LIKE LITTLE STARS

I remember the broken window of my grandfather’s garage, the broken lawnmower which hung from the rafters. I remember waiting until 5 to wake up. About 15 years later, remembering the past in a dream I’d just had. Thinking back to that morning. I don’t know how old I was. Walking along the quiet street, stopping to study a hamburger wrapper flattened against the edge of a metal pole. A teenager in oversized clothes, killing time with a cigarette on the sidewalk and a gray wreath of mist around his mouth. He looked at me but to this day I don’t know if he actually saw me. A forest of lampposts and parking meters …

Outside my grandparents’ house on Emerson, which has since vanished, there was a huge maple. When I was a boy my grandfather dug up one of its seedlings and put it in a coffee can with some soil. We planted it in front of our own house, and it’s still there. But we are not. The maple outlasted us. We don’t live there anymore.

Time’s yellowed hands changed the plastic thermometer on my grandparents’ porch into an icon. The thing still told you how hot it was even though its seams had been split years before I even came along. Next to it, tacked into a bit of crumbled mortar between the bricks of the wall, was a gray strip whose purpose was to hold a gas station calendar from 1965. The picture, warped from many seasons’ weather, showed a wheat field with a sunrise behind it. The paper had thinned and you could see the previous month’s grid on the other side of the page.

In the sitting room was the recliner, my grandfather’s throne. On occasion I was allowed to sit in it for brief periods of time. I never saw my grandmother in it though. She sat in a flowery armchair against the wall.

In the closet was a leather jacket, flawless as the day it was purchased from K-Mart in 1983.

Near the garage with the broken lawnmower was a small patch of earth where my grandfather grew strawberries and rhubarb. The last time I ever ate a whole strawberry was when my grandfather pulled one from the ground, rinsed it with water from the hose, twisted off the top and popped it into my mouth. Lining the windowsills of the garage were empty jam jars, collected over the decades, which he would use to collect earthworms before he went fishing.

A particular moment as a boy, holding my little brother’s hand. His hand in mind–I felt like a boy. And not a boy. And a boy.

Mom would scold my grandmother about her habit of storing leftover soup in the can in the fridge. Lectures about lead poisoning. To this day, when I think of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle I see the interior gray ribs of the can and the bits of chicken left at the bottom. What remained after she’d emptied it into a saucepan. I see also the Cream of Wheat my grandfather made me for breakfast, so early the farm report was on the radio. The hot cereal poured into a large ceramic bowl, gray with two green stripes running parallel around the rim. Cooled down by half & half so that I wouldn’t burn my mouth. The large sugarshaker with the flip-top spout. The stray sugar granules dusting the formica tabletop like little stars.

2001-2008