Untitled Piece

We were sitting outside watching the clouds. In the monsoon season there were these epic cloud formations and especially around sundown they would become particularly intense. We would sit out in the back yard in plastic furniture except for the piece Daddy made for Momma (a beautiful lightly stained cedar Adirondack) drinking soda (I was sobering up) and thinking about the future.

Daddy liked to put a lot of weight into conversation in those days. He valued a good talk and a man on if he could conduct himself in a good talk. But Daddy talked in a different way than the average man. If he wanted to talk about the inherent nature of man to do good and what it means to be just, he would talk about Superman. If he wanted to talk about betrayal and what it meant to lose your hero, he would describe being a folkie watch Bob Dylan (except you never called him Bob Dylan, it was “Zimmie, you don’t turn the man into a god.”) progress in his styles. He could never get out there and say exactly what it was he wanted to. You never heard what was buggin’ the man, you never heard how beautiful the sunset was, or how frustrated he was with being jobless. Instead you got a story about Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s feud and how they were secret lovers or you got a tall tale of Mark Rothko and the Seagram’s commission.

None of us could ever tell it straight in those days those. We had to weave around it, circle around it a couple of times, slowly approaching it and then not pounce. Never did we pounce. We let it lie. And then we moved on.