I had never seen anyone stretch before. Deep knee bends and rotations of the arms. Folding at the waist and swinging side to side. Each afternoon, as I hop down to the sidewalk from the low wall in front of the station, as I feel the delightful pull in my thigh muscles, I think of his morning stretches.
/ / /
31 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem 10 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
On the weekends my grandma made her calls. She called the daughters and the nieces and, in earlier years, the brothers or their wives. She collected the latest news and gossip, spreading it from call to call like a carefully coifed version of the internet. The calls were strong thread, knitting together a small and far-flung family that had once shared Sunday dinners in Lenox, and birthdays, and holidays, but now mostly shared cards. The women she used to call are now grandmothers themselves, and they talk on the weekends still. I make my calls, too, to my sons and my sister, and to cousins and aunts, and to the found family I’ve gathered during this strange life. “One of these days,” my first therapist said, “you’ll have to let go of Lenox.” Maybe, but not today.
/ / /
30 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem 9 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
My “lunch lady” voice is, to some degree, channeling her. Other than FDR, and Burgess Meredith as the Penguin, she was the only person I ever saw using a cigarette holder. I remember her with a perm, with deep crinkles around her eyes, and with oversized glasses on a chain around her neck. (Uncle Jack would be in the next room, monitoring the local first responders on his scanner. In his younger days he’d wake the kids when the fire bell rang, and they’d all rush off in pajamas and jackets to see the fire.) She was a housekeeper at a swanky resort in the swanky town our non-swanky family called home. And that’s it, really. She worked and married (twice) and raised kids and had thoughts and feelings and dreams, but to me she’s a brief series of half-remembered sketches, as I will be someday to people I can’t yet imagine meeting.
/ / /
29 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem 8 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
I came back from a week in Plymouth, where my grandparents had been plying me with Ring Dings and unlimited TV. I got out of their car and saw the look of horror on my mom’s face. Every night for weeks she made me jog around our neighborhood to lose the weight I’d gained on the trip. I was six, maybe seven, years old. I finished lunch before writing this. I logged every calorie into an app. In six weeks I’ll be 50. It never goes away.
/ / /
28 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem 7 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
I am walking on a sidewalk down a hill toward an ice cream shop that has a wall of glass brick.
I am holding the hand of a woman whose face I can’t see.
I am very little.
My arm is upraised because we are holding hands, as if I’m asking to be noticed.
When we arrive at the ice cream shop, the glass brick fills my field of vision. It is both mundane and magical, like the wall of a ruined castle.
This memory contains no ice cream.
After years of tests and probes, it turned out it wasn’t the dairy that was the problem.
/ / /
24 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem #3 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
That’s me at the door, crying, watching my mom and her boyfriend walk across the street to the car. Maybe I didn’t understand that she’d be coming back. Or maybe I understood that she wouldn’t be.
/ / /
23 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem #2 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
I have the golf on in the background. This is a very surprising way for me to begin a poem. I am not, by nature, a fan. But the sounds remind me of my grandpa, who liked nothing better than to watch the golf on a weekend afternoon. Even then, as a kid, I remember thinking it was boring. Calming, in its way, but odd to watch on TV. He used to play, my grandpa. He and his friends used to spend weekends dressed in argyle and knickers, walking around the manicured courses of western Massachusetts. In the few photos I’ve seen they look very happy. My grandpa stopped golfing as a younger man. Maybe my age now. Which is odd, come to think of it. During his retirement, when he had all that free time, he stopped using it for a thing he loved. Instead he tuned in and listened to the whispering men. My grandpa was a quiet man. But in those photos he looks different. He looks like he might have been a man who liked to laugh, liked to tell jokes, liked to throw an arm around the shoulders of another man in knickers. I think about my grandpa a lot. About what he knew. And when. And about why he kept on, and why he stopped.
/ / /
22 July 2023 Charlottesville VA
This is poem #1 in a new series, 50 Days Till 50 Years. I’m writing a poem a day between now and my 50th birthday. I’m going to try to focus on memories of my past, and the people who inhabited it.
I bought Swedish fish at Wegmans. Do people still call them that? The little gummy fish. Mine are red but they come in other colors. When I was a kid, my dad would take me to a little mom-and-pop candy shop. We’d buy a bag of fish, then go home to watch the Saturday afternoon monster movie. Sometimes it would be a classic: Dracula, The Wolfman, Frankenstein. More often it was giant irradiated bugs or a disembodied hand or aliens who looked goofy even in the 70s. If I’m honest, I bought the fish tonight because I miss having parents, but Swedish fish are no replacement for a mom and dad.
As the storm starts I press play on the Dave Brubeck album and think of my grandpa. When I was a kid he had a record by the Jack Stewart Quartet, playing Brubeck tunes. They were a band from the Berkshires, where he and I are also from. Half the album was recorded live at a private girls’ school, the other half … I can’t quite recall. Long before I heard the Brubeck originals, I heard these local reproductions, which had the odd effect of making Brubeck seem like the copycat.
thunder drowns the piano rain on the glass like snares turntable memories of spring
We crossed this border so many times, going to visit your family or returning to our own. Rather than a river of rapids and rocks, our crossing was an imaginary line, a sign sped past at 75 miles per hour. With this poem I’m erecting a new sign, painting a fresh imaginary line. This time I’ll be the only one crossing it. Across this border is the rest of my life, all the other poems I’ll write, all the other places I’ll go. No more words about you, no more places seen together. The clouds will drift over the hills and I’ll go with them.
The first time I breathed in air, it was the air of Pittsfield. My mother took her first lungful in the same town, as did my grandfather before her. I walk from city hall to the Indian restaurant, next door to where my grandma worked in the beauty salon, although the salon and the entire department store that housed it are no more than distant memories, sand castles swept away by the tide of urban renewal. I walk another block past my grandpa’s high school; I wore his graduation ring on my pinkie for years, marveling at his small hands. My own hands are too big now. It no longer fits.
In about 1977, my mom bought me a bag of popcorn from this cart, and then we walked into England Brothers department store, in front of which it was parked. There was an escalator, and as my mom and I went up it I was eating fresh popcorn from my bag. Near the top of the escalator I lost my balance and tumbled all the way to the bottom, popcorn flying everywhere.
From that day onward, I could never eat popcorn without feeling nauseous. I tried many times. My family loved popcorn and made it frequently. I tried when I’d go to the movies with friends. Every single time, I’d take a handful and immediately start feeling sick. That lasted until my early 40s, when I ate some popcorn with no ill effects. I can still eat it today, though I spent so many years avoiding it that I usually forget it exists until I go to a movie.
I took the photo above during my lunch break today. I’m not sure if this is the exact same cart or a replica, but it sure looks the same as the one in my memory. I’m also not sure if this cart is still open for business. There was nobody in it today, but perhaps it’s only open on certain days or at certain times. England Brothers, where my grandmother worked for years, was razed during Pittsfield’s urban renewal.