Friday, December 18, 2015

A Missed Elf Connection

A Missed Elf Connection

Me:  Adorable Elf filled with holiday cheer

You:  Holding a little red wagon that was missing a wheel

Me:  The adorable elf who said “Do you need me to get you a wheel for that wagon?”

You:  Scowling at me and saying “Why don’t you mind your own business?”

Me:  Laughing at what I’m sure what a joke on your part and saying “Oh, come on.  That’s no way to talk at Christmas!”

You:  Continuing to scowl and saying “It’s always Christmas here.  We live in the North Pole for crying out loud.”

Me:  Continuing to hope that you’re joking but realizing you might not be, and saying “Well, I’m excellent at fixing little red wagons.  I could do it in a jiffy.”

You:  Looking down at the little red wagon with a perplexed look on your face and saying “Who even asked for this?  Who still wants little red wagons?  What is this—1887?”

Me:  “Well, as someone who was around in 1887, I can tell you that cowboy hats were the popular item of THAT year.”

You:  “Oh my God, how old are you?”

Me:  Clearly not wanting to reveal my age since I am a lady after all, but reluctantly divulging that I’m two hundred and nine.

You:  Aghast—Ewwwww!

Me:  What, I said, what is it?

You:  I’m only 102!

Me:  Okay.

You:  And you’re FLIRTING with me?  That’s gross!  You’re a century older than me!

Me:  Looking around to make sure nobody was staring at us—“Well, it’s so hard to tell.  Elves age so slowly.  You know my great-aunt married someone much younger than her.”

You:  Nearly dropping the little red wagon—“Marriage?  Who said anything about marriage?”

Me:  Turning as red as that little red wagon—“Never mind.  Let’s just go back to work.”

You:  Fine.

Me:  Fine.

You:  Returning to work.

Me:  Also returning to work, and trying not to cry.

You:  Noticing that I was trying not to cry, and slowly—I imagine—feeling guilty about how mean you were.

Me:  Beginning to forgive you in my mind, because Christmas is a difficult time for some, and we can’t all be holly and jolly.

You:  Continuing to struggle with getting a fourth wheel on the little red wagon.  Finally, clearly frustrated, you threw the wagon down and walked off, muttering something about getting a new job in Marketing.

Me:  Unbeknownst to you, walking over to your station, and fixing the little wagon for you in no time flat, then disappearing behind the Employee of the Month Wall, which is pretty much just a wall covered in photos of me.

You:  Returning to your station to find that your little red wagon has been fixed.  Smiling from ear-to-ear, you go back to your work.

Me:  Thinking to myself—Hmm, how can I let him know that I’m the one who fixed his little red wagon?

And here we are.

If you’d like to thank me and/or ask me out to lunch, I’ll be at my station tomorrow, where I have been for the past hundred years.


And please, don’t be shy.

Santa on the Moon

Dear Virginia,

Yes, there is a Santa Claus
And he’s living on the moon

You see…

I had just dropped off the last present of the year
And I was heading back to the North Pole, but…

Then I thought…

What’s the rush?

So I flew my sleigh right up to the moon

I cut loose the reindeer
And they each floated to their own planet
And carved out a life for themselves there

Comet wound up on Mars
Dasher on Jupiter
Vixen on Venus

I took my first step on the moon
And I felt light
Lighter than I’ve ever felt

I watched the world go around and around
Days went by, weeks, years
And I wondered if anybody missed me

If Santa had become a thing of the past
A relic, a memory
Fog on a window
Wiped away by time

I built myself a little house
And little elves made out of moondust
I thought about Mrs. Claus often
But I knew she was strong
And that eventually she’d continue on without me
Maybe even delivering presents herself

Who knows?

I practiced hanging tinsel from the stars
Making it snow all throughout the Milky Way
Filling up Black Holes with candy canes and sugar plums

It seemed that even though I had left Christmas
Christmas couldn’t leave me

I would look down at Earth
And miss everyone
The children who now had children
And grandchildren
And great-grandchildren of their own

The chimneys
The snowmen
The nice, and even, the naughty

I missed everything and everyone
But I was certain that after so many years
I—and maybe even Christmas—was gone forever

Then, one night, while nestled in my bed
I heard a bump on the roof
And then another
And then another

I ran outside
And to what did my bleary, old eyes did appear
But presents

Hundreds and hundreds of presents
Floating in the sky above me

One by one they’d drop down
Onto my roof
Subverting gravity somehow

How is this possible, I thought

Then I picked up a present
That had fallen to the ground
And the tag read ‘To Santa’

I tore off the wrapping
And the opened the box
To find a beautiful red hat
And a pair of black gloves
Just like the ones I used to wear

I began opening other presents
Each one addressed ‘To Santa’
And on some—‘To Santa, With Love’

Each present was more thoughtful
And wonderful than the last

It took me days and days
But finally, I had opened each and every present
The surface of the moon was covered of opened boxes
And wrapping paper

The last present said—

‘To Santa, Wherever You Are, We Miss You’

And it was signed—

‘Virginia’

So Virgina
I’m writing you this letter
To tell you
I’m coming home

I whistled for the reindeer
And I expect they’ll be arriving
Sometime in the next few years

They’d be here sooner
But Prancer
Ran all the way to Pluto
So he’ll be awhile

But as soon as he gets here
We’ll be headed back down to Earth
I assume that all these years
The parents have been picking up slack
While I’ve been away
But no more of that

By my calculations, I estimate that I’ll be arriving
At midnight, on Christmas—2015

So get the chimneys ready
And put the cookies out


Because Santa Claus is comin’ to town

Monday, November 2, 2015

Daddy's on the Porch

Daddy’s on the porch
Singing to himself
Waiting for the fever to go down

And Beth’s in bed
Hallucinating
Trying to tell the time

How long’s she been in bed?
Six days?  Seven?
She sweats so much we gotta change the sheets
Every few hours

She died on a Thursday
That’s what I remember
Eleven brothers and sisters
And all of us sitting around on the porch
Listening to Mommy wail on the doctor
Wail on Daddy
Wail on anybody who would come near her

Beth died of something
You can cure these days
The last thing I remember was each of my brothers and sisters
Getting up from wherever they were on the porch
And walking off into different directions away from the house
Away from the sound of Mama howling
And Daddy saying Beth’s name
And the clock going tick tock, tick tock
Like it didn’t care what’d happened
Like it was gonna push time forward
Whether we wanted it to or not

I was the last one on the porch
When Daddy came out
And sat down next to me

He lit a cigarette
And scratched at his beard
Like it was something he glued on

Then he said ‘Yup’
And he walked off too
Just like everybody else had

Mama was laying in bed with Beth
Waiting for the doctor come
With the coroner
To take her away
To take ‘em both away

We might as well have buried Mama with Beth
Because we never got her back after that
Just a tower of tears that looked like her

I never wanted kids because of Beth
Because of what happened
How it split the family
How we all walked off
And some of us never returned

But I had a kid
And her Daddy told me not to worry
Because medicine had made it so that
What happened to Beth
Would never happen again
And I felt good about that

Then my kid goes off and has a kid of her own
And one day the phone rings
And I answer, and it’s her, my kid, my Nicole,
And she says her girl’s sick
And she’s real worried about it

I say, ‘Honey, what’s she sick with?’

And Nicole says it

The thing

The thing Beth was sick with

And I almost drop the phone
But I can’t
Because my girl needs me
And I say ‘But I don’t understand’

And I don’t understand
There’s a cure

But of course there ain’t no cure
There’s just something you can take
A shot
That’ll stop you from getting it
And my daughter didn’t want to get the shot for her kid
The way I did for her
Because she read something in a magazine
Saying she shouldn’t
And so she didn’t
And so my granddaughter’s in the hospital
And my daughter’s talking to me from a stall in the women’s room
And I’m in my kitchen
And I walk into my living room
And there it is

A picture of Beth

And I hear the clock

I hear the clock
Tell me what time it is

Johnny Appleseed

The last tree I planted was on the California shoreline.  I put the seed under a few inches of dirt, and then I went to travel the world.  All I had my empty bag still on my shoulder, promising something I could no longer supply.  Everywhere I’d go, people would ask me to plant a tree, and I’d say—‘Sorry, I’m out of seeds,’ and I’d see the disappointment in their eyes.  Out of seeds?  Aren’t you Johnny—‘Yes,’ I’d say, ‘I am, or…I used to be.  I’m not sure who I am anymore.’  Then, they’d walk away from me, and I’d go find a spot of land to sit on until the wind whipped up, and the moon came out, and the path before me was clear.  Go here, Johnny, go there, Johnny—What did you forget?  You forgot your breadcrumbs.  You forgot to leave something behind you.  And then…it happened.  A circle.  I found myself at the first tree I ever planted, in an orchard, in Massachusetts.  It was a crisp autumn day, and two children were apple-picking with their parents.  I watched them and thought—Where are my children?  Who have I ever picked apples with besides myself?  Then one of the children noticed me and pointed me out to their parents, fear circling the drains of their eyes.  I was shocked.  No child had ever looked at me with fear before.  It was only then that I realized I had grown a beard, that my skin had wrinkled, and my hair had gone grey.  I was old.  I was an old man.  When did that happen?  And how?  I had never aged.  But that was before I planted my last tree.  I started running.  I ran, and I ran—the whimpering of frightened children echoing behind me—I ran until I reached the spot where I had planted that final apple tree.  I wanted to sit under it—under the last thing that I would ever bring to being—and I wanted to die there—that was where I wanted to join the earth and be absorbed into the tree, the roots, the branches...

But when I got there…

Nothing.

No tree.  Just a convenience store.  A gas station.  Right on the water.  Right on the edge of everything.  Slurpees and hot dogs.  I was…worse than dead.  I was…It was as if I had never existed at all.  And all the other trees and all those apples meant nothing.  They were vacant poems.  They were the past, where I wanted to die.  This was the future.  Who the hell would want to die in the future?  You want to die in the middle of your last memory.  Your last best memory.  And then I saw her.

Paula—with Babe behind her, holding an umbrella over her head to shield her from the California sun.  ‘It’s all right,’ she said to me, as I fell to my knees in front of her, unable to cry tears, because even my tear ducts were irrelevant.  ‘It’s all right,’ she said, as she put her hands on my shoulders, as she brought me back to my feet, ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I have a place for you.  I have somewhere you can go.’  And then she brought me here.  And she made me young again.  And she made me feel special.  And this is where I’ve been ever since.  And I’m still not Johnny Appleseed, but I’m somebody.  And maybe one day I’ll figure out who that is.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Aphrodite

I’m afraid that at my wedding, they’ll do the Chicken Dance.  A wedding is the only place where the Chicken Dance is acceptable.  If the Chicken Dance came on the radio, you’d be like—‘What is this awful song?  Make it stop.’  But at a wedding, anything is possible.  The Chicken Dance.  The Electric Slide.  The Hully Gully.  Songs that have been lost to time and space are resurrected so that spinster aunts and chubby uncles in suspenders can shuffle around with a half-smile on their face, dancing for the first time since the last wedding they were at.  Shucking off the dust on their joints so they can flap their arms and wiggle their posteriors.  I’m afraid that’s what my wedding is going to be like.  We’ll have the chicken dance, and stuffed chicken, and bad toasts, and white tablecloths, and pictures by man-made ponds and miniature waterfalls, and ugly dresses on the bridesmaids and that offensive photo of the groom trying to escape prevented from doing so only by his groomsmen and a DJ named Steve and a friend from high school named Connie and…and…and Apollo.

I’m afraid he doesn’t love me.  And I’m afraid that if he does, it won’t last.  Or that my love for him won’t last.  Or that we’ll get used to each other.  Or that we’ll never get used to each other.  Or that I’ll gain weight.  Or that he’ll go bald.  Or that I’ll gain weight AND he’ll go bald.  And some people look good when they gain weight and some people look good when they go bald, but I won’t, and he won’t, and we’ll look at each other like ‘Who are you?  Who ARE you?  Who did I marry?’ and I’ll hear it—The Chicken Dance.  And I’ll know that I didn’t have the perfect wedding, and that that’s where it all went wrong.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

John Henry

There’s a word you all use these days that we didn’t have back when I was just somebody working on a railroad.  Problematic.  We had problems, sure, but they were nouns, not adjectives.  Back then things were problems, now things are problematic.  The trouble is, you can fix a problem, but if something’s problematic, you gotta change what that thing is to fix it, and keep it intact at the same time.  A problem you can smash with a hammer.  Destroy it.  That’s easy.  Change ain’t easy.


You know what I wanted to ask Athena?  Out of every dancer here, why did you ask me to kill Apollo?  Because I’m the black one?  Does that make me the scariest one?  The most intimidating?  Or just the one you think you can buy?  Did any of you think about that?


See?  It’s problematic.  People don’t listen anymore.  They don’t see what’s right in front of them.  Or they see too much, and sometimes that’s even worse.  They pick a word out of a sentence and say ‘What does this mean?’ while meanwhile a train’s comin’ down the tracks and they can’t even hear the engine roar.


People know who I am because I took on a train and won.  I beat back technology.  Then I died.  My heart gave out.  So really—the train won.  Technology won.  Oh, they don’t frame it that way when they tell the story, but that’s the truth, isn’t it?  Look around.  The locomotive went right over me, didn’t it?  What we’re doing here at Americana—taking off our clothes—that ain’t just to get your money.  That’s to get your attention.  This here’s the only theater in town where people got their eyes glued to us and they ain’t thinkin’ about checkin’ their phones once the show is over, or whether or not they got an e-mail while they were here, or who they’re gonna hook up with later, because the only people they wanna hook up with is us.  These days, if you got a story to tell, you better take off your clothes while you’re telling it, otherwise you’re likely to be ignored.  Forgotten.  You see what I’m talking about? 


I gave up my life to buy y’all some time.  So you could figure out how you was gonna keep that locomotive at bay instead of letting it plow you down, but it looks like y’all hopped on for the ride instead.  Well hey, that’s your choice.  But it seems to me like we got ourselves a problem, whereas y’all just think it’s problematic.


A little piece of advice—you can’t change a locomotive.  You just gotta stop that thing dead in its tracks.