She only talked about her family in glimpses. Like she was always balancing on a tightrope between the expected and just chucking it all for the next bus to somewhere else. She tried to paint a picture for me of her small town. All those houses on tree lined streets with children’s faces peering out through window panes. Those strict rural Midwestern values standing in the doorways with belts in their hands. But I ran out of brown, umber, and black. I made her laugh…her cheeks turned red from embarrassment. She’d been told unwed mothers had nothing to laugh about.
Tag: life
Summer Days
Heavy air on breezeless days
Push you into shady corners
Sweat stained ball caps
Cover red leather faces
Adonis boys display their prowess
To bikini clad Aphrodite
Blood runs hotter than the sun
When darkness hides their passion
You’re Never Too Old to Learn
With the onslaught of modern technology that gets thrown my way every day and being older than dirt myself, with four children, four grand-kids, a son-in-law and a daughter-in-law that turn their faces away and snicker to each other every time I attempt to make a phone call…I know a bit about this subject. So yes, you can teach an old dog new tricks.
That still doesn’t mean that he won’t stand there and stare at you like you’re the dumbest thing alive. He’s just like me. I know what you’re saying and I know I can hit CTR-ALT-whatever in the hell. Thing is, I just don’t care enough to do it. It’s a whole lot easier for me to feign ignorance and have one of you young whippersnappers ‘show up’ the old man. So, you have to wonder, who was it that just got taught a lesson?
Mike and Henry
Mikey and ‘River Rat’ had been friends since 3rd grade. From grade school through high school they had shared everything. You hardly ever saw one without the other being too far away. But after graduation, Mikey went off to college while ‘River Rat’ moved on to do life’s little things just to try to keep from starving. ‘River Rat’ didn’t dig the college scene because, in his words, “I just can’t understand the need to go into debt for the rest of my life to get a little piece of paper with some snooty guy’s signature on it. Just to proclaim me smarter than someone else.” But in truth, Mikey knew that it was because ‘River Rat was more in tune with a bottle of beer than he was with books.
A year later, ‘River Rat’ was requested to join the Army. By the luck of the draw, he missed Vietnam and ended up in Germany for a couple of years before coming back home. In the Army, ‘River Rat’ became Specialist Henry Bowman and had learned how to stay out of people’s way. He also learned that it was a pretty small leap from beer to whisky and even a shorter step to drugs.
As his youth faded away, he eventually got a job as the maintenance man for the local cemetery where he grew marijuana in the woods behind the back wall. His name changed to just Henry and then Mr. Bowman as, over the course of the next few years, he faded into the everyday life of another rural Midwesterner.
Mikey went on to graduate college at the top of his class and moved on to Law School where he became Michael Schmidt. He ended up in Kansas City where he worked hard to become a partner in the law firm Lindsey, Graves, Schmidt and Leland. He married a model from the city and when he did visit home, she sat beside him in his Porsche 911 as he paraded her through town like some trophy he’d won at the carnival.
Over the years, Michael and Henry drifted so far apart that they no longer recognized each other if they should happen to pass on the street.
One day, the police got a call about the smell coming from the apartment. When they busted down the door, the groceries were still sitting on the kitchen counter. A gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, a box of aspirins and a 12 roll pack of Charmin. A note beside them read, “Don’t try to find me.” They found a box knife in the bathroom next to the body. They never found his wife.
‘River Rat’, his wife and their three children were the only people to show up at Mike’s funeral.
Jerry Brotherton 