Obituary

 Ross Morinalo died of a massive heart attack when he couldn't have been over 60, and the last time I talked to him I tried to sell him Aflac insurance.  The time before that when I last talked to him was maybe ten or 15 years earlier, when I was a kid.  He taught Sunday school one year and I remember he was very excited one Christmas to hand out little plastic miniatures of USS Starship Enterprises from Star Trek, which is something I'd never heard of before.  It was either that, or the little die-cast model airplanes that I had as a kid.  I remember having two: one was a blue Navy plane and the other was a white model of an F-15.  Maybe he gave us both, maybe different years or something.  The blue plane was my favorite, between the two. I lost it, somehow.  I had the white one for years and years, even as the plastic bits chipped off and the paint peeled off the metal.  But that blue one was my favorite. 

One time I had to drive somewhere with Ross Morinalo in a big moving van for something related to church.  The other men were going in cars; it was dusk; Ross said he'd take me along because I had young eyes and he didn't see as well anymore at night.  I think of it a lot of times when it's getting dark out and I can't see the road as well as I used to--how I'm becoming more like Ross and less like the kid in the passenger seat of that big truck.  I kept an eagle eye on the road that trip, but he pointed out something on the drive that I hadn't seen, and I carry that sense of failure too, inside, even though I lied to him in the moment and said I'd seen it too, of course, because I was ten and he'd given me die cast airplanes, or space ships, or something.

Ross ran a cleaning company that maybe sold janitorial supplies, or maybe they were the janitors for big buildings, or maybe a mix of both.  When I was down on my luck and trying to sell insurance--which I never successfully did, not once--I remembered this fact and looked him up and eventually got him on the phone.  He was a little annoyed to find out this ghost from his past, this kid from a Sunday school class now long, long forgotten, was just trying to sell him something; was not calling to say Ross had changed my life or that I remembered anything he'd ever said or had anything redemptive to offer him.  I remember I thought his wife was pretty, but I didn't mention that on the phone.  When we got through the formalities and novelties and I revealed that I was trying to sell him insurance, he sounded tired and said he was busy, and honestly now I really understand why, and I forgive him the slight offense it unreasonably caused me in the moment.  Hopefully he had good life insurance, though, because my parents told me he died a few years later, and I probably could have sold him a life insurance policy.

August 2022

Introvert

Perhaps the introvert is not
one who likes to be alone
but is more accurately described:
one who likes to be alone
when others are looking for them.

As a young man on Sunday mornings
I would hide in the church utility room
touching the old tools, cherishing silence,
fleeing the kindly old ladies
who wanted to hug me and ask questions
I kindly didn't want to answer.

Even now at Christmastime
in a bustling house with my children,
my kind parents, my loving wife,
all my delightful siblings and so on,
I tuck myself away somewhere and
just listen to the elsewhere noise,
soak in the delicious, immediate quiet
just for moments, just because.







july 2022

Meditation

Dust the grass off of your boots

be tender to the ones in need

tomorrow isn't promised, but it's probable

and the gardens of our years require us.








July 2022

Americana

 "Why do I write," he wrote in his second journal, the one for musings and useless thoughts.  I'm almost forty, he thought--no one will read me, never mind publishing.  He flipped back through his prior scrawls, some quite familiar and close, some shit, many of them too dark to read out loud.  "If I want people to read me, I need to write some kind of Americana," he wrote, rattling his mind to recollect some poignant stories--if not from his own life, then things he'd heard.  Cutoff jean shorts, country music, latchkey kids, diversity in public schools, that kind of thing.  There was a current of melancholy running through his thoughts; he labored to make it flow into faded empires and the American Disappointment of the late 1990s.  There wasn't anything good.  Nothing Hemingway.  "I probably shouldn't write," he wrote, thinking, but I won't stop.  A brief vision of posthumous discovery and fame first pleased, then infuriated him.  Finally he settled down and wrote:

The kind of man that buys a lot of fireworks for the family July 4th reunion is often also the kind of man who refuses to be paid back, although he will also grumble about it between Coors Lites if something doesn't go his way, thinking without acknowledging it that he did pay for this evening, after all, and so it's somewhat owed to him--in which, he's not completely wrong, but there are so many rebuttals that it's hard to know where to start; so, most people don't say anything, and he either gets his way or gets a good cause for a short-lasting resentment, and then his wife or daughter or maybe his mother-in-law will bring him another beer, and that's that.

Personally, I used to be the kind of half-assed guy that hangs back at first but by the end I'm lighting all the fuses; but I've made a few subtle adjustments, and now I'm the kind of half-assed guy that sits back the whole time, only getting involved if the safety of my kids demands it, leaning on someone's car like it's the bar at a downtown cocktail lounge and drinking pricey scotch since about 3 in the afternoon because if that asshole is going to drink Coors Lite like it's the only thing not too fancy for him, then I too will drink what I prefer instead of downing the IPAs and wheat beers everyone else bought.  That's the kind of dick I am now, despite a few weak efforts to be anything else.

The literature for the pontoon boat says it carries 15 souls, but everyone's stepmom was watching her 3 grandkids from the first marriage, so that made it 18 and ruined everything.  One of the middle kids looked up a law about it and we could have all gone out together, but it didn't matter.  Some people had a nice fight about it while I watched my three kids and two of someone else's kids and maybe there was a neighbor kid, too.  Since the other seven adults watched two of the other little kids, it was pretty much an even split.  At some point I was sitting on a porch with the step-mom and one of the brothers-in-law and someone's daughter from a previous marriage and I realized none of us were related by blood or even directly by marriage.  But America is all about family, and family is very important, so we gather for reunions and argue with each other just to remember how incredibly special we are to each other--even though Family, as a modern American concept, deconstructs into "people somebody else picked for us to hang out with."

He stopped writing and looked it over.  All shit, he thought, closing the journal & tossing it on lightly on a nearby chair.

Desire

The smell of an ice cream parlor
--indistinctly sweet, complex,
this minute fudge, caramel, then
bubblegum, maybe cake batter--
is not one of the ice cream choices.
I don't want anything.
We stare at frozen buckets, desiring
and hope we ordered something close
since we'll never have what haunts us.
Which is not to say I do not want.
Like candied nuts from a street vendor.
You could stand nearby, just breathing,
loving the aroma for exactly what it is
for free, I guess--but none of us ever do.
I only want un-specifically.





July 2022