Little Bird

photo by mollycakes.

Sunday morning in the family room. I love my wife and kids dearly, but all I can think to myself right now is “Leave me alone.” I announce that I am going to my den now to write, and I slip away to that corner of the house where the windows are small, where potted palms sit on the floor in what little pools of light gather in this corner of the house. At first, I avoid the typewriter perched on the desk. I still use a typewriter. I am a walking cliché. I smoke a pipe, leaf through nineteenth century novels, scratch notes on scraps of paper, and eventually sneak up on my type writer and settle slowly into the wooden desk chair, careful not to spook it. I stare at the keys for a moment, afraid it is going to burst into a flapping of wings and escape out a window. That’s it. My typewriter on the desk is like a bird trapped in a room, panicked, breast thumping, trying to find a way out. My fingers must be gentle with it. Once it least expects it, I clamp my hands around it so that it can’t get away. I stop typing to scribble this metaphor on another piece of scratch paper for later.

There’s a quiet knock at the door. Must be my son. “Come in.”

“Dad, will you play Chutes and Ladders with me?”

“Not now, Sam. Your Dad’s working. Didn’t Mommy tell you not to bother me when I’m up here?”

“Yes,” he says in that little mouse voice that usually allows him to get his way.

“Why don’t you go play with Elizabeth?”

“She’s over at Jacqueline’s house jumping on the trampoline.”

I pull him up into my lap. He’s still in his pajamas. What time is it, I wonder? Why hasn’t Susan gotten him dressed yet? She’s probably down at the computer, chatting with her sister or with her friends from work. Jesus, she sees them all day during the week; why can’t she give it a break on the weekends to get her children dressed? “Why don’t you go get your big boy clothes on and we’ll play in a little bit. I’ve got to do some stuff yet, and then I’ll come out. Don’t knock though. I’ll come out when I’m ready.”

“Okay,” and he slides off my knee, leaves the room and gently closes the door behind him. I smile at this gesture of his, so careful around me, but then I see how like an invalid I have become, tucked away in a closed room, not to be disturbed. How long have they been tiptoeing around me?

I try to get back to my story, but the characters have wandered off, the backdrops faded, and in the world of my imagination I am losing the light. Damn it. But if it hadn’t been Sam, it would have been something else. A loud truck out in the street. A blue jay flashing by the window. I was able to finish three sentences, though, before the little bird died in my hands. I guess I clutched I clutched it too tightly.

It began with a letter. Ever since I received the envelope addressed to me in a hand faintly familiar, I could never return to the old life I knew. I have since burned that first letter, but it went something like this…

The Sacrosanct Flamingo of Christmas Past - 2003

photo by psmphotography.

Christmas day in the year of our lord, what’s his name, 2003. December 25th marks the Birth of the Unconquered Sun, Sol Invictus, per Aurelius the Greek, heralding the first day upon which the sun hangs in the sky a little bit longer than the day before. What better place to celebrate the sun than in Florida, in my mother’s villa in her gated retirement community in Lake Wales? Her back yard butts up to the ninth tee of their country club golf course. The day rang in with the ping of fat-headed titanium drivers and Titleist golf balls soaring towards the immaculate green.

Leave it up to a mother to take in her wayward son on Christmas, so soon after my divorce and I have no place to go.

I sit in the sunroom waiting for sunset, palm trees silhouetted against a pink sky. For twenty minutes I watch the shifting reflections on the windows, revealing a sallow middle-aged man from the north. Despite the tropical surroundings, I know just where I’m from. But reflections can be deceptive in the shifting light of sunset. The glass reflects what is happening here and now, but I choose not to see it clearly. Instead I see what might have been; Christmas by the fireside with the wife and child that never were. I don’t blame myself for filling the vacancy in the glass with imaginary things.

Reflections are not limited by time or place. This dayroom is now an atrium in a Roman hall, and I see in the glass a woman reclined against my arm. She smells like Gardenias. Dark hair falls in ringlets down her back. Face pale, lips like ripe plums. We lean comfortably into each other, eyes heavy, smiles of contentment just starting to creep into our faces when the sun dips a little further below the horizon, and she’s gone. The window shows the dark outside.

Time for a walk. I pass down Tumescent Lane, dodging the mass exodus of golfers in their cavalry of golf carts, beating a retreat from the fairways to their homes, barbarians of social security waving their clubs, drug induced disciples of the goddess Medica. I walk long and far, out to the edges of Phase 2 waiting to be transformed from swampland into villas, out where the sky opens up like a great black cavern and stars ricochet off the road. This swamp is my church, these stars my epistolary, far more so than the dismal Lutheran church we attended earlier in the evening for Christmas service. The congregation sang boastful praise of the strength and awe of Jesus. I didn’t know the words to sing along, but they sounded too much like rap music, a cocky gang banger adorned with gold and bling, slinging rhymes of his fame, strength, power, and riches.

I turn back towards my mother’s house. How can I question where He is leading me when I don’t believe in Him? But I do believe in something. Something expansive. Something all knowing. Something that scattered the stars into the sky, that programmed the cells of the human body, that molded the brain and left it as vast and unknown as the ocean floor. Maybe I believe in the Roman’s Saturnalia and a topsy-turvy world where I’m 36 and sleeping in a pull out cot in my mother’s spare bedroom. Maybe I believe in the imaginary characters I cast as understudies for the people I’ve chased off the stage, and maybe I care more for reflections of the sun rather than staring directly into it.

I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies. I do believe in fairies. I do . . .