To Leather Jackets

  My first was from a head shop in Deep Ellum that also had a small but well-chosen selection of used, vintage clothing. This was more of a coat than a jacket, hip length with a quilted lining. The leather was worn, scratched in places. I was only 20, but I was serious. I wanted a life filled with Meaning, Art, Beauty, Ideas, Work. The jacket was all of these. I would button it across my chest and shove my hands into the deep pockets. I kept a pack of Camels and a small notebook and pen in each. I spent my nights burning through both, nothing but ashes and fragments to show for it. The jacket hanging empty on the door knob.

 Next, I bought a beautiful long-fringed, deer-brown suede jacket. I moved away from serious, away from vigilance of calculating the importance of each day, toward the more lighthearted. I went to Grateful Dead concerts, taking the train down to Pennsylvania to catch them playing near Philly, day trips to Ithaca just to drive in the countryside. With a friend, we planned to hitchhike for the summer and decided one day to practice by getting around town. In my leather jacket, walking down Vestal Parkway, I jam my thumb into the air as a car approaches. The driver pulls over and gets out. It’s our friend, Frances. “You’re gonna get yourself killed,” he says. The smell of leather fills the car. We never try it again.

The last one I bought was from a mail-order catalog. I was working at the Dallas Theater Center and for the first time in my life, I had a salary and benefits. Health insurance paid for by my job. I bought a 4 door sedan. I found the jacket in a mail order catalog. The model was a working woman with a briefcase, but young. It was tailored like a man’s sportcoat, but  just a little longer, a little more narrow. I wore it Friday nights to Club Dada. After hours, we’d make our way to the Green Parrot jazz bar, my serious self trying to make peace with my frivolous self over rum and cokes and improvised saxophones.

To Elf on the Shelf

You’re popular on Facebook. Guess who got into the frosting and now has a sugar hangover? Can you believe that bad elf drew pictures all over the bathroom tiles? What kind of crazy elf decides to empty the kids’ dressers, tossing clothes around the room?

Elf, you have freed the parents. All year, they have been role models for their children, dutifully eating their green beans and brown rice before having a very small piece of pie for dessert. They get up and go to work even though the three year old had a fever and was throwing up all night only to be cured at 7 AM and bounced off to school, leaving the parents with a tired no coffee can cure.

These parents stay sober at parties so they can drive home safely to babysitter. These parents use old flip phones so that the kid can rent a sousaphone and play in the middle school band. On Friday nights, these parents show up in sweaty, crowded gyms to listen to the middle school band play “Ode to Joy,” and though the word “play” is not exactly what the children are doing with the song, the parents cheer wildly.

These parents worry. The D on the last math test. The way their son seems too fragile these days. The way the twins fight all the time. They watch the news and worry. They watch the Internet and worry. They look at the cost of college and then try to go to sleep.

They don’t sleep. The parents just want to play. They’ve been good up until now and they just need to release a little steam, be a little bad. They break open the brandy and after a couple hot toddies, they are draping toilet paper all over the hallway and eating bags of skittles.

The kids know. They’ve always known. They pretend, like their parents, to be surprised. The elves are so bad.

To My Fears

 Robert Creeley wrote, “I think I grow tensions/like flowers."

 I say the same about fears.

They are lovelier than I would have imagined.

My fears seem delicate, almost translucent. I think I can see through them as I walk around the day. I think they are just veils or screens, that I can still see the shapes on the other side: my son, his 15 years; my dad, his lungs; my baby grandniece, the world she’s growing into. They are all there, it seems, just out of reach, just far enough away so that if I called to them, my voice would dissolve just before it reached them.

But fears aren’t veils or screens and I’m not seeing through them. They’ve grown slowly wild around me. They are prehistoric, coded in my DNA, oddly particular in their fragrance. They are hypnotic. And it’s not other people I see; those are the fears beyond the fears, the fears growing behind the fears, the viney weave crawling up a trellis.

What is there to do but pick them? This one is pain. This one is death. This one, that I never existed. This one, that you never cared. Or that you did. And then you didn’t.

I will dry them and press them between the pages of the dictionary. I will smother them with words I never learned taken from languages I’ve never heard. And then, later, I will send them in cards, letting them speak for the tensions we carry.