Tag Archives: father

Solstice Serenades

Despite the mounting profusion of ads for Halloween, the bloom of summer remains fragrant. Besides, this was written in September. At least two weeks yet before Michael Myers, Freddie Krueger, and Jason Voorhees start invading screens for marathon gore sessions. Continue reading Solstice Serenades

On Our Side of the Line

Perception must depend on location and familiarity as well as with who surrounds oneself. This realization has become even more pronounced since moving cross-country.

Before coming to Nevada, I’d already accumulated years in the Southwest. Though after whatever needed conducting here was finished, I scrammed back to New York. Now as a Silver State resident, the region’s peculiarities are more present and therefore more insistent.

Especially among non-landed citizens. It’s as if they’re intentionally indifferent towards recognizing individuals, preferring indistinction and keeping certain groups amorphous. Continue reading On Our Side of the Line

Soldiers of the Great War (Part One)

Jenkins was a stranger to Lancer. He only recalled ever seeing him once. On a sunny spring day inside a coffin at his funeral. Continue reading Soldiers of the Great War (Part One)

Social Eye Rolling

The calamity of Trumpvirus has made me glad my parents aren’t alive today to witness our disgrace. Only father’s and mother’s astonishment might’ve surpassed their disappointment in us.

As I’ve written elsewhere, by the time father and mother reached 27 and 16, respectively, they endured the Jim Crow South, the Depression, and World War II. After those preliminaries, they formed the devoted black masses who broke the second-class barriers which suppressed the truest of all Americans. Continue reading Social Eye Rolling

Keeping True

On Father’s Day 2019, I performed an act my own late father might’ve considered sacrilegious. I attended a Dodgers game in Chavez Ravine.

To mitigate my baseball transgression I cheered for the visitors not the home nine.

Father was a Brooklyn Dodgers man through and through. The Los Angeles Dodgers could never have engaged his rooting interest. Continue reading Keeping True

The Mohicans

Vernon is dying. He is a cousin who inquired about Edna Long three years ago. She was an unknown figure who appeared in one of our family branch’s turn-of-the-century census tracts. Turn of the 20th century.

The people who may’ve known about her, remembered her, they’ve been all good and dead way before curiosity aroused his present-day fascination with this stranger who’ll remain a mystery. Continue reading The Mohicans

Old Paint Was a Lemon

Old Paint was wheezing harder than usual. After all the part swapping, repairs, and just general babying of that car, what finally forced my hand was a check engine light. Sure. It could’ve been a fouled sensor. Or maybe it might’ve been the first sign of the head gasket preparing to crack.

In any case, I read the yellow dashboard light as a clear warning from the gearhead gods. It became the straw which broke my camel’s back. Continue reading Old Paint Was a Lemon