Fourth of July with my Father

[reverie]

*Still a little too prosy, even for my tastes. Will work on boiling it down some more sometime.

 

2/10/2008

 

Fourth of July with my Father

 

You learn to sleep deep

in a guitar player’s house.

Particularly when at least

one son feels a similar

pull towards the blues.

Even more so when you are

the other son and all you

want to do is sleep.

 

Fourth of July I had overslept

and woke to what I thought

was an empty house. Couches

were over-turned, coffee table

smashed, but no holes were

punched in the wall, so that

was one less thing to fix.

Then, I smelled the burnt plastic.

This was new.

 

I walked around the lesser debris

of the living room—scattered magazines,

upturned plates and broken glass—and

into the kitchen to find that someone had

burned a black scar into a few squares

of the linoleum floor. The back door

was open. Outside I discovered a small

fire built from a stack of fireworks, still

in their package. I kept a safe

distance and walking around the fire, until

I found at my feet a small packet

of black-cats, little explosive noise

makers tied in series. I tried to picked

them up, when a low voice barked,

“Give me that,” then the dark version of

my father took them from me and started

throwing the little firecrackers onto the

pile. He did not look at me as he did it,

so I back away into the house.

 

I made my way around the scar in the

kitchen down a short hallway past the

washer and dryer and into the converted

garage that also doubled as my father’s

music room and I found my mother

on the sofa sitting there quiet

with a piece of paper in her hands.

 

I sat next to her and she showed me

what was left of a Peach Tree

Road Race number. The essential entry

token into the annual street race, the men

of my family have suffered through mile

by humid mile consecutively for the last

twenty years. She explained it had

gotten lost in the space between the

drawers of their night stand.

Hours earlier, my father had torn

through the house in vain for it.

And as the race started on TV, he, in a fit of rage

gathered all his t-shirts from the previous

races and set them on fire in pile in the

kitchen floor. At one point,

she explained some reason seeped back

into his head and he scooped up

his tantrum between two pans, and threw

it outside, where I had found him.

Where’s Eric, I asked? “I sent him over

to a friend’s house,” she said, “You were sleeping.”