The Unrest of Late July

The world is depressed here. The economy. And the hard cracked clay earth where nothing grows. The scratching of mice in walls, and squirrels break off oak twigs, scurrying up and down the big tree, this way and that, noisily dragging leaves. A quiet feeling of unrest is in the air these days.

The fair is gone. It brought color and motion and drew devouring crowds. We all say, every August, that it wasn't as good as last year. Something is missing.

Remember that really great ride? The one that blared music, and went ninety miles an hour, and if you sat on the outside of the car you'd get smashed, but I always forgot and sat on the outside anyway? You were so drunk you puked from the heights of the Loopo Plane as fountains of coins, glinting in the sunlight, sprinkled to the ground from our pockets. I fell in love with the rubber man, and the kid who owned the double ferris wheel gave you free rides. Remember? It was so much better then.

We carried Dolly's bag of caramel corn home, dutiful children. She loved the bingo tent and we walked through the 4H building, the automobile building, the floral building, under the grandstand, to the free tent where local talent played for an audience of farmers wearing bib overalls, leaning back in folding chairs. The Geritol Gang. Sherry's House of Dance. The Magic Show!

Tomorrow is August. Summer tilts and the school year scratches at my consciousness. I keep those thoughts at bay, but the sunlight in the yard, filtering through the morning glory vines is softly diffused. I can't take my eyes off it, me in my polarized amber sunglasses which transform the faded landscape into a vivid and rich wonderland, like photo editing software for reality. I head outside once again, banging the screen door behind me.

Sentimental Things

I wish I'd known my father better. He was what my mother used to call "a kidder".

Georgia called it cruel, but I thought he was quite clever when he told us to "look at the stars" by gazing up at the window through a coat sleeve as he poured water from a glass down onto our faces. Georgia also holds a childhood grudge from an incident at a birthday party where my dad told her to make a wish and then pushed her face into the cake. Georgia is not what you would call a practical joker. Now, as an adult, I can see that we could have taken practical joking to new heights with my father.

Before holiday meals, the only meals that apparently were important enough, we said "Grace", and his standard prayer was this:

Bless your ears and bless your skin
Pull out your ears and jam it in
He would then glance at the faces of his three daughters, and he could always count on one of them for a laugh. Dolly, with a look of disapproval, laughed too.

Sometimes on thick hot summer nights when we fled to the backporch to escape the stifling house, he would sing his repotoire of strangely archaic songs. We would be wowed by his World War II medly, including You're in the Army Now and The Caissons Go Rolling Along, and he'd belt out a song from his high school years that went something like this:

Hail hail to *-**-** High
You bring the whisky, I'll bring the rye

Send those sophomores out for gin
And don't let a sober person in

We never stagger, we never fall
We sober up on wood alcohol

All the loyal faculty lies drunk on the ballroom floor
My personal favorite, one that I always joined my father singing in an appropriately plaintive and ironic manner was called Oh, How He Lied:

She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
Smoked her cigar
She sat on her bal-co-ny and smoked her cigar
Oh, how she smoked her cigar

He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
Strummed his gui-tar
He sat down beside her and strummed his gui-tar
Oh, how he strummed his guitar

He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
Oh, how he lied
He told her he loved her but oh how he lied
Oh, how he lied
In the remaining verses the couple get married but then she "up and dies". She goes to heaven and "flip-flop she flies" and he goes to hades and "frizzles and fries" (presumably because he lied).

Wonderful lowbrow silliness. It's an artform that takes a certain humility to appreciate. A cultural artifact from a time when people, without the luxury of air conditioning, all hung out on the porch and spent unhurried summer nights together.

Rings and Things and Buttons and Bows

Dolly's rings, which I slipped from her fingers during a long-ago hospital MRI and later dropped into a cardboard box, were tossed to the back of the storage space at the head of my bed with other once-important stray buttons, and bows. Unbeknownst to me, my mother's jewelry has disquieted my sleep with its' demands and emotional reverberations all these weeks and months and now it seems like years. Time is so difficult to gauge, in these days.

Just yesterday, visiting Dolly at the retirement home, for effect I pulled the square box from my bag with a flourish, like a silk bouquet, and studied my mother's face as she lifted the cover and peered inside.

"Oh. My rings."

She worked them one-by-one onto the ring finger of her left hand. First the engagement diamond, reset into a wide gold band years ago on her 40th wedding anniversary after the original tiny ring had worn completely through. Then the ring that was a gift from her daughters, upon which were set the birthstones of Georgia, Willa and me, MJ. Finally the fragile sliver of gold that was her wedding ring. She studied her outstretched fingers, quickly pushed the rings off, and began working them back onto the same finger, but in different order. This time the birthstone ring went first, followed by the wedding band and then the diamond.

"I don't want these rings!" she raised her voice in irritation as she pulled two of them back over her knuckle. "I'll just keep one."

"Oh-KAY!" I said in fake surprise as the symbols of her marriage bounced againt the walls of the cardboard box.

Dolly stared at her hands again, held stiffly in front of her. Then she removed the birthstone ring and placed it with the other rings in the little box. "I don't want this one, either." She closed the box, and left it.

"That must feel good," I said, searching my mother's face for connections, "to be free of all that holding-on. To not worry about keeping track of stuff. Or people."

"That's the way it is now," said Dolly matter-of-factly. It seemed, for her, neither a burden nor a blessing, but just the way it is.