Magic
Guilt hovers like a storm cloud when it comes to doing the things that we want to do. Not what we need to do, but the little moments in life that fill us with indescribable happiness. And not that I don’t feel happiness and liveliness throughout my day-to-day, because that isn’t a fair assessment of the life that I’ve spent so many years building. However, the routine of everyday life can breed monotony, and a feeling that you want to live. To truly grasp what it means to be alive, and experience something so filled with magic that you can almost believe in forces beyond those of the natural world.
It’s called enjoying the fruits of your labour. It answers the question of why you put in the hard work that you do, beyond simply surviving. You work to provide. Shelter, food, power. But you also work in hopes of escaping the often torturous malignancy of a brain that seems to work at the opposite end of a rope during a never-ending match of tug of war.
And for me, magic in its purest form is music. On weekends, after a long week of work, I put my favourite records on the turntable and sit in a small loveseat that I purchased for a mere 40 bucks on marketplace. I crack open a beer after the needle has been placed on the grooves, and the music starts and I close my eyes. It’s magic. It’s a time machine. It’s a world of endless possibilities, where a man can come to a fork in the road and explore multiple possibilities.
I can see a world where I chased my dreams of being a rockstar. I’m standing in the cold like I did so many years ago. I have a guitar case in my hand, and a fake leather jacket draped over a chequered plaid shirt. There’s an ominous January wind coming off of the river that in later years will fill me with dread, but on this evening, it does not because I’m playing my first rock and roll show.
I can listen to the music of Bruce Springsteen and feel my blue collar veins like roots from my family tree. Each story impactful and meaningful. The realisation that perhaps I’m one of the less fortunate dreamers from a rock and roll song, but also that maybe my life is as important as it gets. Like I said, the music is magic and the soft burn of the alcohol as it descends my throat into the pit of my belly, makes me feel lighter, like a feather but also heavy, depending on my mind set when I decide to crack open that can.
I tell my wife, “We need to see the boss live.” She agrees, and although there’s much discrepancy in our tastes in music, Bruce Springsteen is not one of them. She loves him, and we sing along to Badlands, and Adam Raised A Cain, and Prove It All Night in the car as we drive through town. Her as much a character in one of his songs as I am. Some days I look at her and see us as the two young protagonists of Born To Run, singing “I’ll love you with all the madness in my soul.” And then some days I look at her sad and defeated, living a life that isn’t so much living but just a conscious shadow walking through life feeling unseen and unheard. I think she resembles more the love interest in Racing in the Street, than she does Wendy from Born to Run. “She sits on the porch of her daddy’s house but all her pretty dreams are torn, she stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.”
Then the day comes where I buy tickets to his show in Montreal at the Bell Centre on Halloween night. Because of illness and fatigue, the show has been postponed a full year, so the rescheduled date has finally arrived and I can’t believe it’s here. I came so close to selling the tickets many times with a belief that the show would never happen.
We wake up that morning, get the kids ready for school, and then drop them off. They’re sad that we’re leaving and that storm cloud of guilt is hovering so close to my head that I can feel individual strands of hair meeting it like an electrical current. But we never take time for ourselves, and it’s been longer than I can remember that my wife and I sat alone in a car and acted like two people who fell in love before kids and mortgages entered the picture. “I promise this will be the only year we won’t take you trick or treating, okay?” I say to my kids, who are understanding. Their grandpa is going to take them, anyway. They aren’t going to miss out on Halloween.
We drive to my in-laws’ place to drop off car seats and tell them a couple of last-minute things about their few days with the kids. My mother-in-law smiles and says that she raised kids before, and she’s pretty sure she can handle it. She tells us to have fun and to drive safely.
After that, we grab coffee and we hit the road. We have a 10 hour drive ahead of us, but the day is young; the air is warm, and the sky seems undecided about whether it wants to provide us with sunshines, or hard rain. Before the drive is finished, we’ll get doses of both.
It feels strange just the two of us alone in a car. It's like a first date. She places her hand on my thigh and smiles at me. I can feel the poison being extracted from my body and in those moments on an open road with a warm cup of coffee, I ask myself, Why do we fight? We’re living similar lives and going through similar stresses, and that should bring us closer together, like the music of the boss does. When you find something that you have in common, you hold on to it; you bear hug it into submission, because if it gets loose, everything feels empty. So, again, I ask. Why do we fight?
For the first few hours, we don’t play music or the radio. We just talk. We’re excited about the concert because it’s been ten years in the making, but we’re trying not to get too excited until we get closer to our hotel, and until we actually get into the arena.
And even when we’re not talking, it isn’t an uncomfortable silence, it’s just silence where our heads are saying, Wow, there actually is silence in this world. It’s peaceful. I like it.
A few times, I can see her through my peripherals, and she’s smiling. She’s smiling the way she used to smile when I had a microsecond when I was going somewhere. When I’d get up on a small stage in a dingy bar with my acoustic guitar and my words and close my eyes and sing. I’d open them and she’d be at a table with friends and a drink that usually featured one, if not several colours of the rainbow, and she’d just smile.
Then, when the show was finished, I’d order a pitcher or two of beer and feel good. Feel happy that even if my music didn’t change the world, that at least, I put it out there. That was all a person could do.
And after we were both good and drunk, we’d stumble our way back to my apartment, and feel all the things that a person should feel. Those things that make you realise as clear as day that there is life and there is living.
And as the years go on, those smiles don’t appear as much. Those pleasures go through periods of such brevity that you forget how special that connection can be. And I don’t think that a concert will save a marriage, but I think Springsteen has been the soundtrack for our entire relationship, and that sitting together, just the two of us and hearing a 50 year catalogue in the space of three hours will let us escape into a place we used to go so often when we were younger.
The drive isn’t without its complications, because of heavy traffic and a GPS that ceased to work during crucial moments of finding our hotel, but we do arrive and we get to the show when the doors open.
My wife isn’t feeling great because she doesn’t always travel well, and the added stress of the last hour of driving had her feeling weak and sick. I was getting nervous as the show approached that she wasn’t going to enjoy it, or that she was going to throw up and have to leave.
But she powers through. We find our seats and wait for the show to begin. I still feel that heaviness sitting in my chest like an inability to relax and enjoy the moment. The anxiety is there like it so often is, but I’m still hopeful that the show will allow that feeling to subside. That it will truly allow me to live in the moment and nowhere else.
She still looks sick and unhappy that she’s making me unhappy, but I’m not. I just want her to enjoy the show and not remember it, only for the way she was feeling.
7:30PM, the show begins. We’re behind the stage, but we have full access to the huddle and prayer that the band gives before each show, and we get to see Springsteen walk on stage to a roaring crowd of over 20,000 people. All those years, saying that I needed to see him live and wondering if I ever would, because the rock stars from the 70s are now in their 70s, and like the boss says, “once you get older there are a lot more yesterday’s than tomorrows” fade away. Because there I am, watching him count off the band 1! 2! 3! 4! And the music starts, and it’s life. It’s life in its purest form.
It takes me three to four songs before I get over the shock of staring down at one of my biggest musical heroes, but once I do, it’s magic. My wife begins to feel better and I can see her staring down at him with a look of awe on her face. The pain is going away and is being replaced with magic.
As the band goes into Atlantic City, I can feel myself going back to the first time that I heard the song. Just a university student who’d recently started buying Springsteen albums. I was in my room listening to Nebraska when the second song came on. From the first seconds of, well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night. I was gone, baby gone.
I showed it to a friend I was playing music with and then showed it to my wife. And I was like, this is it.
This is what?
I don’t know, but this is it.
During those shows where my wife smiled at me, the way she did during the early stages of the drive. It’s all there. I’m here now, but I’m somewhere else too. I raise my hands with the crowd and I look around and I see stories. I can read them in their eyes. There are hardships in those eyes. There are worlds of people who kill themselves to survive. I can feel it.
There are two old men sitting next to us, perhaps the same age as the band, maybe younger or older. It’s hard to tell. But they’re seasoned in this world. They close their eyes and move their heads and they’re lost in it. Then when the encore comes, and it’s time to dance with the lights on, they get up and sway like they’re in their living room all alone. But it’s wonderful, it’s thousands of people doing the same thing. Our lives so different, yet so much the same, in that we all seek respite from days and nights of hardships. We all seek those moments where we live, not only exist. Where we’re using our time and living in it.
And it’s there. I can feel the weight getting lighter and the air going into my lungs easier. And I know that there are things I’ve done that I’m not proud of. There are moments where perhaps I would have chosen another path and seen where it took me, and I wonder, but doesn’t everybody? Is there anyone on planet earth that is happy with every choice they’ve ever made since they were old enough to make them? I doubt it. I sincerely doubt it.
But with music, is the power to understand that the world is filled with people who go through hardships. And the right music will tell you it also, Ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive. And that I wanna spit in the face of these badlands.
There are lyrics that tell us I’ve done my best to live the right way, I get up every morning and go to work each day. But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold. Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode.
But the same song can also tell you: There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor. I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm.
The songs are about hard times, but hard people too. That you can feel weak, like you’re going to explode, and that sometimes your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold, and that’s life. That’s life in all of its pain and glory. It’s right there. It tells you that you need to feel pain to understand the beauty of an evening without any of it.
That you need to come face to face with yourself, and especially a version of yourself that is bent on tearing down those walls that keep your sanity intact. But the songs will also tell you that the bad doesn’t always win.
Throughout the three hours of that show, I felt life the way it was meant to feel. Not always, but the way it feels for the people who lay down their lives every day, and who need a moment to say, yeah, this is fun and I’m not the only one who feels this way. There are 20,000 people here singing these songs and closing their eyes and drifting away into a world where the bad is put into submission by the power of community. By the power of love. And even as someone who is neither religious nor spiritual, you can’t deny something higher than ourselves in the rhythmic swaying and dancing of a sold-out crowd who all understand the difference between existing and living. Who are choosing, if only for a short while, to fully live and to fully experience what it means to feel your heart pound in your chest, to feel the blood flow through your veins, to allow yourself a moment where you can be vulnerable. Cry if you want to cry. Dance if you want to dance. Sing as loud as your heart desires because that is what magic is for.
And on the drive back, we listened to Springsteen music, and we reflected on an important evening. An evening where we spent time not just as mom and dad but as two adults who loved each other long before our lives changed, and wanted to make sure that it was all still there. And it was.
Sometimes we fight and ask if we’re only together for the kids. But it was nice to get away and realise that we do love each other. That we could still eat a romantic dinner on either side of a small table and look at each other and talk.
And then after another day of endless miles of open road, we finally made it back home. And as soon as the door opened, the kids came running out, hugging us in excitement and we know that our life is hard but it’s rewarding, and although there are days and sometimes weeks where we’re likely not doing much other than surviving, there is always magic around the corner. You just need to find it, see it, and make sure that when it comes, you’re living in it.
I have but one skill
I have but one skill
November 02, 2024
My name is not as important as my looks.
I have ulnar dimelia, aka mirror hand syndrome. Both of my hands have eight fingers each. I have no thumbs. I have been this way since birth. Barely seventy people, world-wide, present as I do. There are many reasons for this.
I cannot wear gloves. I will not shake hands. I avoid people who make thumb wrestling jokes. I can flip you four birds. I have trouble grasping objects. I can't tie my shoes. However, I can tie a Double Windsor. I use a straw for most beverages and (some) soups. I have been x-rayed. I have never been fingerprinted. I will not make a movie appearance. I do not wave. Forget playing baseball or the piano. I will pass on bowling and clapping.
Despite all of my obvious shortcomings, I do one thing very well.
I am a master locksmith. So much so, for those who know me and what I can do, I am always in high demand.
Why?
Because I can feel tumblers fall. I can feel a pick travel into a cylinder while I measure the pressure required to raise the individual pin tumblers. I am also just as adept with other locking mechanisms.
How adept?
I work off of touch, not sound. I can measure differences of force and pressure within .0002%. I can do all of this both at the source and as far away as two meters (personal best). If it turns, if metal moves across metal, if any part of the mechanism moves, I will know.
Once opened, then I will know what the lock was protecting.
My few friends wonder how I can remain legit. How can I forgo stealing a stack of money here or a diamond necklace there. It must be tempting.
It is very tempting.
But, so is an accusation against the someone who looks like a freak. So is responding to bogus legal requirements that I register with this agency or that agency in the interest of public safety.
No one sees my face, only my hands. No one listens to me, only the sound of their own voice denying my rights. The ADA people wish to characterize and classify me. The FBI wants to interrogate me for every unsolved crime they have. Insurance companies will deny me coverage. The police think I can shoot a pistol. The DMV thinks I shouldn’t drive. I haven’t tried either.
Yet.
So why am I making this announcement? Because I now have confirmation the worldwide number of people with my condition will soon increase.
I am going to have twins.
So, if you have the penchant for making my life miserable, I might just find a level of reciprocity to make your life miserable. What do you have locked away? Money? Papers? Jewels?
Raising children is expensive.
Do you have a secure system? I will teach two apprentices my craft. From the look of their x-rays, they already come with the tools.
Time is on my side.
See you soon.
And often.
To my daughter on her thirteenth birthday
The monstera plant you gave me last spring sits in the kitchen window, its leaves pressed against the glass like palms seeking warmth. One leaf has developed brown spots, crisp at the edges where it forgot to unfurl completely. The others reach in their characteristic splits and perforations—nature's design to let wind pass through, to prevent the broad leaves from tearing in tropical storms. Even in failure, there is adaptation.
I've watched you study this plant, your fingers tracing the aerial roots that snake down toward the soil, searching. "Is it dying?" you asked last week, pointing to that imperfect leaf. The question carried more weight than its four words should bear. These days, you ask many questions like this—about the shrinking monarch migration, about the empty lots where meadows used to be, about the summers that burn hotter each year.
The truth is, I don't always know how to answer. The leaf is damaged but the plant grows on, putting out new shoots with a persistence that seems both foolish and brave. This morning, I noticed a tiny leaf emerging, tightly coiled like a fist. It will take weeks to open fully, to reveal whether it will be whole or split, perfect or flawed.
When you were small, you used to imagine yourself as a plant—usually a dandelion, stubborn and bright, breaking through sidewalk cracks. Now at thirteen, you see yourself more like this monstera: reaching for light while anchored in shadow, carrying the marks of hard seasons while pushing toward growth.
What I want to tell you is this: Yes, there is damage. Yes, there are leaves we cannot save. But look at how the plant keeps unfurling new possibilities, how it finds ways to continue even when the path forward isn't clear. Look at how it adapts—not by becoming harder or more defensive, but by creating spaces for the wind to pass through, by learning to bend without breaking.
The brown-spotted leaf will eventually fall away. But today, right now, a new leaf is uncurling in the morning light, carrying all the complexity of our moment—the inheritance of damage and the insistence of hope, the hard truth of loss and the harder truth of continuation. We cannot know what shape it will take. We can only tend it as it grows.
Magic Pianos
It’s 1943 and I’m fourteen years old. My father is in the South Pacific on an island called Guadalcanal. He writes to me when he can, but I hear that it’s dangerous and my mother believes that he’s never coming back. She tells me to brace myself for that storm, so when the military men come and knock on the door, there’s no shock. She says she won’t even cry because he was a fool to go, and now she has to work long days at a textile factory. She cackles with laughter when I tell her I think that he’s a hero. “Boy, men have been killing themselves since the dawn of time. Heroes look after their families.”
I go to the Drekon school for boys up in Loudon. It’s a big gray building on a hill overlooking a small town thick with industrial smog. The boys there aren’t soldiers. They’re the boys who are going to send soldiers to their death. They even say so as they walk the halls filled with framed pictures of past presidents of the school. They’re the future bankers, lawyers, and factory owners. I don’t belong here, but my grandfather attended this school, and family of past alumni could attend Drekon so long as their grades were fine.
My mother tells me I need to do something good with my life. I tell her I will, but she laughs when I say it. She tells me, “You have too much of your father in you,” as though that’s the worst thing a mother could say to her son. But secretly I think that’s a good thing. He’s a good man, a hero, whether or not she wants to believe it.
On Wednesday’s after school, I take piano lessons from an old Italian man named Victor. His hair is thin and white, and when he isn’t teaching piano lessons, he’s in the back of his shop repairing them. The shop is beautiful, and it smells like history. It smells like if these pianos and violins could talk, they could tell you stories unlike anything you’ve ever heard. And the boy in me sometimes asks them questions quietly as Victor finishes up his work in the back.
I rub thin lines of dust in the shape of musical notes and I say, “What have you seen? Where do you come from? What do you think about the war?” They never answer, though my hope is that someday they will and I’ll sit with them for hours and write what they have to say. Because I want to be a writer, it’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted.
Victor takes me in the back and I sit at a Steinway piano made of Walnut and I tap the keys and play some of Chopin’s Berceuse in D Flat and Victor smiles. “You’re practicing, I can tell.” He says through his small spectacles.
“I am.”
“But your heart’s not in it?”
“It is.” I say, and he laughs. Like my mother, a big cackle. And he says,
“If you want to lie to an old man, you’ll need to do better than that.”
“I want to be a writer.” I say.
He smiles. “And what do you want to write about?”
“Soldiers.”
“Because your father is one?”
“Because I believe they sacrifice a great deal, and people like my mother think it’s all a waste of life.”
“And you don’t feel that way, young Charles?”
I stop playing Chopin and I look up at Victor. He never seems to get angry, just curious. I’ve seen a man throw profanities at him in his shop before, and Victor’s tone and his well-articulated responses never wavered. And I wonder how he can do that, because I can already feel my heart pounding at the idea of debating this old man, only to find out that he agrees with my mother.
“I think that the country called, and he answered. And that I’ll do the same thing if the war is still going on in the years to come.”
“Well, I think that’s honorable, Charles. I pray that you never have to experience war, but I do believe there is a great sacrifice in service, and that sacrifice should not go unspoken.”
“Did you serve?” I ask.
Victor pauses for a moment, rubbing the small stubble on his chin.
“In a manner of speaking, I did.”
“And did you regret it?”
He pauses again, his brown eyes staring off into the distance.
“I regret what war does to men,” He says.
“What does it do?”
“Young Charles, there are more ways to die than simply the stopping of one’s heart. There are people out here walking these streets every day who are more dead than my forefathers. And it isn’t only your father who is sacrificing.”
“I-I don’t understand.” I say.
“Maybe in time you shall. Now, enough of this. Your mother pays me to teach you piano, and she is not a woman to cross.”
He lets out a smile, and I laugh. And we play Chopin while on the other side of the world. My father kills, and like Victor says, dies as well.
I’m sixteen in May of 1945 when the war ends. My father returns home in June. When the taxi pulls up to the house, I jump up from my study and run down the stairs and out the door.
“Hey, kid.” He says and smiles as I run into his arms. Mother is working at the factory, and I’m happy about that because I want to pick his brain and finally have a story worth writing.
End of the year writing assignments are due in two weeks, and I want desperately to showcase my best work. I know that Mr Dupoint has contacts in the industry, because he himself is a published author. His novel For There Goes The Tides of War was a great and fascinating read. He wrote it when he was stationed in France back in 1917.
We walk inside, and he asks where mother is.
“At work.” I say.
“Ah, yes. And I suppose she told you she needed to work because I’d run off?”
I nod my head. He tousles my hair and smiles. Letting out a big laugh.
“Your mother never changes. I sent money in an envelope every two weeks. Enough to keep a roof over your head. And she goes out and gets a job. What a woman.”
I smile. I don’t know how long to wait before I ask. But I’m dying a slow death inside.
“H-how was it?” I ask nervously.
“I’m glad it’s over, Charlie.” Again, he tousles my hair. He sits down in the dining room and asks if I’ll get him a drink. I pour him one, and bring it over, and he shoots it down quickly before asking for another. “How’s school?”
“It’s okay.”
“Just okay? That’s a great school my father got you into.”
“I know. It’s just, I uh, I don’t want to be a banker or a lawyer.”
“No? And what do you want to be, kiddo?”
“A writer.”
Another crackle of laughter. The same one that my mother gave me when I called my father a hero, and the same one Victor gave me when he caught me lying, and now my father when I tell him I want to write.
“A writer? For the paper?”
“No. I want to write books.”
“Write about what?”
“I’d like to write about you. I’d like to write about the glory of war.”
“The glory of war?” He says, but I can see blackness in his eyes. The same blackness from when he brought my brother back from the train tracks. Holding him in his arms, and staring off like if someone made a single wrong move, it would be a swift end to their life. "There's no goddamn glory in war, kid."
I hadn’t seen him in so long. And the blackness had returned.
“Just get the hell out of here, Charlie.” He says.
“B-but I,”
“GET THE HELL OUTTA HERE, CHARLIE” He screams and points to the door. "You want to do something with your life, pay attention in that goddamned school and get a job. A real job. So just get the hell outta, Charlie. I'd like to be alone."
“But I miss you. I-I-I haven’t seen you. I just want to hear about your heroics” “
He grabs me by the collar of my shirt. “I won’t tell you again.”
I nod my head and despite my best efforts; the tears begin to fall and he scoffs. My father in his army green. The most handsome man I’d ever seen. My hero. And as I turn to the door, my mother is standing in her factory clothes, her left hand resting lazily on her hip. She’s smiling.
She wraps her arm around me, and my father grabs another drink.
“So, you made it out alive, eh? Well, I told the boy not to get his hopes up. Because a lot of men weren’t coming home. But Charlie kept his hopes, anyway. Nice for Charlie to get some one on one time with his hero, eh Walt?”
My father throws the glass against the kitchen wall.
“A bona fide real-life hero.”
Then they begin to yell at each other. He’s only been home a few minutes. I leave and grab my bike and go to the music store.
I walk in and Victor is in the back with a boy of no older than six teaching him the basics. I sit and wait at one of the grand pianos. I tell myself to calm down, that war is hard. That it was my fault. I shouldn’t have brought that on him so quickly. I should have let him rest.
I whisper to the piano, “You’ve been through it all. You’ve likely seen war, yet you are gentle and kind. Your music creates peace and warmth. You are easy and easy to love.”
Then the little boy comes out from the back crying. “I hate this,” He says to his mother, as she drags him through the store and out the door with the ring of the bell.
“It isn’t gentle and kind for everyone.” Victor says. “It takes patience and understanding before it becomes gentle and kind.”
“Oh, you heard that?” I ask, embarrassed.
“I know you talk to them and want their answers. I know you seek answers from them because you know they’ll never give them to you.”
“I suppose it’s easier that way. Because then I can create my own answers.”
“Perhaps that’s what makes you a writer.” He says, as he walks towards me, taking a seat on the bench next to me.
“Your father is home. But he will never truly be the same.” Victor says and begins playing. “He will have days when he can forget, and days when the war is so clear, he’ll forget that he’s home. In many ways, the father you knew is dead. But in other ways, he isn’t. Just like the Charles, who came here as a sulking 12-year-old boy is now dead, but in many ways, he isn’t. We all die small deaths every day. It’s all a matter of how you choose to carry on. Perhaps your father will beat the worst of it, perhaps not. But if you want to write, find the beauty in all of life’s pain.”
“What if I don’t know how?” I ask.
Victor laughs. Again, that bright big cackle of his that drives me mad, but this time I smile.
“Then you’re no writer.”
It’s 1955. I’m 26 years old and I’m promoting my first book at a coffee shop a block from my childhood home. My hair is slicked back, and the reporter smokes Lucky’s while writing in his notepad. He asks me questions about my novel, Factory Girl and says that there seems to be a large demographic of women who consider me to be ahead of my time.
“What do you think about that?” He says.
“Well, it’s based on my mother. I spent a lot of time idolizing my father as a child because I felt that, as a boy, it had to be my goal to become a man. But being a man is a little more complicated than that, I believe. My notion of manhood was certainly one devoid of happiness and of any kind of aspirations that were my own.”
“What does your mother think about your book?”
“She likes it.” I say with a laugh. “She thinks that my fictitious mind sometimes runs away from me and that the book would be better if it were a bit more grounded.
“Your father is certainly a character in this book, but he isn’t necessarily a heroic figure, is he?”
I stop and look at the newspaper on the counter. I sip my coffee and see a headline that reads. Local Music Shop Owner Dies with a picture of Victor Abate. His stubble from my childhood, grown into a jolly old Saint Nick beard.
His voice echoes in my head at that moment, clearer than the voice of the reporter in front of me.
There are people walking these streets every day who are more dead than my forefathers
“I, uh, think that my father was gravely wounded during the war. Not physically, but certainly mentally. And I feel that perhaps my fictitious mind ran away from me slightly, but he became another child to my mother. And maybe she didn’t mind for a while because I lost my brother at a young age, but it broke her down as it did to me. In my eyes, she became more of a hero, and I began to understand exactly why she wanted to work while he was away. Because she’d heard horror stories of men returning home, and she needed to ensure that a roof was kept over my head. I began to look at the everyday heroics of the women who worked and cared for their children.”
“And how long has it been since your father passed?” The reporter asks.
“Three years ago. I miss him dearly, but I believe that he is happier now.”
I think back to the day he returned. The coldness of his eyes, and the sharpness of his words. The silence was paralyzing, he never told me a thing about the war.
Somedays I fear he was never a good man. And that my memories of him before the war were just snapshots. Just another story of a boy wanting desperately to be loved by his father.
“And what are your plans for the future?”
“I’m here to visit my mother, and I plan to persuade her to leave this town and move in with me. She worked tirelessly to keep a roof over my head and I believe it is now my turn to put one over hers.”
“Do you have another book in you?”
“I believe I do. Although I couldn’t at this moment tell you what it’s about but perhaps something about the magic of pianos.”
“The magic of pianos, you say?”
“Yes. The old man who owned the music store just passed away. His name was Victor, and he was a great friend of mine. I, uh, used to be a very lonely child, and I’d go to his shop early even though I knew he had other students. I wasn’t too keen on the piano, but the smell of aged wood provided me with a great comfort. I’d even ask the piano questions.” I chuckle softly at this. The reporter raised an eyebrow quizzically. “I was a young boy looking to write, and the pianos had history. I prayed that they’d open up and tell me their story, and I could write the world’s greatest novel.”
“Did they ever answer?”
“No. No. Not in so many words. But they still helped me unfurl my own stories. If not for Victor and the pianos, I would have never written this novel.”
We finish the interview, and I shake the man’s hand. I walk out of the coffee shop and head down towards the music store. I walk in and the bell rings over my head and I picture the young boy of six years old, screaming to his mother that he hates the instrument.
There’s a young man in the back who peaks his head out and tells me he’ll be with me in a moment. I tell him to take his time, that I’m simply browsing.
I walk through the store and I sit at a couple of the pianos, and think that I haven’t played one in a decade or so. I haven’t spoken to one in the same amount of time.
So I walk and rub my hands in the light dust all along the storefront and at the end, I see a note written in the dust.
Make the piano talk, or you’re no writer
I cackle with laughter, and then I go to my childhood home to fetch my mother. She opens the door and tells me I’m late.
“You’re too much like your father for your own good.”
I smile, but I hope that I’m not completely like him.
The Parallel Universe Finder
Sleep does not come willingly. It’s a fight against an opponent who does not weaken, and who does not feel the strain of stamina. It’s an opponent which I no longer step into the ring with. Laura snores softly beside me, her body facing the opposite direction. Some evenings, the poison of midnight conversations with myself, can drive me to near lunacy. It’s a world that I should not be a part of. It’s a world that should be fast forwarded while I’m deep in the trenches of REM sleep. There are monsters that live in this darkness. Not the type of monsters that you see in horror movies but the type that have no solid foundation. The type that softly echoes all of the things that you avoid during the day because there are a million things to do. At night, all you can do is sleep, or think.
I decide at 2am, to swing my legs off the side of the bed and sit upright for a moment. Then I get up and open the door slowly as the hinges creak noisily. But Laura is undisturbed, she’s a traveler, a thousand miles away. I close the door behind me and look in on the kids. They’re sleeping peacefully and I wonder what they’re dreaming about. What I’d give to slide right inside their heads and breathe in the fantasy of childhood wonder. The places they can imagine, where all is well, and the heroes always prevail.
Downstairs I open the fridge and take out a carton of milk and then pour it into a glass with a thin crack spreading down the center like varicose veins. I take a drink, and wonder why I decided to have a glass of milk. I never drink milk.
I take out my phone and begin mindlessly scrolling, hoping that by the time I look up from it, the sun will be rising, I’ll make a cup of coffee and a sense of normalcy will return. As usual, I feel that my phone is reading my mind. Because I’m thinking about parallel universes. The theory that out there in the vastness of space, there’s another me. But he isn’t sitting in the kitchen, drinking milk, and wondering how much longer his marriage is going to last, and why he can’t beat this depression. He’s happy, and sure of himself. I laugh at that idea.
Then on my phone, I see an ad for an app. The Parallel Universe Finder. All you need to do is download it, enter some of your personal information, and it’ll show you what the other versions of yourself are up to.
I go to the app store and download it. I don’t know why, other than I’m an insomniac with hours to kill, and it was a thought that was running through my mind anyway. Is this the best version of me? Or were there other versions that took opposite paths on those many forks in the road?
A screen pops up. It’s a pretty shade of orange and it tells me to enter my address. I do. Then it tells me to take a picture of myself. I sigh, but I oblige. Then it shows the top of my house like on Google Maps and then quickly it pans out. Then I can see the entire world, and then the solar system and it keeps going faster and faster, until a giant light seemingly leaps out of the phone, and I drop it.
“Ow!” I say, rubbing my eyes with the palm of my hands. What on earth was that?
I grab my phone from the floor and the tiles are different. They look like the tiles that Laura and I looked at the hardware store. Something we used to do when we were broke and bored. A way to pretend that we were of a higher class than we were. We liked to wrap our arms around each other and point at the different tiles, or go through the paint and each grab a sheet of colors, and talk about painting the exterior of a house that we didn’t own.
This was the Forest Valley flooring. I knew it. I rubbed my hands across it. It glistened unlike our tiles which were cracked and separated, an ugly brown crack filler lazily filling in the gaps. But that was gone. For a moment, I thought that I did fall asleep, but if so, this was the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I could smell new paint and hardwood, mixed with some kind of exotic fragrance.
I walked into the spare room where I had a tiny music setup in the far left corner, with an old beat up guitar hanging from a wall mount just above the turntable. But above the turntable was a dozen guitars hanging in perfect unison above a thousand vinyl records in hardwood crates like at an Indie record store.
On the far wall above a 60 inch TV was a line of gold and platinum records with my name on the bottom. “I’m a rockstar.” I said. “Fuck me, I’m a rockstar.”
I stared in awe at the man cave of my dreams and then decided to take a look upstairs. The stairs were beautiful, and the railing was something out of an early 20th century mansion. The kind that Shirley Temple would be tap dancing in. The hall upstairs was three times as long, and five or six times as wide with strange Art Deco shapes crawling along the walls like an invasive species of plant. I rubbed my hands along the walls, and I could hear giggling coming from the first room on the right.
Inside were two beautiful blonde women, laughing, drinking tall glasses of bubbly champagne and snorting white powder off of a piece of broken glass. They both looked up at me with white circles on the tip of their noses. “Tysooonnnnnnnnnn” They called out together, and continued laughing.
“Where have you been, baby? You said you were only going to be gone for just a whittle minute.” One of them said, mimicking a baby with pouting lips, while holding her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “But you lied, mister. And you need to get punished.”
Without having any control over my body, I feel myself almost gliding towards this king sized bed shaped like a sphere with silk sheets the color of an Ancient Roman toga. I fall face first into the mattress and the girls corrall my body within an instant. They kiss my cheeks, then my lips, then each other. Then they put the piece of small glass in front of my face, and before I know it the powder is in my nose, then coursing through my system. Then the champagne, and more powder. The world is spinning off its axis, and I think I'm going to be sick.
I lean over the bed to throw up my guts, but nothing comes out. Then I look up into a life size mirror. Something tall and strange like you’d see at the carnival. Faces and bodies distorted, and all I could see was a mane of dirty blonde hair crawling down bumble bee sunglassed eyes, like I was the male version of Jackie O. My arms are like a connect the dots, leading me to believe that I was battling serious substance abuse issues.
“Where’s Laura?” I ask.
“Who?” The girls say in unison. Laughing.
“Laura. My wife.” They laugh again. “What’s fo fucking funny? Where’s my wife? My wife?”
“You were never married, hun. Said it wasn’t for you.”
“What?”
“You had a girl, baby. But she got pregnant. Don’t you remember? You told us the story a hundred times. You were drinking and playing guitar, getting ready for a show. Your girl said she needed to talk to you and said she was pregnant. You told her to take a hike. You had no interest in raising kids, remember?”
“I, uh, don’t remember saying that.”
“Well, hunny, don’t act like you did the wrong thing. Look at this palace. Look at us.” They started to kiss again. “You don’t need anyone holding you back, baby. You created this all on your own.”
“I, uh, I need to get my phone.”
I walk back downstairs, the world around me going in and out of focus as the drugs take over my system.
In the kitchen I find my phone sitting on the floor. I scroll through and look for the app. I can’t find it. After a few minutes, there’s a pop-up that says, “Do you want to return?” I click “Yes” then it says, “Are you sure?” and I click “Yes,” then it says, “Are you really sure, Tyson?” “Yes” “Okay. Just a reminder that in the other world you’re an insomniac bordering on depression. Who works at 9-5 and has a marriage that’s dissolving like skin in battery acid. Here? Sure. You have a little drug problem, but that’s part of the excess. You made it. You won. So, I’ll ask again. Are you sure?
And for a moment, I hesitate. I’m not happy. I’m drowning, but maybe I’m drowning for good reason. Maybe, what I think is drowning is actually just responsibility rearing its head and telling me that I need to be a good father and a good husband. Telling me that I need to slow down with the drinking and nightly self-deprecating ritual that I take part in. That without the responsibility, I could have done something, maybe, but it would have come at a cost.
My thumb hovers above the phone and I click yes.
The light hits me again and I’m back in my middle class home, my fingers on the floor placed right in the crack filler. The glass of milk with the crack, shattered to my right. It was time, I suppose. It was time.
I check for the app but it’s gone and when I search for it, there’s nothing.
I walk to the man cave and it’s the middle class one again with the barely functioning turntable, a small milk crate of records, and my old man’s beat up Fender hanging crooked on a cheap plastic wall mount. But it seems better now. I feel better, like I could sleep for a fortnight.
Is Laura upstairs? I ask myself and I drag myself feeling nervous about this fever dream. Feeling like I might have had a psychotic episode and I’m actually in a straight jacket in a padded cell somewhere banging my head against the cushion and laughing. Laughing like the blondes.
But when I reach the top of the stairs the Art Deco is gone and replaced with an old stained white color that’s peeling and in dire need of an upgrade. Then I peek my head into Laura’s room and there’s a body there, sleeping with her face against the opposite wall. I walk over to her side of the bed, and see her mouth slightly ajar, with a little bubble of drool coming out, and yup, it’s Laura.
The kids' rooms are both occupied with my children and then I decide to lay my head on the pillow.
Sleep is coming, I can feel it. I don’t fight it. I smile, but for a moment before sleep takes me, I hear Laura’s snoring and think.
“I could have been somebody.”
And then I fall asleep.
Butter My Bread
Oh...so many poor, lost souls
My baby, you really did not know?
When you eat toast with jam
As the sun rises in the east
Birds chirping and twittering
Flitting about
In the hedge of a Rhododendron
The slice of bread must always be warm and toasted
On both sides
And butter liberally applied
Upon the surface intended
For a deposit of Kerrygold
Land O’Lakes
Butter…
Then, and only then
May jam be spooned and slathered
Lathered, spread
Upon the surface of the bread
And my dear
Did you not hear?
Should you desire a special sort of toast
The type that is round as the rising sun
Bagel they do call it
It must also be toasted
Though only on the two interior surfaces
And cheese that has been creamed
Must be applied to both those surfaces
Before the addition of smoked salmon
Tomato, onion
Caper berries…perhaps a grind or two of black pepper
If you so choose.
If a breakfast that is cold
Is more to your liking
Perhaps a bowl of sweetened cereals
With milk of the bovine ilk
But be forewarned…
The cereal must enter the bowl dry
Before milk is lovingly poured from the pitcher
To cause it to crackle and rise to the rim
How else are you to know
Exactly how much milk the cereal requires?
Each mark is different
Corn pops, Cheerios, Crispix
Some take more, some take less
How reckless it would be
To serve a bowl of milk to the wayward traveler
Asking him to add cereals upon it!
My G-d they could drown!
Floating upon that cold sea
Helpless, soggy
Never able to fulfill their perfect destiny
Crunchy yet wet and milky sweet
Such a tragedy
Forgive them my Lord
They know not what they do…
The Commonplace is Sacred
To write about something well is to write about something that is specific. This is to write about something with which you have spent a considerable about of time; not only something that has kept you quiet and solemn company on rainy nights, but that you have talked with, grappled with, something that can make you laugh or clench your teeth. To tell the truth is to tell of what you know and understand.
You cannot understand what you have not sat beside on the front step under the dim yellow porch light while swatting flies away.
You cannot understand what has not held your hand in the car on the way to the ER.
You cannot understand what you have not wrapped up in a soft towel and buried in the frozen earth on Christmas day.
You most certainly cannot understand what you haven’t shared a frozen pizza with at a table cluttered with bills and crusty dishes and cups with milk rings in the bottom.
Come sit beside me, child, and let me tell you again that the commonplace is sacred. And then you can tell me about the places and the people you sit with most often.
Abandoned In A Deserted Town
Sunlight filters through white fluffy clouds, beams reaching for dew-kissed blades of grass between an abandoned swing set and a faded jungle gym, sparking from chain links as swings sway, chased by a fugitive breeze. A carousel spins, the mournful whine of dry bearings singing a song of loneliness and neglect. The echoes of delighted screams and childish laughter swells and fades with the leaves scattered on the arms of the wind.
Waves curled with foam climb higher and higher on deserted beaches, wetting and drying, wetting and drying, bubbles popping up from buried clams. A broken umbrella tumbles along, scattering sand into the gusts. The edge of an abandoned towel flips up and down, up and down before it disappears into the grains it once rested upon. The ghosts of the uncounted drift over evaporating footprints.
Merchandise gathers dust inside stores closed tight, windows papered over with cobwebs as deserted mannequins stare, fading slowly into expressionless shapes, frozen in the act of meaningless gestures. Long lines of useless carts sink into once shining tiles now crumbling to powder. Sidewalks outside with weeds leisurely filling the seams once avoided in an effort to not break backs. Rows of tables with overturned chairs gathering the blowing dirt from planters of long-dead flowers and trees, penned inside railings on disintegrating decks and patios. Windows reflecting sun stars outside bars, stools stacked neatly, grills and countertops left clean, dishes and silverware ready for meals never made. Rows of bottles still shiny, still full, waiting to be poured into glasses filling with drifting motes and the bodies of insects trapped inside.
Streets and buildings are cracking, the gaps filling with soil seeded with wildflowers blown from fields high with standing grass, fading into them as time creeps, turning days into months, into years. Gas pumps sink into crumbled concrete, rusty nozzles propped in a useless parody of readiness. Signs proclaiming goods no longer offered, sit in windows unseen, letters vanishing into illegibility.
Shuttered Houses appear blinded, their eyes blank and staring, waist-high lawns and tangled flowerbeds are strewn with the abandoned debris of everyday life. Desiccated hoses coiled or stretched to dehydrated sprinklers, overturned chairs dripping threads and stuffing. Bicycles and skateboards rusting into immobility, kiddy pools choked with weeds, plastic toys unrecognizable chunks of suggested color.
Is this a vision of a world waiting to be reclaimed? Will it be us or will nature erase the mark we once stamped into the earth? Will future generations emerge and dig into the dirt in search of what once was? Will they know or only guess how we buried ourselves and waited to be told when we would be allowed to live again?