meeting the kids and seeing the classroom for the first time. Everything, especially my mother, was new to me. I had been here just last Christmas but somehow things had changed. I should say, my mother had changed – she’d gotten old. The appearance of time left, for her to be here, was no longer eternal. The house’s materials, mostly stripes, were blurry, old, with dust lightly powdered amongst her crystal water cups, the pill bottles waiting their turn on her footstool by her chair. My first night in Sharp, I settled into, and fell asleep in, a room with the window shades left open after dark.

Everyday began with her bones getting worse leaving her back lowered to leave her in a constant sitting position even when she was standing. Then her asking for her own mother and other things unobtainable, the freshness in her bountiful thoughts and vague voice not heard unless you sat near.

“I used to swim in the coves near the trail with Frankie Valenzuela. We’d see how far we could walk up the valley before the road shredded our shoes.” She’d smile lazily thinking of the days with salty buoyancy to the cove water and speaking of Frankie who I am not sure really existed.

“Was Frankie part of the Forbidden Sector?” The name they called their group of friends down at the “Hoof-and-Horn” dancing nightly, she never had an answer. I’d place a key word in front of her and she’d take the old story and run away with it as if holding a beloved corner piece of birthday cake, newly cut, with a rose made of icing on it.

Part II of I Saw Their Happiness – Tomorrow