Power Trio

Power Trio, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

Today I switched hospitals with a colleague for the convenience of going to a doctor's appointment that is located here. The thing I love most about this particular hospital is that it has a medical library that discards books relatively frequently and makes them available gratis. Many of the books are outdated manuals and reference books from obscure medical specialties, but sometimes, when the literary gods are feeling frisky, they are novels.

Today was just such a divinized day. The discard section was lined with brightly colored paperback spines that drew a running gaze from me, head tilted severely to the right. My eyes tripped along several low quality affairs and a shite-load of Tom Clancy titles until fixing firmly on the name Walker Percy. The book was "Love in the Ruins" and for those not familiar with mid-twentieth century Southern writers like Walker Percy, Eudora Welty or Flannery O'Connor, it might have been mistaken for a trashy romance or other some such thing. As it is, the main character is a psychiatrist and the story itself has a faint SciFi odor about it. It might as well have had my name written in it.

Another book that made my eyeballs stop and take notice was Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions". The last time I'd picked this book up and begun reading was in the early 90's as an overly earnest student at a stridently conservative college. Two chapters into it I had been thoroughly scandalized and saddened that this author whom I'd grown to love and trust for good fiction would write something so trashy and un-American. I stopped reading it in disgust and may have even thrown it away.

This book too was snatched up and put in my cargo pocket. I read the first two chapters while eating my lunch and found myself more than once giggling like a silly school girl. Such brilliant satire! Such scathingly accurate insights! Quirky as heck. Apparently it took twenty years of maturity for me to be able to appreciate what he was doing with this novel.

I met Kurt Vonnegut once, kind of, not really, and managed to piss him off. As a senior in High School I drove up to Indianapolis with some friends and fellow Vonnegut lovers on a blustery winter night to see him give a talk at a large High School auditorium. I had my hard back copy of Cat's Cradle with me and after the talk my friends and I snuck back stage.  As he attempted to exit in the rear I presented my book and a pen for his autograph while partially blocking the doorway. He gruffly waved me aside and pushed past us to leave, burning my friend's hand with his cigarette in the process. If I'd really known anything about him outside of the few books I'd read, I'd have probably known that that shite wouldn't fly with him. But I was just happy to have had my brush with fame, literally (literarally?).

The third book that caught my eye was John le Carré's "Russia House". To be perfectly honest, I have never read anything by him though I was enthralled by a movie based on one of his books, The Constant Gardner. I also recollect that the movie based on Russia House had a beautifully melancholic soundtrack that featured Branford Marsalis on soprano saxophone, a favorite Jazz musician of mine at the time. The music haunted me for weeks afterwards and gave me a burning desire to learn how to play a soprano saxophone.

I even went as far as to buy a soprano saxophone when I was living in Korea, a black beauty with nickel plated keys. I was able to shave almost two hundred dollars off of the price by using the monetary exchange rate to my advantage. The seller refused my offered price in dollars, so I split my offer into dollars and won (Korean currency) that he ended up accepting even though for me it was an equivalent amount. The one thing I learned from that experience is that if you want to learn how to play the saxophone, don't try and start with a soprano. And if you want a good deal in Korea, carry two currencies.

Sadly, I sold that saxophone a few years later for a loss in Bloomington Indiana after squeaking and squawking on it for awhile, but getting free books today has helped take away some of the lingering sting of that memory.

Whatever It Takes

whatever it takes

to escape the pain
if only for a minute

whatever it takes

to keep myself sane

or even to admit it

to take a hit
to draw a drag
to punch the vein
to light the fag

to sniff a snort
to slice the skin
to drink it dry
to grind a grin

to give it up
to a stranger's grope
to hang it high
to knot the rope

whatever it takes

to keep myself sane

or even to admit it

whatever it takes

to escape the pain
if only for a minute

***

A Very Snowy Day

A Very Snowy Day, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

A peculiar thing
to see a squirrel
dragging a cut
of cloth, jumping
from branch to branch,
through swirling
bits of snow.
Later, I ascend
the stairs
to a window,
binoculars in hand.
From my warm
perch I spy
the clump of
leaves and twigs
just slightly above
eye level
and bring the
viewing circles up
to take a look.
At once I am,
or perceive myself
to be,
in the nest
padded by a cut
of cloth on this
very snowy day.

Reading about Poetry

Reading about Poetry..., a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

***
Reading a book
about writing poetry
on a couch
in front of a window
while wind and snow
blow at my back.
My son says,
"Look Dad, it's a
blizzard!" And
so it seems.
***

The Sweater

The Sweater, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

I want to write about the sweater. It has wide stripes of black and red, only some have said over the years that it is dark pink or other somesuch color. The color is not important, though there is some significance to the fact that it was a color other than green. That detail came from how I acquired it in the first place, from friends, on my birthday, while serving as an infantryman in Korea. They were one American school teacher and two Korean students, friends I'd made while teaching English as a volunteer in the evenings in a small town north of Seoul.

They bought it at a shop outside of my military base, a shop among many shops selling cheap knockoff clothes, watches, and anything else that could be stitched or made to look like something it wasn't. But this sweater was different; thick, warm, and roomy. It has been in my possession for twenty three years and it looks like it could have been bought yesterday. What significance the red/pink/salmon whatever color?

My wardrobe then and now is 75% olive drab with the other 25% comprised of mostly earth tones. They were happy to give it to me for my birthday, so far from home, and laugh that they bypassed a nearly identical one that was green and black because I needed something "different" to wear. I later saw the one they passed on and found it exceedingly pleasing to my eye, but I did not buy it.  Instead, I wore the one they bought me out of deference to their friendship, a sustaining force in a hard place in my life, and it grew on me.

I brought it back to the States when my time was served and continued to wear it when the weather permitted, usually with a black or olive drab turtleneck, needing to temper its color with something more familiar, a compromise of sorts. I was wearing this very sweater the night I met the girl who was to become my wife. Accoutrements included a beanie and a man purse that I wore across the chest and called a "pouch." We laugh about it now, such strange ideas, individuality gone a bit awry. It is the prerogative of the single person with all eccentricities at full bore w/o any temperance or tampering by others, significant or otherwise. Somehow it was not off putting enough to disallow the coming of vows and the co-creation of two small but exquisite human beings who fill my heart beyond imagining.

The years have passed and the sweater has followed. It has survived several wardrobe weanings as we've hopscotched from the Midwest to the East Coast to the South and back to the Midwest. I have never been able to part with it, though it has fallen out of favor with my wife almost from the git go and I've ignored it these past almost fifteen years of marriage, sitting in the back of closets or in boxes, touched by neither moth nor decay. Until today.

It was one degree fahrenheit this morning when I let our dog out to potty. Instead of her usual roaming she did her business and returned quickly to the door to be let in. The few seconds of having the door open while standing there in my PJ's was almost unbearable. I made my way back upstairs and looked to my top shelf where I keep my sweaters, digging through the green, beige, brown, and black ones until that odd colored one dislodged itself, unearthed like a pleistocene fossil, the gay coat of a woolly mammoth. I brought it down and unfurled it to take a look, unchanged over so many years, a witness to so much of how I came to be who I am.

It was as thick and comfortable as I remembered it, worthy of a polar vortex. I'd sworn off turtlenecks for decades, nevertheless I dug around and found my old olive drab one and felt the two should be wed once more. Coming downstairs, I found my wife cooking breakfast for the kiddos.  She glanced up at me when I entered the kitchen. There was a hitch to that look that made her eyes hesitate, "You're not going to wear that to work, are you?" I told her it was warm and, ultimately, just a sweater, though in that look I could see that she wished I'd gotten rid of it years ago.

Premature

COSI, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

***
Perpetually born premature
I live out these tenuous hours
in my incubator of a house
kept alive by the oxygen-rich
vitality of my two children
and a spouse who will not
simply let me go with the
pull of a plug when the
drain of my selfishness
has reached its fullness
***

My Father's Shoes

New Basketball Shoes, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

I found them in the back of my father's closet amongst a litter of 70's style above-the-ankle leather shoes with side zippers. To be fair to my Dad, it was the 70's and I was seven years old. Above my head hung what seemed to be hundreds of polyester suits and a rack of ties, each wide enough to prevent any food from reaching a shirt front. In those younger days I had a habit of exploring every nook and cranny of the house when my parents were otherwise occupied, certain that I'd find something of interest that had been hither to hidden from me. And, by gum, I found just such a thing that day.

I picked one of them up and turned it in my hand to look at it from different angles, heck, I may have even smelled it. It was not like the others and it did not seem connected to my father who was a preacher from a very conservative denomination that was always on the lookout for signs of "worldliness." Its function and appearance did not include anything remotely Sunday-go-to-meetin' and had me not a little scandalized, but exhilarated all the same. What was it? Well, I can only say in retrospect what I did not know at that time. It was a bona fide black canvas Chuck Taylor All Star high top tennis shoe.

This was a part of my father that was a mystery to me at that time. He traveled a lot for his weekday job as a carpet salesman and oftentimes got home late. On Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, as well as on Wednesday nights, he was preaching. The first time I really saw him in action was when he had invited another pastor from the same denomination to bring some of his church members over to play a full on game at the basketball court situated on a corner of the town square.

They all wore short sleeve buttoned shirts and long pants, not t-shirts and shorts which were deemed too worldly. They had to be a witness to anyone that might pass by and plainly see that they were of a different sort. The Chuck Taylors made an appearance that night on my father's feet for the first time since my discovery. I watched him shuck and jive around that court, run from end to end, and throw up several Bob Cousy style running hook shots. It made me deliriously happy and proud.

Now I am forty four years old and I have a son who just turned nine. This evening we bought him his first pair of high top tennis shoes for basketball season which starts this Sunday afternoon. Seeing those black Nike high tops in front of his closet tonight brought back that memory of a thrilling discovery in the back of my father's closet all of those years ago. And it made me deliriously happy and proud.

Purple Play-Doh

***
It's all she wanted
for Christmas
at two, almost three
years of age.
A consistent request
from which she
did not waver.
The look on her face
when she opened
that yellow cup
filled with the shade
of her fancy.
Who can describe
such a thing?
I won't even try.
***