“Bending to popular demand, my father would sometimes find himself in MacDonald’s, awkwardly jingling the change in his pockets, which was a sign of his discomfort. Sense of humor still intact, he would look around & make ugly but funny comments about anyone overweight or dressed poorly, according to his standards. He was not “a man of the people”. He was a man who’d shed his immigrant past, except for when it suited him, to be thought of as Greek, or Italian, or someone who had transcended ethnicity. To that affect, he’d pretend at parties, to be an Arabian prince, or maybe, a local taxi driver, depending on his goals. His command of dialects, or facsimilies of same, was pure genius. Kudos to his scrappy, survivor soul. I’m provincial, in comparison, but not in essence. For what is a chameleon, but a creature who has had to adapt, and do it well, and quickly. Who really knows me? No one. Like my grandmother before me, I run a boarding house, of sorts, and play instruments. Like my great grandmother, I till the earth, and root my life onto cliffs & overlooks. Like my mother, I fight for what is right, and protect the children. Like my daughters, I create beauty, with every fiber of every day. So I’m nothing unto myself, just a copy, of what I’ve learned, and turned, and cogitated. And the places I find myself, feel both holy, and humble. Wearing one fingerless glove, a tough, leather palmed item from the work-wear section of the hardware store, it’s a happiness, to push dirt & gravel off the marble patio stone, & watch the tiny shards of the sift, fall easily into grooves I’ve newly routed out, with my smaller tools. Looking up, the view down the valley, across Lincoln’s bottom lands to the Breadloaf wilderness, surely trace an air highways of dragons, ones that move in the night. Their menace and mystique, casting light, then dark, then darker still, onto an immensely unknown. Over the tiny houses of tiny men & women, and their chicken yards, and goat pens, & farm barns, and well used dirt door yards, full of junk cars, & rusted equipment. Over makeshift puppy pens, and outdoor hot tubs burning maple chunks, over black plastic held down by stones, and “Pick-UR-own” blueberry patches. I’ll be anything I need to be, on any particular day, just like rhubarb, hated or loved, or Christmas lights, put up in June to make a drab porch look festive. Embarrassed, somewhat, to find myself wherever I am, I’ll make jokes, just like my dad, or find ways to get in and out, before anyone notices or calls me out, for something I did, or didn’t do. Or driving at my own pace, along a local river on a day when the mood is hard to read. Alone with my thoughts, maybe startled by a flash of red leaves, early turning. Cranking my head to see things, I can’t quite see. Where a road went. Where a huge raven went. Where a turquoise colored 1965 Ford pickup might of went. Where the party was, when I met someone who turned out to be trouble. Or, the love of my life. Or where that painter lived, or the drug dealer who called me “the most naive 27 year old” he’d ever met. What did burn down, or just fell and I made something up, by now too late to verify, because all the people are actually dead who would have known, besides me. The pasture where the horse kicked me. Where I last felt close to someone, like a sister. Where the gas can got tipped over. And where he never said he cared.”
