Making Widows Wince

    When the kids were small, for shits and giggles, I’d pick them up by their ears. I’d look at them and say, “I’m going to pick you up by your ears,” and then reach down, with my palms facing their little heads, I'd then wrap my fingers around their ears and press my hands together, to squeeze them in a gentle vice type action -- and then I'd lift them up in the air a foot or two -- just enough to say I had.     Allison knew from the start, and from an inner instinct she was born with, that the trick was to grab my forearms with her hands and to hold on tightly as I lifted -- to allow the grunting and flourishing that I was acting out to steal the show, while safely playing the straight girl, and to allow my dramatic showman's flow of personality to distract. I love her because she was in on the joke from birth – and she always will be.     Kayla never knew it was a trick. She thought I could make the magic real and that everything I dr...

Two Funerals and a Cup As I write this, little flies are bouncing off the glass door next to me, frantic to get out of here and away to something else, anything, else. They seem to be the same as the ones that were frantic to get in earlier, though, since they are flies, it’s difficult to be sure. I’d like the power to dip them in amber to make them live forever and, maybe, make them be a little less anxious about what they are missing as they ram their little heads into the wall. I’d like the power to read them – to unzip their DNA in real time, to play them back in reverse until I understood what motivated and drove them, to gain a little fucking perspective. The only thing I can see now is that they eat shit and make more flies -- and I wonder if that’s the point, and if it is, why? We are not movies, but we might as well be for all the acting we do living and dying from scripted cause and effect. And maybe it is all written and we are just playing out a strange combination of...

    I finished my five pounds of crap coffee this morning – a gift of something that might have been abandoned in the trash if not for my poverty – a gift given in a large plastic zip lock without label, identification or aspiration. Not wanting to go crazy by getting too ahead of my station in life and say, rocket up to something more substantial like Peet’s, I bought a pound of Mr. Coffee ‘Bold Brew’ with a plan to live with it until the next upgrade cycle – maybe then to switch to Dunkin Donuts, or something similar. It’s just a drug, and the dosage stays the same no matter what the taste – and I’ve forced down worse for less in my lifetime. I ended up with the bag of crap coffee because Mary needed the can for medical reasons – to wrap a thromboemboletic stocking around the lip of it in order to allow her mother an easier way to put the damn stocking thing on her feet. (Get can, wrap stocking, insert foot, and pull stocking,) She dumped the coffee and kept the can –...

      Tuba City       It ended well: with us sitting in a nice Travel Lodge restaurant sharing a common meal of roasted chicken with a Harry Potter birthday party, but it didn’t feel good on the way to getting there. Arriving was the best part of the day.     We had decided to head south from Moab -- rumor and deductive reasoning said the road would be pretty, and since it was new to me, a bit of something different to tell tales about to others. (When traveling, I tend to tell the same stories about each milestone on the trip. If you travel with me two times, you only get one story, so it’s best to seek out new roads – best for everyone.)     We are headed south but it feels like we are just going down. To the right, uranium mining tailings and to the left, not much. There’s a big-time headwind – I feel like I’m riding a motorcycle with a cracked windshield. The road just goes on – Monticello, Blanding, Bluff...

Traveling west on interstate 40 from Flagstaff, we passed by Williams on the way to Seligman. We passed it because it doesn’t need our help – it has both pine trees and a train to the Grand Canyon to keep it alive, and though bypassed by the freeway, it still sits close to the road and is accessible to the casual tourist, or those in need of gas and candy. Ash Fork comes next, 20 miles later. A crossroads for the turn south to Prescott, it’s not much, and is never a stop on any of my journeys. Someday I might find out I’d missed out on something nice there, but doubt it, and have no interest in it at best. There is a new turn off a few miles down from Ash Fork – an exit with no other purpose than to get you back on Route 66 for a few miles. I’ve never seen it before, but it doesn’t look new. We take it, and as we parallel the interstate, I remember it as the place out car broke down years before – back when I was very young, and times were different. This was where I rode the twenty...