Sons, the grandfather who didn't live long enough to meet you asks me in Winston 100 smoke-rings whisper what you're like. He's sitting in his powder blue recliner - the one where he watches the News at 10 & then The Benny Hill Show before the orange smolder of his cigarette butt fades to a flicker in the black plastic ashtray that rests on a folding table by his left arm. His smoke circles like an oasis & disappears & he falls asleep doing this routine each night of the week. I struggle for adjectives & adverbs to describe you guys as I blink through tears & IVs hearing my dad, gone 30-plus years, question me in a fog of words & discordant machines emitting metronome noises over the air conditioner's hum. My old man's only son describing his sons to a ghost in a blue post office button down short sleeve work shirt, thick bifocals in tortoise shell frames & all I want to tell him is how I've been & what I've done & that I'm ok. But we'll catch up soon, Dad. Knowing we'll grab a bagel & instant coffee somewhere soothes me as the nurses recycle in symphonic movements, adjusting my drips, checking off charts at the foot of my bed. I may be crying. This room may be raining. What's left of my eyes dances between you three, my sons now guardians, as you look to the nurses & then back to me & the monitors & back at me & my eyes flutter like shutters in summer storms, my lips like a vacant orbit, a vapor whisper.
Dad.

When my grandmother’s hands hurt too much to play the piano, she lost her will to live. She began to forget. In the middle of duets, her hands dropped off the keyboard. Notes transformed themselves to dots, melodies to monotone. We kept turning the pages to try something else. We never made it to the end.

She forgot the way downstairs to the pool, and whether she’d washed the strawberries. She forgot where the cabinets were, and the refrigerator, the names of the cards when we tried to play gin rummy. The air in her apartment grew dank. She wouldn’t open the door to the balcony. The ocean humidity might hurt the Steinway. 

My daughter now sits at the piano, yelling at fingers that will not hit the right notes—her eyes, my eyes, daggers as we struggle through duets. She will not wait for the right time to come in, and sometimes, neither will I. She yells at the piano, at me, at her hands, strawberry red and raw from winter. My daughter complains that the keys on our piano buzz, stick, reverberate. I tell her to tune it out, the way I tuned out my grandmother’s hands, her pained fingers falling into the wrong places. When my daughter was little, she used to sit on my grandmother’s lap, her chubby hands slapping at the Steinway. My grandmother would follow her as she toddled around the edge of the pool in a dark green dress that barely covered the edge of her diaper, the two of them sporting the same opened-mouth smile. “I always wanted a girl,” she said.

It took my grandmother over a year to die, several months to forget her words—one note, one phrase at a time until all was silent. No notes. No words. Only once after weeks of empty measures did she utter a lilt of syllables, my daughter’s name. Clear and in tune, I could see them again, the day they disappeared into the bedroom like sisters and came back in silver party hats. My grandmother yelled, “March,” and somewhere on the Steinway, I found some chords, a march rhythm, 1-2-3-4 all the way to the balcony, where beyond the pool, the ocean was so perfectly blue, she even agreed to open the door. Just a crack. Just for a moment. 

after the illustration by Sybille Von Olders (Germany) before 1916

​I.
This rabbit has too many children. Even if this may be the common case with rabbits, the picture is far too rosy. The ten rabbit children look like they’re on the brink of prancing. They're on two feet, not four, and holding each other’s hands. Again, a rosy choice. Did this mother rabbit have the choice to bear all these children? 

II.
In Germany, where this picture originated, abortion is technically illegal, but unpunished during the first twelve weeks–as long as you’re not too explicit. The picture is dated before 1916, but what happened in the 1930s—or in the 1940s, especially to children who didn’t have pure Aryan blood? Was there an urge to abort? A surge to abort? How many women pranced happily pregnant in ghettos until the soldiers came to take them away? 

III.
What does a baby think when it draws its first cry in a refugee camp in Rwanda? In a war zone in Ukraine? Or Gaza? When does that moment of pure innocence and infinite possibility first start to cloud over, like the feeling of the real world pricking hard at your edges after you’ve just come back from vacation? So much better to be in a painting like these happy rabbits prancing in paradise, which, on vacation, you try to capture with the snap of a camera as you tell yourself, this matters: this moment, where you can be as happy as the rabbit children. 

IV.
Before they get to the water, the rabbits must pass through a grove of trees whose trunks are so close together they look like prison bars. Beyond the trees is an open field, where the ground changes to a brighter green with yellow hues, brightened at the top by sky. Though the air takes up more than half the canvas, our eyes are drawn groundward to the happy rabbits, whose mother never had a choice whether or not to have them. Two of the rabbits have human faces. In the story, these are children the rabbit mother rescued and made rabbit suits to keep them warm. The children are in the lead, as if the artist is saying that humans, like Aryans, will always be superior. But nevertheless, let’s give the artist the benefit of the doubt. She wants things to be pretty. She wants the rabbits to be happy. She is letting the rabbits pass through the pressed together trees out toward the water, its wide expanse of promise.   

​It started with a dining room table and chairs, enough for a small dinner party where we would converse about the composition of novels or maybe music or film (not movies, but film or cinema). I even bought furniture for the front room of the house I was renting, a closed-in porch that pretended to be a sunroom, but was too hot when the sun was out, too cold when the winters of Indiana settled in. Nobody ever sat on the couch, and I never occupied the chair, save for in my imagination when we moved from the table to have dessert and discussions about politics or art or other Important Issues.
​
Or maybe it began when I looked through catalogs: one from public radio with shirts emblazoned with Not now, Carmen, I’m Bizet or Books: The Original Hand-Held Device and ties modeled from Frank Lloyd Wright designs or one from Levenger filled with barrister bookcases with a B chiseled into the glass and fountain pens that cost more than the engagement ring I bought for my first wife, the one who would leave before I could ever afford one shelf, even without the engraving.

I fell in love with skyscrapers and public transportation, so I traded in the mountains for a metropolis, of sorts. And now when I go home, or a place that looks like it—difficult to tell the difference—the one-fingered wave on the steering wheel that once welcomed me home has transformed into a finger flipped at a foreign entity with bumper stickers for the other side. Or maybe I’m the one who’s changed.

In “Thinking as a Hobby,” William Golding writes, “It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.” To a boy from Carter County, Tennessee, who ended up in graduate school in the Humanities, it was impossible to know what a different life could look like, so I missed a world I never had, a world where books matter more than football scores, where philosophers filled my mind more than the family I left behind. I never knew what I had lost. I never knew what I had gained. I never knew which was which.

​I didn’t believe Jamie would beat you up, find you with his fists after school even though I told him to, every day for a few weeks. I treated life like the Atari video games that were just becoming popular, something like Chopper Command, where we would hit reset every time we made a mistake all so we could make another and another and another. He told me about it on the bus ride home; we were proud of ourselves. If I saw the students I teach behaving that way, I would want to shake them until their self-satisfaction fell off their faces and rolled down the hallway, never to be seen again. I’ve passed middle age by now, so I wear self-righteousness on a too regular basis, as if I never made such mistakes myself. But what can I say for the self I was then?

I was young and I was dumb and I wanted not to be on the bottom of the popularity pyramid for at least one moment, I wanted to know what it felt like to be aligned with Jamie and Alan and Joey who beat me up like it was their hobby, beat me up on a rotation like the universe had employed them to keep me in my place, and I thought that I could show that you were beneath us all—though that was already obvious to everyone, even me—and I was mean, though I didn’t know it then, and I wanted somebody else to suffer like I did, that feeling of wonder that came over me when I looked at other boys talking and playing with ease, without wondering what everybody was thinking about them all the time and when my parents sent me to your house to explain—as I had said over and over that I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it—your mother didn’t believe me because she knew me better than I knew myself, but you forgave me and I was almost in tears and I said I was sorry; I was sorry; I was so so sorry, and I never did anything like it again. But I know enough now to know I didn’t change—I’m still mean and I’m still dumb—but at least I rearranged what I worry about: popularity isn’t a priority; people’s opinions are as fickle as a boy who turned on his next door neighbor just to prove he could. And my ego has never recovered from the beating I gave it that night.