Congenial-speak #12

Along for Harried Reunions

Space is my ground, after 11 hours and change, in the air, across the Atlantic, licked by Aurora's melts. Oslo is buzzing with a tiny-town efficiency on a dense scale. Our troop has been asked to wear—I suppose for collective purposes—maroon colored wind-breakers. However we are in uniform as we come into the terminal like invading descendants. (I'd guess 98% of our troop has Norse ancestry.) The cooler, older scouts—which now includes me—immediately locates a restroom to doff the uniform for non-mandated clothes, even though the windbreaker covers them. I don't recall being so vain.

We bus to the Immie Hotel. It is a four-story hotel in the left of center Oslo. Its height dwarfs its stars. The rooms are like Ikea shows, virtual catalogs. Our maid is named Hydra and has hairy legs. The younger scouts believe she enjoys being asked for ice and towels and soaps. There are vicious towel fights, wet, whipping sounds break through stale, woody air of Ikea rooms, drawing blood in some circumstances.

A game is at kiosks. It is a glass encased labyrinth a ball runs through for some prize or pellet. It acts as a Skinner box for the young scouts. They are amused by the money, the Kroner and Øre, the Krone coins with holes in the middle. The latter we place in slots at the top of the case and hit, like the flippers on a pinball machine. It is a game of chance.

I joined troop 262 in 1979. In those days, in the Beartooth mountains in Montana, or to get to camp sites off trails, I required help. I was driven as the others hiked, or simply hung back usually in some compensatory fashion. By 1983, when I was told we would be hiking—with full pack—through flat clean city streets my eyes lit up. This was it, my time to shine, to hike like the rest. I had my Eagle badge and this trip was my coda. I could go out with a long-awaited equity. Before we went over a father, just looking out for me, had rigged up some contraption on two wheels on which to pull my pack. I said no thanks.

Walking, smiling, sunny peopled city streets indulge us. They clear for us and we are the Israelites led from America, from the hairy-legged obscurities of the Immie Hotel by at least four Mosaic fathers. We were laughing and joking, acting brash, assimilating to culture class. We were horn-dogs at the Norse smorgasbord. Flirtations impeded our progress. Twenty marooned mice break pipers' wind. A few people think we are a break-dance troupe and the young punks bust a few moves. They spin on the pavement and rock on their heads like the pros. The natives are fooled and we're hallowed, we're revered until they find it's just a horny scout in a maroon shell. Onward, and upward, hire to conspire, church steeples rain down. We curtail our hormones and walk the pews, soaking culture and Anglicized history as we leave Oslo.

We cross Sognefjord via ferry to Balestrand on its northern shore. Enormity slims me, intimates me, shrinks me more than anything has before. I peer at the rock iced walls with a timidity known only to giants. I imagine the history, the geology, the ages that past between here and Minnesota. Our 10,000 odd pot-hole lakes are nothing, mere divets in the earth to pale in volume to this pageantry. It is clear blue, deep. It's a knowing depth that give a chill to me, a fear, an insecurity. It's a waiting epic catastrophic property, a swallowing, a swelling of earth's precarious proportions. As sun descends early, hesitant, behind icy coolness, we make camp.

Congenial-speak #11

Norse ledge ends

Back in the day, when recycled newspaper was worth something, our scout troop filled many endless semi trailers. We called the parcels of paper, the finds, the booty, the jackpots, “lucys or “baglys” in reference to how they were received. The fathers, the leaders, the masters of tender-feet too young to drive, learned routes. We taught them. We smelled on instinct where the loosest and most bagged papers were. There was a house inhabited by a hermit, a creature of habit, an OCD'd accumulator of news. We went there in a pick-up, a flat bed, sitting, flouting laws, to a house on the corner. It was the kind kids might TP because they thought no on cared. White ribbons trickled down, around branches barren, defiant of seasons reasons for changing, for living. It was the house of Boo that got TP'd because kids knew it was a easy job, festooning the trees until the rain washed it away. Around wood stairs to descend into musty dampness, prizes revealed in a single light blub's shy intensity. Wound and cornered by stone work, lime and sanded liths of monosyllabic resonance we saw our quarry. Yellow edge entail of yester-years news, stories of Tet or Nixon's resignation, led us to more—much more—and then some.

Across from the Lyndale house—my second neighbor/childhood—was a Lutheran church that sponsored Viking Counsel's troop 262. It at least allowed the semi truck to wait in its lot. It was there for weeks before and after the sale, the paper drive, the Norway exchange fundraiser. The drives, themselves, usually occupied the best parts of a Saturday. I was often on the assembly line, a pair of arms in the chain that went 20' back. Older, stronger scouts sometimes accepted my slower, slimmer, less dexterous hands begrudgingly. I was still using crutches and often fell back into a wall of newspaper, slipping to stand, on the glossy magazines and catalogs, the copious ads from Sunday volumes people discarded religiously.

Sometimes they left me, the older scouts, to hold the wall. I waited in the truck while they went on routes. I accepted paper donations from individual old men and women. They drove up to the mouth of the semi, all day, in minty Buicks and Oldsmobiles whose odometers read 20, 000 in May. Often, curmudgeonly, they quickly as their eighty-year-old bodies move made their deposit right on the loose gravel of the church lot. Most had taken time out of their sedentary life to put the paper in grocery bags. Occasionally, though, a car pulled into the lot with a trunk full of the dreaded “lucys.” My depends were out hunting, and I cringed, I blithely chagrined, falling back on the solace that I was only a second-class scout. The donators saw me shuffle, barely walk without my resting crutches, and they lifted out armfuls of loose paper and put them up on the truck for me. I thought when the older guys returned they'd get mad, so I worked fast bringing lucys back before they returned. When I succeeded there was a pride I had I kept humble, just between me and the semi.

It was fun. Nicknames were born. Lucys were thrown as bagglys were quickly passed down. The truck was packed to the roof, to the steel bars that structured the semi. Row by row, wall changed wall, through the best hours, the most productive, of a Saturday. Jackpot fresh pick-ups returned two to four times, younger scouts near buried in the bed with newspaper surrounding their head. Some stashed away Playboy magazines they unearthed. Or the less shamed older scouts returned sitting in the flat-bed atop a sea of paper looking at center-folds for all to see.

The drives, raffles and Christmas wreath sales paved the way. A decade plenished our coffers and, in 1983, most of our troop flew to Norway. We arrived in Oslo on SAS (Scandinavian Airline System) via Iceland and Greenland for fuel. Our efforts bought us two weeks at $400.00 per capita, meals and lodging included. Transportation, except for a few ferries and taxis, was limited to our feet.

That's how we got to a land of the midnight sun, of glaciers, fjords, and the sublime passionate beauty of females with viking ancestry.

Congenial-speak #10

Grounded at Zero

In the days of my book, for the times it took to memorize history, years from mis-remembered nuances, the idiosyncrasies of narrative writing, ours stood at subterranean level. Before carpet covered the floor, when it was still tile floor and overhead lights bouncing off them like cues to grow into something wise, better, more sociable and judicious. And the walls enshrined my eight-year-old mind, bombarded with audible, textual and visual cues. They were tan wood begging for adornment.

Before antiques or political buttons, I played on the stairs, on the brown-specked carpeted descent to the basement. I had a “big Jim” action figure, I had a Muhammad Ali figure, I had a black version of 'Big Jim.” My figures were diverse, they were powerful, muscled, but not dispositioned to war, to general infantry. The Jim figure came with a silver band that wrapped around his biceps muscle, on the arm you chose, and when it was flexed the band shot off. They all got along, Jim, Ali and the black Jim (I want to say his name was Jack). They went on adventures. I had an RV and camping equipment. It went down the stairs and broke at the bottom. Camp was set, or they climbed the stairs to scale them. My sister came on some trips, crinkling cellophane to simulate frying sounds. I twirled a tiny plastic pan between my fingers. We were a team.

And then one day I noticed the accumulation of the politics of earlier days, of McCarthy, of Humphrey, of Don Fraser, of state and local politicians, of LBJ, of Warren Spannus-AG. I heard the nailing, the hangings, the exacting measures and levels my dad made. Subsequently I felt the walls' emptiness populate. Gradually I watched the bulletin boards' burlapy orange surface area fill, with buttons like islands within another island on wooded tan infinity. A bumper sticker interrupted the islands' tows—of eyes—with a subtle infrequency. They served as inlets, estuaries to teach compromise, to appease a metaphor.

I crawled normally, anyways. I trailed behind the ethnically diverse RV, behind the bar. At the far end of our basement was a bar with an orange-pink shine. Its Formica ran roughly 8 feet. Four stools in front provided endless fun, taking turns, spinning, dizzying, stomaching, the revolving gold seats. Political fundraisers, U of M and socially kosher parties filled the room's memories. My dad's HELP Center parties (a low-income university program) attracted hippie types, creative student, ex-cons and counseling faculty. They drank, and drank, smoked a bit and drank some more. They ate sometimes if a meal was offered. They slept on a trundle couch. I remember one man, somehow associated with my dad and the U of M, staying for an extended time. I had a bowling set, a light ball and 12 plastic pins. We framed our games in the laundry room where I played floor hockey (see blog post CS#7). He was the pin-boy of yore, and set about pinning our games. The ball scuttled across a smudged tan-specked tile floor, unguttered, unparalleled in random accuracy. Three strikes is a turkey he taught me, and also what constitutes a foul.

Six bulletin broads accrued the walls, dulling and enlightening my play and Saturday cartoon sanctuary. At the end of the room, opposite the bar, were twin couches and our first black and white TV. I watched there, as the rest of the house settled, Schoolhouse Rock and Archie. It was an osmotic room with walls that seeped political progress and history. Antiques from up-north auctions were eclectic, at first they had to be. A mannequin in a black dress with breasts and frills stood. It looked in the dark like an evil old woman, and in the early days sleeping downstairs scared me. The witch woman was next to the wicker wheelchair, a combination antiquarian fraught with murderous possibility. On the bar, on trees, were the pointed witches shoes. Above, mounted, was an old gas-light run electrically. Mirror wall backed the bar and your face and all its where was there for all to see. They saw you spinning, dizzying, assimilating to the eclectics of a youth, a stewardship, naturally.

The basement was a museum, a signed den of amusing politically bred and bartered antiquaries. The walls were now hanged with old railroad lights, irons, rug beaters, bed pans and various agrarian utilities. In the corner, as you came down the stairs, one saw a wood box, a copper kettle, a clothes ringer and rack. In the curtained work-room was where repairs were made. My mom stripped and re-finished antiques once begun. In rags and turpentine, she varnished the smells. It was lacquered and mixed, clumpy, gooey, fixes that lasted and peppered the air. I built things with no particular design with legos, tinker toys or Lincoln logs in the next room. The auction lots that were brought home as trophies, as non-political tangible possibilities, to stand in the most elegant and docile room of the house. Upstairs, where the piano played and my dad added method reading to the Sunday paper.

poetic interlude #1

Defenses of Youth

by M.P. Amram

Derelict rejections of what I was

come spiraling down,

blending like side-burns

the sediments of me,

I dare to nurse and coax sweetness

from a pear and wipe

juices on my leg to soften it

for the next forage

suns that are hidden behind drapes

lacy with transparencies

opaque pulpits that guard boundaries

morning crows' are my ripe sentries

They're shapes of fruited trees

silhouettes on shades pulled

behind what drapes fit ghosts

of what I think I must leave

with hinged spectators outside

the rattles of windy nights

star-borne sadists that taunt me

until beds end their fetal fights

and in the union of the night

as I lay, spent, betrothed,

addled with my dignity

in my bed hat and sheets

that sieze to fly up to moonlight

glare—they're ribbons in cells

within my jailed defiance

yet I lay still, I quiver

as beams of vindictive light

embolden me.

Congenial-speak #9

Fun-House Mirror

It became clear to me. I saw an incensed, defiled, infatuated by promise fulfillment, Trump leaning over senators' shoulders telling them to legislate faster. He concluded that health care was complicated and ran from the challenge. He didn't do the leg-work. He pointed fingers, he half-assed it and, in writer-speak, he pantsed it. No executive, no matter how much experience they bring to the WH can, or should, introduce a bill with out much contentious debate, research, and consideration.

America is not real-estate. It is people with wants and need. It's people who had promises made to them, written and those implied in moral fiber. The ACA was not rushed, it was a culmination of work, of several plans since FDR. I think the ACAs biggest deficit is that it ever earned the euphemism Obama-care.

It is just an educated guess, but I have a nagging feeling that if the “law of the land” speaker Ryan (and Butch Patrick look-alike) conceded to yesterday was called what it actually is from the get-go, vast amounts of contempt, protest, party disintegration may have been avoided. It simply amazes and confounds, it astounds me how much who stamped a bill figures into the acceptance of its actually good (or partially good) content. I was thinking about this juxtaposition, this empirical cognition, this refusal to see the good in something because of an irrelevant, incidental factor, some nit-picky arbitrary facet like a skin tone.

Rabid baseball fans had a fit in 1947 when Jackie Robinson stepped on the field. Seeing a good contest, one in which new talent made the Brooklyn Dodgers a better team. Who threw the ball, who caught, the ball, who hit the ball, who scored a run for the team was more important than the contest itself. It was more important than the worth of a ball game. That was 70 years ago! 70—almost an average male lifetime. After seven decades, something in the dynamic suggests to me that color is still thicker than the pursuit of happiness, the enjoyment of the American pastime, or the easy passage of health care legislation.

The vengeful tweet

Oh, I see now. The G.O.P. has a base, a team, a core of a currently rotting apple. They couldn't issue a ban—twice. They can't get a bill past the House, they can't execute a raid with any accuracy (with a host of intel equipment at their disposal), they had Japan steel their water-wings, they could not find the lights in the Oval Office. This is the Keystone Cops of transition teams, cabinets, legislators, commanders in chief, of administrations. The generals are the only ones who seem to only feign playing the fools game. But it is a slippery slope, and one by one cabinet pez are falling into the Trump trap, the vat of vindictive, paranoid fake news. The web of lies, the pathogens that dance so blithely to dumb down, to ease into speakable, unencrypted determinable words that ping-pong between the press and Spicer, Trump's lucky leprechaun.

Afraid to cross him? Afraid to cross him from within. He's the fricking POTUS (see what a slippery slope that clever acronym was: first POTUS, then SCOTUS, then FLOTUS and now FDOTUS. What about Jarrod? FSILOTUS?) what can he do, have a tantrum? Those have passed. I suppose termination like Sally and all those Ags. But afraid, afraid of an insane, delusional, narcissistic blow-hard hack in a democracy? It is the most cowardly, UN-American, inhuman, selfish thing I can think of being. Maybe this is the difference between the two parties. Who, for the most part, fights and, even dies, for their values? Who, in 1967, was not AFRAID, to join a campaign to dump an incumbent POTUS. Who was there in Selma, Montgomery, lunch-counters, the back of the bus, freedom marches, taunted by hoods, peaked sheets of burning crosses. Who took on the state trooper on the bridge? Who was not AFRAID to compromise their integrity, their jobs, their families, their freedom, their lives. John Lewis, MLK, Fredrick Douglas, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Abbie Hoffman, David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Susan B. Anthony all put ideals and morality far ahead of their own wealth, safety or freedom. The most recent Republican protest I can think of was that quasi-reciprocal pro-life march. But, as soon as those specula stop waving, those ersatz fetuses stop, support will go to the NRA to put a gun in every hand. Guns that could end up killing. . . .women with expectant LIFE. But that is another can of worms.

A macrochistic society

Isn't there something bigger, a scintilla of difference between night and day, life or death, war and peace? Tillerson and the rest knew, like Roy, Thurston, Mary ann, the risks of boarding the SS Trump. They must have sensed he wasn't even a Republican with the rationality of. . .say. . .George H. W. Bush, that he lacked (as they did) any leadership or governmental experience. I have not checked, but I doubt that after his hard-to-watch sycophantic unrewarded stewardship to Trump, his disastrous tenure as NJ governor, that Chris Christie has much of a political career left. Their base is eroding, imploding, entombing them every day. Where's Ryan in a year if he crosses Trump? Where's McConnell if he pulls his head out of his posterior long enough to see the insanity. Actually, any one of his cabinet could just tell Trump to go f--- himself, recede into the good night, and live quite comfortably. (I would pay 200$ to see that.) So it all comes down to a base (see I knew baseball was involved), a glib penchant for government pensions, an altruistic shot for a next generation G.O.P. The elephant has been dying since Lincoln when it was turned ass-backwards. Time for euthanasia. Oh, that's right, the pro-life deal, the appeal for the right to life—not to LIVE—from the people who proposed a health care bill that would deny access to 24,000,000, from senators and congressmen who looked constituents that were dying square in the eye and tap-danced around life.

I really think it is a merciless sickness. It is. . .GREEEEEEED. Wall Street, Madison Avenue, Sacs, Koch, Dodd-frankly greed. It's what keeps each party going. Imagine a government of Bernie. Imagine no loop-holes, imagine no perverted religious principles that justify actions that end in pockets of the rich. Imagine no clogged drain-pipes that never trickle down.

They are either gutless, heartless, or brainless. It is the lion, tin man and scarecrow, a menage of duplicity. Can anyone pull the plug when democracy is in the hands of murderous people? I guess there isn't a health care directive. So on they travel down the gold-bricked road, the yellow spats on a dossier that pulls them toward the Kremlin where the wizard sits shirtless on a horse.

Congenial-speak #8

Fools rush in

A scrap of a babushka, a yellowed corner of a dossier, a sip of toxic tea prove something. Years of friendship with Paul Manaford sound incriminating, closer, closing in on the smoking gun or, if you choose to whiff, the poisonous pot of tea. He protested vehemently. Too much for any private dic to think otherwise. It could have been the poor 300-pound man in a bed, the guy Sarah Palin's saw in her window to Russia who sat on the Bering Strait. He tapped into America's electoral process, its tabulators, its electronic voting time machines quite accidentally. He confused his remote while trying to raise his bed.

Geo-politics earns the odd bed fellow, the effervescent prostituted shower and intelligible dossier. Trump, I believe, has a Putin fallacy, an admiration, an impractical emulation. Trump wants to be Russia. He likes its onion towers and plaintive democracy. Putin is three times the billionaire Trump ever claimed to be. His people fear him. They dare to revere him, and one rises up rarely to go away. He has the KGB track them, say its just, and shoot them in a Moscow street. But that is how Russians are, that's their oppressive, one voiced, oligarchical history.

America has always—I fear until now—been the land of the free. We also claim home of the brave in that war-worthy sobriquet. We are free to flip the president off if we choose. We don't even have to hide behind a blue bird tweet and could presently tell the president to take his policies and stick them. We fear no reprisal with non-threatening words, and even then our life is not at stake. It is a tough call—if you discriminate at all. From the beginning, in descending order of severity, the groups of Americans who were not free are; Native Americans, Afro-Americans, heretics, Jews, Asians, women, GLBTIA....who am I leaving out? The point is that, in essence “land of the free” is a half (or less) truth. Although maybe, like I am still learning about Christians, it is a work-in-progress. Freedom across the board is a goal, a benchmark, a tug-of-war prize, or just a subliminal patriotic message to remind us how good we have it compared to Putin's Dem-oligarchy.

Rarely in America are peopled killed protesting a government. They will be beaten, maced, gassed, hosed, whipped, but usually left with breath to protest another day. People do die, incidentally, provocatively (Kent State, 1968 DNC) in modern history. Killing was meager, controversial, tried, even before (Boston Massacre) we were a paper democracy. The CIA and FBI fathom justice. They miss information, or classify it to facilitate assassins. They bury their dead under so much bureaucracy, so much conjecture and hearsay, that after 53 years it is still argued who killed John Kennedy. Yes, presidents do end up dead in America, usually the ones who are trying to do, or have done, something good. JFK, RFK, MLK, Lincoln and all either did, or wanted to, advance America, disrupt the status quo, to bring the country beyond the bible-bound, tight-lipped, 20$ Andrew Jackson, convoluted sense of equality.

Black men still get killed, inordinately, indiscriminately, in the 21^st century. If MLK were alive he would say its an abomination. He'd be sad at the irony, the pages of blister footed history that pushed a black man into a white house, only to have his successor (a racial opportunist) hate all his work away. I say it is back to a Crowish mentality, a lynch-mob sentimentality has crept back to America. The violence is captured on personal cameras, i phones, body cams, and other surveillance of individual space. It seems disproportionately black, and a buck says it is, but I do not make those decisions. I did not decide that Zimmerman was acquitted.

I believe, in spite of these discrepancies, America will never be Russia, never has and never will. Trump will never be Putin because we are the land of the “free.” We are a work-in-progress, like some hypocritical Christians (I conclude), it is something we strive to be. We are aspirants and freedom's just a theory, an AA chip, a reason to call this mess a democracy.

Congenial-speak #7

Musing on the subtext of my May bound political memoir, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

Props

Someone was riding my bike. A freshly adroit kid who could. I think around the time—rounding off to the third week of March in 1971—when I had my shed lesson. I had come home from an eight-week hospital stay following an MVA that severely limited my sense of balance. I was taken, after insisting that I could still ride, to the garage and set on the bicycle I rode at first meeting when I was four. It had been a little over a year since that first meeting, and I was worse for the wear.

My dad set my on the bike and I could not even sit on the seat. In later months, as I sat atop giant therapy balls in PT, it became clear to me that, largely, I was a pawn to the law of gravity. Anything, that I had mastered by five-years-old, that required sustained balance, was something no amount of ball-sitting, or walking parallel bars could recoup.

For a few weeks after my garage defeat, the bike I'd patrolled the neighborhood on, that I coasted down Oak Grove's hill on, whose spokes I'd clipped baseball cards to, sat there in its spot in the garage. And then one day it was gone, sold or donated.

But I had a hockey stick and skates somewhere. When I was four my sister and I went for skating lessons at Bremar arena in Edina, MN. It must have begun as figure skating. The lessons ended with a show in which sis and I were penguins. (We later reprised our guises in a costume contest on the SS France, winning first prize.) I played hockey though. Glimmers of blades and pieces of puck pepper my mind. I have no idea what happened to the skates. They were not a pair of shoes I'd ever grow into again. I out grew them and I assume they were passed to the next aspiring biracial hockey star.

I held on to the stick though. I can very well image it in my head, boarded along the basement wall with two other floor hockey sticks, a real puck, a red and a black plastic one. There was a goal too. A friend, really the only friend I ever bothered to make on Lyndale Avenue, and I played floor hockey on the small, uncarpeted expanse between the play-room and the laundry room. We set the netted goal and one end opposing the wheeled laundry basket the stood beneath a chute. I dribbled puckishly the best I could. At ten-years-old I was still chasing the puck more than I had six years before.

My friend had a kidney-bean shaped below-ground pool. It was in his family's wood fenced deck area. In the winter it was left half-full and bore with natural snow-froze goals at either end. I brought the real stick over, the one from a prior neighborhood, a childhood, a former aspiration. It never got worn like every other young Richfield Spartan, splintering with blistered strains in sanded wooded grains always trained to go with their handler. On one hand it was capped in shinny rubber, a lined design that figured in NHL, a last tip to secure the grasp tested in a wrist shot. Or maybe a more aggressive slap shot that came from further down, hand under hand along the new resplendent feel, to the blade. Mine never acquired the chews. It never earned the dents, the bends those Fremont kids in Sorels and straight peaked maroon Richfield hats had. Still, my blade was wrapped in black electrical tape, protecting its durability, promoting the impossibility that it would ever be engaged in play with the necessary roughness to hurt it.

In high school I, in true non-conformist fashion, went outside the district to join a team. I had some say in naming our team the South Suburban Silver Bullets. I think we practiced at Elliot school. Players from Bloomington, Richfield, most suburbs in south of Edina comprised our team. We played floor hockey at a loss, in the beginning. I found a niche, the team finally found its synchronicity, its eclecticism, our idiosyncrasies. Teamwork, eye for an eye, check for a disabled body check. The team was adaptive and most played from electric wheelchairs. I was a cocky, muscled, smitten seventeen-yer-old. The fragile effervescent presence of a blonde girl with a bone condition did not help. My anger vented, my testosterone fought to contain itself and play a fair game The other teams played on a mental field when the physical came up short. A boom-box in 1982 played Survivor's “Eye of the Tiger.” They talked smack and said “We're gonna waste em'.” They knew their limitations though. A opponent on clutches fell over, trying to saunter out of the gymnasium, and quipped, “I can't help it if I have shitty balance.” I thought, this is me ten years ago.

Congenial-speak #6

Musing on the subtext of my May bound political memoir, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

Zipping Past Battle Points

 Fibrous tendons sink. A rope meets the shallow depths of Bay Lake, an off-shoot remain from the 1800's Sioux island known as Battle Point. It is a candy-caned eel, a loose, slacked tow-rope that looks for its keel, sweeping slow through weeded green forests of hummed muffled watery murked gasoline tinge. I wait in my orange PFD, my very own collaring flotation device. My small legs, still being trained two walk on my brain's command, flutter above the weeds, mere feet from the bottom of the lake. I watch the boat, I see my mom in her role as observer, looking out across the shadowed bay in her yellow terry-cloth poncho. We are one of the last skiing teams off the lake that evening. The boat trolls its 35-hp outboard around, magically my dad steers and defies the gentle waking nudges of the early lunar tides. Slowly the rope regains its slack, pausing and then becoming tight with a snap that sends feelers out in sound trails on the glassy bay.

 It is the summer of 1974 and, after three summer of road-work with my dad, I attempt to begin my timed stance on water from a seated position. I want to be as much like the skiers as I can. I practiced.  It did not come over night. I began in 1971 behind our row boat, with a 12-hp outboard, lying prostrate on the blue zip sled. Learning lessons hard, after a cerebral trauma in '71s winter, I had to try water skis to know I  could not hold them together. I could not figure out (at 7) that I would never have the coordination to provide the balance and hold the skis together, but far enough apart, to ski. They needed to be parallel, like those bars I had spent many weeks in March walking in PT. Math is not my forte. I have never been good at geometry.

 My friend, my consolation prize, my modus of water operandi, is tilted. The bi-lateral lines on the pads that palpate my feet are submerged, and I realize I am in a part of our  bay just off County Road 10. The general store I walked, I concentrated for a half-mile to get to, is just past the trees to my left. It is like I am in a bath and I can reach the phone, I can see familiar crowed telephone lines. Zippy stores water like a camel. It has a hollow, a widening,  a cistern, a well worn foot. It is simple Archimedean physics. It is weighted water and that which it displaces. I, at that moment, was the sum of Bay Lake, the water my 90-pound wet mass and the sled volumes.

 I look through the murky water, hazing past the distortions of skin color, the lighter brown that had sparked intrigue in a neighbor's eye on Aldrich, now just an arbitrary greenish off-yellow jaundiced hue. The outboard idles, it chokes, my dad disengages the light current, until I find my correct footing. I see myself rising mechanically out of the water like I see the  older, athletic neighbor kid do, like I watch my dad, my sister and my mom do.
 “Tension,” I call, followed by a measured “hit it!” for effect.

My dad lurches the quivering throttle forward. I struggle to rise, to remain standing. The speed mounts instantly and I am staring down a rooster tail, a glass bottomed ceiling that surfaces the bay. It is  impenetrable, infinite, unfathomable, and I am shaking my head to signal a slowing down. There is a release, an abrupt rush of security. I slow and think I will sink, momentarily. It is like the part of a roller coaster ride, after the loops, when your heart falls back to find its missing beats. The ride plays out, gliding past, in desired speed, with time allotted to appreciate the Battle Points.

Congenial-speak #5

History's second dark ages

Couching the soap opera, looking in Trumpland's windows, I wait to exit. I wait to vote again and see if it's only time for America's 200 year check-up. I look to discern whether dark ages come in phases, if democracy's been coasting for 41 years, wearing its axle to a hub, smoothing un-GPSed asphalt, shrinking and ballooning toward its Greek roots.

Never did I expect to watch the news for a light comedy, a darkness that, so far, has had little real success. The executive orders are usually baseless, lacking any credibility, would fail any constitutional test, and are often nullified before their ink is dry. The instance, the illogical, the counter-productive order of success: put guns in the hands of the mentally unbalanced, the decks of 48, the ausgespielt. Does Trump see the irony here? This includes him. He wrote an order to give himself easier access to guns.. Yes, let's go with that. That, at least, would make sense. Otherwise it totally contradicts his “law and order” premise. Let's see. . .he wants to arm the insane, yet he wants law and order, yet he is emptying out the state department which would eventually mean fewer check-points, government security, and cops on the street. And let's not even go into the hypocrisy of toting a pro-life banner.

Money speaks the loudest from the overstuffed pockets of Republicans. Democrat's pockets may leave green vapor trails, although the difference is worth noting. Nine times out of ten the Dems will throw that surplus at things that, barring Reps cyclical attacks in the House and Oval Office, will benefit humankind, American people, actual constituents. (Actually, if any good is to come from the nightmare, it is showing Democrats the worst mutation of political fodder, the most dangerous laughing-stock the Electoral College could cough up. It shows how deeply necessary measured philosophy, checks and balance and judicial review are needed). Zero, nada, bupkis are the times in ten that Republicans—certainly this tea-party hybrid web-toed cousin—will throw the chump-change at anything whose end result will help humanity in any definable, enduring way.

Trump is poison. It's Bushy nucle-ar toxic waste from Three-mile Island that's marinated in bryl-cream for 38 years. Look at him, his face is glowing, his hair piece is glowing and everyone who comes near him loses their spine. Don't look him in the eye. He is Medusa gentrified, sitting on a golden pot with snakes that are petrified. He tweets out his half-wits, his digited twits and uses a spicer to translate them to double-speak. He is a character from 1984 in some long lost Orwellian draft. (or the dumber pig in Animal Farm). Okay, he had his fun, appointed his compasssionless billionaire's boys club with the two tokens. He got one EO past the goalie, found out how America looks on methamphetamine. Get him out of there! Trump, Pence, Ryan, anyone who has had any complicity with this administration's constitution distorting, oath-choking, unethical (no accident their first move was a shot at ethics) policies. This does not include the people who stayed on from the good days, if only to lend credence to an administration that literally needed help finding the light switch, most of whom have parted ways long ago, to leave the emperor to contemplate his naval futilely. Caligula lies smothering himself with grapes, aged and bereft of dexterity, when Kelley-Ann will no longer feed him.

Maybe I am the only one who saw it, who engraved his smarmy, pigeon-hole Catholic, “thank you, may I have another,” mayoral head-tripped, face in my mind. Rudy “may I be damned if I'll go gently into any night” Giuliani sat with the better part of the country thinking Hillary had the election sewn up. Trump's paths to 270 were nearly non-existent and, moreover, to many tested any existential conception of government. The former NYC mayor chattered away with a reporter in a diner, sure anything he said would be misrepresented by the media. On November 6 he said the Trump campaign had “a few more tricks” up its sleeve. It was looking bleak, but ol' altar boy Rudy never lost faith, even if it meant reaching out to Russia and being accomplice to a dossier that included golden showers of flagellation. Trump beat the bushes, the hidden constituents, the under-privileged, under-educated, uninformed who roamed the fields of Lancaster county out-pacing complacent Amish who probably thought they were the ones laughing. His sleeve tricks were the white mid to lower-class remnants of the tea-party movement, the under class for whom money spoke and reality TV celebrity status out ranked a much less affluent senator from Vermont with only a salient, direct message and no celebrity. They were too blinded by his “billions,” his celebrity and his promises to hone the word back to a homogeneity that placated simple minds. But Trump tried to appeal to blacks, stoking the fires with “what have you got to lose?” Some did fall for his Tom-foolery, his African-American friend.

Some did not vote at all, not even for the two other parties on the ballot. I don't think it was a “lesser of two evils” contest. Clinton's record of service since 1973, her executive and legislative tenure sat there, under-appreciated, if anyone even bothered to have the audacity to set it on the same scale with Trump's doodle of a signature as a real estate mogul. Clinton's balance would plummet to the floor. It would precede gravity in its chained drop, turning Newton's apple to mash. I feel sorry for Hillary, I really do. The world, not just our government, has treated her horribly, knocking down an indefatigable woman with their tenacity and suspicions emblematic of an Egyptian cat. Her questioned mistakes were admitted, endured before tribunals, decimated to extraneous minutia and never forgiven, much less forgotten. In my written- about (story in my collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation out later this spring) dalliance with the bible and Christianity the passage in Mathew about forgiveness stuck with me. Is that not “The Book?” Is that not the phraseology they so dutifully, mnemonically phonetic, so pathetic and glibly tainted when they oddly appear in church to utter the Lord's prayer.

But it is a dark age. The span of the 6^th to 14^th centuries, the Inquisition, the Third Reich, all in Europe, all with little regard for humanity, thinly veiled hope (only showers), all designed to push one—or more—races deemed undesirable away from the fugue, the kiln solidified to make sure we grow stronger together, that we will be stronger together. Now, at a brief gaff in the beginning of the 21^st century, perhaps it is America's turn. We enslaved a race for upwards of two centuries, we've lynched its people, we've blocked their right to vote with whips and barb-wired club. They've been segregated, belligerently integrated, systematically debilitated and left with the odds of the law killing them not in their favor. Andrew Jackson drove Native Americans away. The government broke enough treaties to wall the library of congress. The ungrateful dust of European “visitors” have run over the Native to end at Standing Rock.

This however, this trampling out the vintages, is no Salem witch trial. It is no gallows pole farce with teenage girls pinning tricks on their mothers. As those judges had no history, no science from which to learn, Trump has no compassion. That is a human deficit, it is not inherent. But he also refuses to even know history, much less learn from it. He refutes science for ignorance's sake or because during so would veer off the path that ends in a field of green $$$$$$$.

congenial-speak

Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: Growing up democratically I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

Shades of Yellow

Haziness toyed with me. I was hazed to days. It vexed me. During the summer of 1970, give or take a month, a sunny morning or a silhouette's shade, I woke often to see leaf shapes on my window shade. The walls were painted a soft blended yellow that gave the room a false sense of security. The room was mine and my sister's and fit at the east end of the house. The window above my sister's bed looked out to the backyard. She saw the garage and the alley, possibly the dog house and lilac bushes on the periphery. At the foot of my bed, nestled, inches from a closet, was the window that hatched my most malicious operations. It was the window to my five-year-old soul. It was the window through which I escaped a babysitter's valiant attempt at discipline, perhaps in practice for her anticipation of 20 years to impending motherhood. Its height and I were immeasurable, its width to me was discernible, with a wood grainy sill like soft tan sandpaper that invites one to touch it. My window was my first look to the world each day, our narrow Avenue of suburbia on which balls were thrown twixt blocks, within yards, to be caught in tan gloves that smelled like leather belts.

My older sister was deep in school competition. Central Elementary would feel my monster tiny feet cross its threshold that fall. With my new school supplies I'd cross past the heavy green doors. I was not wild about rules, and probably would have made an acceptable anarchist. (Although as may folks and the DFL proved, democracy works sometimes). I played by my own rules. Most kids do—or did. I look in to look out that window in my first, and last, shared bedroom. I look from my mind now and see that lawless five-year-old, that crew-cropped hatchet chopper of plants, that curious agent of bucolic upsets.

She had grown sunflowers to the left of my window. Susan took great pride in her class project, standing by her plants, nurturing them with love and water and the sunshine their name could not pull from the sky. She had the makings of a farmer, with her two years over me and inches and allegiance to the lessons of school and nature. She read directions. She took directions and, at age seven, believed the writers of those directions should never be questioned, least of all by her. She loved me like a biological brother, I loved her like a sister, but the reality was similar traits were more at odds than most siblings. I was adopted and it showed not only in appearances, but in actions. Most of the time, though, we found common ground. For the most part, we were peaceful and respected each other's space. I trusted her two years more of knowledge, time spent reading, doing math and things I never slowed down to do.

Mornings in Richfield, on our little slice of Aldrich Avenue, cardinals sang and crows screeched like orphaned banshees. I ruffled my tan fluffy blanket and sprang up in bed, anxious to unleash the mischievous possibilities a new day brings. Outside, an almost-still-born breeze commands the 6' sunflower to intrude out to my window pane...intrude out to my window pane...intrude out to my window pane...day after day, morning after morning, crow after murderous crow to feign what can and test how a kid's too sane. My sis slept in the trundle from under my bed, up-righted and on the other side of the room. It was on wheels and inched in unperceptive millimeters horizontally on the hardwood floor. Across its ends was also a spring, reaching, skimming the floor. She writhed and sent shock waves from end to end like a seismograph machine. A plot was a foot.

It was not vindication for a past offense. It was not jealousy. Maybe it was the intrusion on “my window,” my space in that mutually impaired room. And, perhaps if she had grown her sunflowers under her own window, if she had not left mine open to temptation, if she had not obscured the sun with brightness of yellow peddled black beehive patterns, I might not have ever been moved to destroy them. So all I can say is that resentment, politics, territory, imminent domains may have been working in subterranean realms.

It happened one August evening. The day had been hot and humid, the kind where the kids on the block, myself included, run down to the corner chasing the ice cream truck. In daylights the merry wind-up music tinkles and out of the last tiny hair in your ear, above play noise, the sound of drumsticks and ice cream sandwiches for sale perforates everything. My plot was thickening like the aversion to rules that conquered my mind. And like that sandwich in the August heat, it would soon melt with each hatchet chop. Dinner had just concluded and I passed on dessert, which itself raised suspicion. I slipped cat-like to my side of the room, grabbed the hatchet I had stashed earlier in the closet, opened the window just enough to my a clean break, and rolled into the night. I fell to the ground, narrowly missing the well that enclosed a basement window, and went to work. For a moment I stood and listened to the warm breeze, the crickets keeping time and, of course, the sways of the plants. My bearings held fast telling me I was between the bosom of my adoptive family and my neighbors and forgiveness could be found.

CHOP! CHOP! CHOP! .. . stalks of shrapnel flew in to the darkening space. I felled one stalk, hearing it rustle to earth like a dead luminary, a toppled idol that had dreamed past its boundaries. I felled a few more of the sunny tribe and went in for the big kill. Without hesitation I jackknifed my logistics and I was on top of that main leaf. I was looking down into our room. Nothing had changed. I was no bigger.

I aborted Operation Sunflower with the main flower head held high, its leaf trimmed, intact as well as any dignity five years can collect.

congenial-speak

My horse(s) were enmeshed in their blinders. Out side the division mounted. Trump at times brought a foreign object into the debate hanger. Spanky and the gang, the frigid, hypocritical women of wrestling cheer themselves. A neurosurgeon softly spoke. Little Marco, lying Ted and oily faced ol' Jeb's worth a million with matching heir.

It is comedy. It's dirty schoolyard vintage follies. Picking old wounds and dancing as they bleed, as the red-faced megalomaniac howls in contempt. Cruz unearths the spoonful of bucks Trump's daddy fed him. He is a wounded elephant in need of a tranquilizer.

I watch the Repulican debates for entertainment. I watch to see how low people will go, how they will disgrace and humiliate themselves on national TV for the residential nomination. The Bush legacy. Another one? Do we need an iron cross? A sven saw to fell the Bush no one ever hears.

Bernie and Hillary aren't nearly as entertaining. They stick to the issues and refrain from taking pot shots. The Vermont senator is an Independent candidate running as a Democrat. He speak the words I hear much too rarely in America. He put the disproportion in its perspective. In my suburban, liberally-fed opinion, Hillary and many Democrats before her, do not cut to the chase. They don't steer clear of the upper echelon middle-men, the wolves and Wall Street emissaries hungry for a buck at the opportune moment. They don't draw boundaries clear enough to avoid the petty profiteering at the expense of citizens united for health-care.

The stump speech rings out each debate, and the 75-year-old challenger says it like it is, how it has been for—ostensibly—since the great American experiment began. He dose not say how it could or should be. He does not talk about how strong we are together, nonetheless a very apropos message, but lays out the cold hard reality. Both candidates agree we need affordable health-care, tuition or the lessening of college debt, jobs that pay a minimum wage that will go further than supply the paste for the end of a brush and equal pay for women. The latter of the goals is often heard louder coming from Clinton.

Sanders never changes. I watch him nip a Hillary's stamina heels as he keeps the margins close nationwide. Clinton has baggage. She's collected it from lawyer days, from things surrounding her husband, from the senate, from her time as secretary of state, but maybe with the most relevance to this campaign, from a poorly thought out decision to use a private email server. Sanders defends her and says in debate number one, “I think everyone's tried of hearing abut your damn emails!” (Now that I think about it he may have just increased the propensity to scrutinize her email.) Wittingly, unwittingly, set-up or misstated, the fact was she had baggage she brought as a candidate. Should the mere suspicion and speculation, hours of FBI grilling with a conclusion that found nothing, impune a lifetime of working toward equality for all? I say no, but that is for the majority of voters to decide.

And then came Philly, the birthplace of the whole American experiment. I watch fear, distemper, kerfluffled bite chomps on national TV. I listen to Michele Obama and Elizabeth Warren speak of a Trump world. He wanted to make America great again, as though it was never great. POW right in the kisser. Trump sure likes to give America a black eye, to denigrate it, to say African Americans have “Nothing left to lose” (in voting for him), to say the inner-cities are basically dung heaps burning in wait of an affluent ignorant extinguisher, to grab lady liberty by the pussy. Everyone else want to make America greater, to expound on the lags and bounds, the marches and clarion sounds that ring so well when not a venerable soul is listening. I held my breath. I was so sure the message, the democracy idea was going to continue into the 22^nd or 23^rd centuries at least. Hillary steps out on stage, the last night, dismissing vapor trails of Benghazi and emails as footnote fodder. The ceiling was etched in minds of women and men. The roof Shirley Chisholm had made a significant dent in 44 years before. Hillary, as a white woman, won the Democratic nomination and took a chunk out, weakening, crippling the metaphor's foundation. I really thought this was it.

congenial-speak

Dogging the Bounds:

It was an outcropping, a stone rubble of a gateway to my youth. It was there, beneath a weeping willow tree when we bought the place. In 1970 it tempted me, and further, each time I passed by it carrying things, unpacking the station wagon, on the way to the side screen door. The history of the wall, the gate, the unilateral keeper of my Northern Minnesota summer home, dawned on me as it did many dew-dropped foggy windowed mornings. The structure had a hitch in front suggesting that once it hinged on something, or something were to hinge on it.

The foundation of the monolith, like the cabin, like the tower in Pisa, was askew. It leaned. It fought gravity its entire life, but then most things do. It really was a gate in the most liberal form. It was to your right as you walk to the side to enter the Amram cabin. Many did and may remember it well. The gate/wall topped out at about 6'. It sloped from there to disappear into brush and home to mosquitoes and chipmunks. In 1970 I was barely 3' high and I longed to scale the gate. I climbed, first trying to get up the 6' the hardest way. Tying rope to the hitch, I went up like batman walks up the sides of buildings. After many failed attempts, scraped knee, enlightening advice from my sister, I took her elementary path. I went back to where the nested monks may be, to where the sticks and tangled wore the earth, to where we were in danger of crossing our neighbor's property line. I walked hunchbacked up the slope of the stone arch. I planted my flag on top of our little liberal gate, just like I had seen Neil Armstrong do the previous summer.

Later, when my folks were bit by the auction bug, a wooden bike rack found a home in back of the gate. I think my sister had some kind of bicycle there. I parked my thee-wheeler there. Along side it came eventually, from an auction, a sulkey. It was spray painted silver and had a tractor-type seat between two wheels. They are design to be pulled behind horses. I watched a “buggy” race once in Kentucky. My sulkey had a shaft leading from the seat assemblage with a hitch at the end. My dad and I went to the hardware store in Crosby and got a U bolt. He fashioned this on the back of my three wheeler. I gave my friends rides along Count 10, down to the general store. When I was riding, pulling them, looking down to see their feet fluster as they hung unprotected, the part of me that wasn't laughing was vindicated. I was proud. I saw where I had walked 1,000 times so slowly that the sun saw us, my dad and I, as he counted my steps. Now I was dangerously pulling someone, in control of their injury or safety, going fast, past pots of sun and well-trampled and matted grass.

It came as a latent edition to our corral of velocipedes, our bike rack that toed our western wall. Via auctioned transaction we acquired a tandem bicycle. Blue, Schwinn, low handle bars, two speeds, seats gold specked like the least sat-upon eggs, we challenged our married—or engaged—guests to ride it. It was a test of teamwork, of the coordinated efforts a marriage is likely to require. The gear shift was old-school. The riders had to agree on when to pause in pedaling and allow the nature of their beast shift They had to be in sync in going up hills and coasting down. Many times I rode along side, in front, in back, hearing them banter. They argued sometimes and I laughed to myself, guessing the fate of the prospective bride grooms.

Some slabs of sandstone, maybe marble, I think were found at some quarry. They were set in place on the 10' feet of land that went between the cabin and the wall. I skipped or lunged this crooked strait when we unpack the car. It was set in stone, they were the first steps in fishing. Grass grew around them, the slabs, and I pried them all over in my quest to find worms. It was usually the first place I looked, when asked to fish, when my sister wanted to fish from the dock, or my grandparents visited. For them, I had to find the bait, set it on their hook, and take the fish off if they caught something. It was their ground-rules for indulging the grand-kids. I was happy to do it, to watch their face either shine in the odds of catching a fish in one of Northern Minnesota's lakes or shatter in awe and disgust at what found the end of their line.

I crossed the line as a timid 4-year-old. It was pouring rain. Baggy clouds broke and suddenly found me in my yellow hat, boots and rain slicker. My pop's mother was on the dock with my sister, which in itself was worthy of a revelation. Here is this very proper German-Jewish woman who had gone from somewhat privileged in Germany to very unprivileged in the 1930s—and continuing here in America—to spending her life trying to find that privilege again. She was a trooper, out of her refined North Miami element, fishing with my sister in Tame Fish Lake. Thick accent, borrowed rain poncho and plastic head kerchief, they watched their bobbers through the rain. On a sunny, placid day, nothing but the musings of a fish creates movement, ripples in the water just before it strikes. In the rain, in the dark windy abysses that a small Minnesota lake becomes, the bobber is illusive. Not until the strike, after the wait of the play in the rod, do the rookies reel with all that they have. My Oma's (grandma's) fish struck. Her bobber submerged and let out a few German exclamations and eventually surrendered her rod to my sister. Oma had her fill and went in the cabin to the warmth of a fire. I envied her. But we were young anglers in the trappings of youth, finishing a job the mother of our father had started. She had gone out of her way to entertain us.

Susan called to me to get a net. I ran to the pump-house, a tiny structure in front of the wall containing all out needs for maintenance, fishing and boating, all surrounding (burying) a water tank that gave us running water. I rummaged through the assortment of nets, on the floor and hanging on the walls, and selected one. It was always the biggest one, hung high in the corner of the house, which I had to stand on the tank to reach. I felt the gentle vibration that propelled water to the cabin. I heard the gentle hum and watched the drips in condensation. I grabbed the net and ran out on the dock, feeling important and instrumental in assisting my sister and returning my grandmother's favor.

A long dark shadow rose to the surface. It broke and was otherworldly, alienated from any fish I'd seen. It had tentacles and a green so dull it might as well have been black. It splashed us, rising up from the churn like the expulsions from a tornado. We both nearly fell in getting the 3' amphibious denizen into the net. It lay there, curled and hideous, like an alien creature pulled from the river Styx. Its gills gaffed, respiring like it knew its oddity, the repulsion and curiosity its presence caused.

“Take it to the neighbor over there,” Susan said, pointing beyond the wall. “He'll know what it is.”

Our neighbor, beyond the wall where the earth meets the tall nests of grass, where the wall slopes to so chipmunks play, was a naturist. He was a little Jim Fowler and a little Andy Taylor. He knew his animal kingdom, but he was also a lawful man. It wasn't his job, but he respected his boundaries. He was no recluse, no hermit man like in the Scooby-doo cartoons who always muttered when the mask was torn from their face “If it hadn't been for you meddling kids....” He was a kind man, but I thought twice about walking through the wardrobe to his property.

By now the rain was covering us in sheets. I was sure my sister had abandoned me and the project and moved to higher ground. I imagined them all sitting at the fire fabricating the tale without all the evidence. Water had entered my boots in the gap between the top and my small shins. I heard a slosh above the falling rain. I was over the line, into alien-deciphering territory. I held my reticence and the fish on the stinger with every ounce of strength I had. Approaching the house-like cabin I hoped for a break in the rain, to look out to the lake and judge for myself if it was different from his vantage point. I tapped on the patio/deck window with my free hand. I saw a paper fold in the light and the release of a rocking chair. Our neighbor came to the door munching on a pipe looking very Sherlock Holmesian.

“That's quite a fish. Do you know what it is?” He said, testing me, my retribution for crossing the line.

“A mutant bullhead,” I shrugged with a childy smile.

My dad had caught a few. It was the only tentacled fish I knew. They were good eating, sweet and scavangy tasting in a beer batter. Best of all, they were easy to eat. One back bone and you could dig in without looking at your food like a minefield. We took out the bone and created a fossilized fish. My dad always held up the boned column and suggested we bring it to school for show & tell. Our neighbor stood shaking his head, chuckling as his pipe clicked in his teeth.

“No, what you have there is a dogfish.”

I looked, frightened, over my shoulder at the lake, the cavernous hell from which my Oma had dubiously pulled this oddity, this monstrosity, this amphibian canine. It was dark, and churning as far as I could see. Aksarben gardens, the min, mini, mini theme park across the lake was barely there. I had accomplished my mission and felt my time past the slopping wall was nye. My time on his property was encroaching, suffocating, sure-to-expire.

“Thank you.”

Even as I squeaked down the wooden steps of his deck I thought of my family—my extended family—sitting down to supper. Our neighbor had told me that it would be insane to eat the fish and we should destroy it. I can't remember what I finally did with the fish. I carried it around in the rain, safe on our territory, my arms cramping, thinking my family and Oma had given up on waiting for me. They ate the bullhead frozen from yesterday and shared stories of the strange fish.