Category: Blog Post

You can’t just plop your heart on the table every day, prod it with a fork, and expect it to give up its secrets. It can’t be shoved or bullied, and has never stood for interrogations.

It speaks when it’s good and ready, and when it has something to say. There’s no small talk in it, and when it does finally speak –and it speaks less and less often– you can be certain it will tell you the truth, and that truth may either move or bruise you. It is also capable –and you fear this– of shattering you.

Your heart’s stock in trade has always been simple, declarative sentences, but it is also capable, from time to time, of really carrying on, of railing, of delivering the occasional surprising and stirring exhortation, harangue, or passionate monologue. It is not afraid of giving you a good dressing down whenever it feels like it’s required.

Whatever it says, though, it is always clear that the sentences have been a long time building, word by word, each word carefully mulled and weighed.

One night, you recall, after your heart had been for many days entirely silent, it spoke quietly from its purple velvet cushion next to the alarm clock on the bed stand. Your heart and the alarm clock have a touching and clearly affectionate relationship.

It was very late, after three a.m., and you had inserted ear plugs and the fan was blowing. You were reading a collection of E.B. White’s essays.

When your heart spoke it spasmed almost imperceptibly in place, and the lamplight that had settled on its moist, lacquered-looking surface trembled. You took out your ear plugs and asked it to repeat itself.

“I hope you realize,” it said in its odd and familiar baritone croak, “that I am capable of doing just as much damage at rest as in motion.”

“And are you now at rest or in motion?” you asked.

“What the fuck does it look like?” your heart said. “What the fuck does it feel like to you?”

I have no one to blame but myself, I know that. I clearly blew what might have been a career-making opportunity.

I’ve been trying all night to take the advice of my boss and look at this whole unfortunate situation as a ‘coachable moment,’ but it’s not easy, and, frankly, it really does make me question what the hell I’m doing with my life.

If nothing else, this whole sorry episode illustrates the importance of never putting off for tomorrow what you can do today, or whatever that old line of horse hooey is.

Here’s what happened, more or less as I can piece it together after the fact: I was hustling out of the house yesterday morning, and running late as usual, when I noticed upwards of several hundred giants gathering in the park across the street from my house. I don’t mean to imply in any way that these were mythical giants, but neither am I being hyperbolic; if my eyes were not mistaken these were all clearly giants as classified by medical science, if, in fact, medical science still even bothers with such classifications for people of uncommon height and proportion.

My elderly neighbor was sweeping her sidewalk as I made my way to the car, and I gestured at the commotion in the park and said, “Any idea what’s going on over there?”

“Looks like a giant convention,” she said, and shrugged. It was a sort of question, really, the way she phrased it; there was a definite suggestion of uncertainty, which was uncharacteristic of this particular woman. I had always found her to be one of these know-it-all speculator types who’d likely never uttered the phrase “I have no idea” in her entire life. In this particular instance, however, based on what I could see with my own eyes, her supposition didn’t seem to be entirely off base.

“The caloric requirements of men of that size are almost impossible to believe,” she said, and then went back to her sweeping.

Here’s where I made my big mistake. I got into my car and drove away from this spectacle that was developing directly across the street from my house. And even as I was driving downtown to work I was thinking about those last words of the old woman, and recalling that a personal experience from my childhood eerily corroborated exactly what she had said to me: My father, I remembered, had once taken me to a local grocery store to see a giant who was on some sort of promotional tour for a brand of bacon.

I could be mistaken; it might have been a breakfast cereal. At any rate, though, there was a giant in the grocery store, and he struck me as a rather socially awkward fellow. He just kind of lurked around behind a table, if I remember correctly, and had a woman who did all the work for him. The woman handed out photos of the giant, on the backs of which were printed a typical day’s menu for such a huge man. My father read this menu to me as we walked across the parking lot to his truck, his voice literally rising with incredulity as he recited the portions of each meal in the giant’s diet. The seemingly ridiculous quantities of food that this giant was alleged to consume each day struck me as questionable, I remember, primarily because the giant in question was such an unnervingly gaunt fellow.

All of these thoughts and memories were swirling around in my head as I drove to work. Once I arrived at the office, though, I went directly to my cubicle and busied myself with the mind-numbing nonsense that occupies such a huge part of my day and my life.

Sometime after lunch my editor stopped by my desk to chat, and I related to him what I had seen that morning, almost, I must admit, as if I were recounting a dream. My boss was understandably full of questions, questions I was in no position to answer. And I could not answer those questions for the very obvious reason that I am a complete failure as a journalist. At a moment when any normal human being –even a dim-witted child– would have been seized with the basic investigative curiosity of a journalist, I had climbed into my car and driven away from the scene.

To his credit, I’m sure, my editor would have none of my ignorance. If, in fact, there was some sort of congress of giants taking place in the city, I was told, it was imperative that we have a reporter on the scene. Pronto.

“We really need to hit the ground running on this thing,” my editor told me. “We must own the giant story. Get your keister back out there right this minute and get to the bottom of this business.”

I went back down the five flights of stairs, got back into my car, and retraced my journey of many hours earlier. By the time I pulled into my block some thirty minutes later I could see immediately that the park was completely empty of giants.

My neighbor was still out in her yard, now messing around with the flowers in her window planter, so I went over to see if she could shed any light on what had transpired earlier.

The woman stared at me like I was out of my mind, and I was seriously afraid for a moment that she was going to tell me that I had imagined the whole thing. Instead she said, “Even more came after you left. Buses full of them, and every one of those fellows was so tall they had to practically bend over when they stepped off the buses. I couldn’t tell you for certain what they were up to, but there seemed to be some deliberation for a bit; then there was some chanting and holding of hands, a softball game, and, finally, a song.”

I asked her if she had noticed any television cameras or newspaper reporters. She had not, she said, but then she wasn’t one for sticking her nose where it didn’t belong.

“It was just like I told you, though,” she said. “Several times during the morning huge caterer’s trucks pulled up over there at the park, and they were immediately swarmed by the giants. Such big people eat like you can’t believe. It smelled like they were eating barbecue ribs. I suppose you could go over there and see if they left behind any bones.”

You will surely understand why I am now, at 3:30 in the morning, still pacing my dark house and smoking and murmuring to myself, resisting the urge to sit down on the floor and punish myself with the most fearsome scriptural lamentations I can get my hands on.

The truth is a bright and terrible thing in the small hours, and I have no choice but to stare it down as best I can: I have utterly failed at my chosen profession. I could not –and I did not– own the giant story.

Odd shard, the moon.

Last call.

He lugs his iron

head through the

brass-clanging

days.

The dull trash-can

gong of winter, a throbbing

that starts in his

fillings and swells clear up

straining

against the black

cap of his

underskull.

Snow swept, dead silence,

dead Saturday folding

into Sunday morning.

What is fog and what is

what he feels?

Why are you possessed of such

a thirst while others

walk upright and

clean? Drawn to three

a.m., drifting

the dark roads

beyond the last

lights of the

Hy Vee.

The night behind him

a roller coaster,

a teeth breaker,

an empty bag,

a broken broom

stick.

His mother sleeping,

or awake, her head

full of her own

confusion, his broken

promise.

He can’t see her

crouched

in her old robe,

folded hands asking

once more for no’s

overthrow. Respite: her

one boy asleep

in his own bed,

in dreams,

one man sleeping

like all the

others, not

clipped and limping

along the roads

outside of town,

his blood running

with black bulls

and head roaring

with mineral spirits

and automobile primer,

his face

a shimmering mask of

silver from the

bridge of his nose

to his chin.

Not a howling ghost

broken by boots

and broomsticks

and bones,

stripped

of the last sixteen

dollars in his

pockets and bound

with rope.

A trail in the

snow led back

into the darkness

behind an

abandoned

farmhouse.

They dragged him back there by his heels.

There was an old well

there, and they

stuffed him

in the well.

He showed his broken

teeth to the moon,

and it sat calmly

upon his silver mask.

Snow swept,

dead silence,

dead Saturday

folding silently

into Sunday

morning.

This one guy, every couple weeks it’s these amazing places you can’t even believe, mountains and him standing in water or strung up on a cliff and hanging from ropes. He’ll bring in ten or twenty rolls of film at a time, and it’s gotten so that I look forward to seeing him come through the door. You see the whole world, is how my boss put it when he was training me in. This job is a privilege, he’d say. These people are trusting us with their most private moments.

I’ve always been one of those guys who isn’t much for going places –going places, actually, doesn’t bother me; it’s the being there that I have a problem with. But it is interesting for me to see these other places and to imagine, you know, my own versions of the stories these pictures struggle to tell. One time this guy brought in a roll of film and it was nothing but pictures of dead cows –seven dead cows sprawled around in the dirt. There wasn’t a single person in any of the photos, just the dead cows, and somebody had taken pink paint and outlined their bodies in the dirt, just like they’d been murdered in the movies. And of course you get the pictures of women in bathing suits, and people on the toilet –I’ve seen hundreds of those– and occasionally some actual bare breasts, although we’re not supposed to develop anything that’s “too far over the line,” as my boss says. But I have to admit that in five years we’ve never refused to process a single roll of film that I’m aware of.

My own family never took photographs. I don’t think I ever saw a camera in either of my parents’ hands. These people would come around at school to take photos of the students and I remember bringing home a little packet of those every year but I’m not even sure what my mother would do with them. They didn’t go up on the refrigerator like they did at other kids’ houses, I know that much. My mother didn’t put anything on the refrigerator.

I’m sure people would be horrified to think that we look through their photos, but they must know. It’s human nature, my boss says. I think one thing that happens so often is that people will find an old roll of film still in a camera or laying around the house somewhere –in a kitchen drawer or in the glove compartment of their car– and they’ll have completely forgotten what’s on there and curiosity gets the best of them so they bring them in to be developed. They bring them in because they want to know, and I think that’s when you get some surprises.

People always ask, what’s the strangest thing you’ve ever seen looking at all these photos day after day? And, to be honest with you, that’s not an easy question to answer. I’ve seen so many strange and I guess disturbing things mixed in with the birthday parties and the picnics and parades. More than one person with a gun in their mouth. A dead dog laid out on a kitchen table with a flower in its teeth. This one guy we called the Sign Man, who would take photographs of himself holding hand-lettered signs that said things like, “Tammi, I am not a part of your experiment anymore,” or “I am sick and tired of being taken apart with nothing to show for it.” Unsurprisingly, the Sign Man eventually turned in a roll of film with a photo of himself with a gun in his mouth.

I have seen so many babies being born that it is no longer strange. I have seen a hundred families or more standing in front of Mount Rushmore or shaking Mickey Mouse’s hand. Young couples in formal wear, of course, getting ready to go to a dance or get married. Little children crouched next to their beds with folded hands, saying their prayers. People in coffins and carnival rides and tombstones. Christmas trees, obviously, and kids pointing guns at the camera.

People also take a lot of pictures of food, color photos of turkeys and hams. You see everything, really, pretty much anything you could imagine.

Personally, I like the stuff in the margins, the mistakes and unintentional shots that show what goes on outside the world of what people think of as a picture. I like to study the people who are just standing in the background, looking puzzled and unaware. I couldn’t tell you, really, what staring into those pictures makes me feel. Captured, sort of, I guess, the way I feel when I stand far enough outside myself sometimes that I can see how small I am.

It’s sad when people wish, my mother always said. She’d say, You pray that when you get to a ripe old age you can look back and count the number of really sad days on one hand. Maybe that’s why she didn’t like photos around, because they were like reminders of wishes that never quite managed to turn out like you hoped or expected.

Long, long ago, in the sweltering twilight of an August night roaring with cicadas and the vacuum hum of a lazy small town in retreat from the heat and the falling darkness, the yards and sidewalks abandoned for living rooms and television sets (the wobbling blue screens of which we could see through the dark, otherwise blank window frames and the gauzy, fluttering filter of curtains), I bucked you across town through the empty streets on my stingray bike.

We were hunched together on my sparkling blue banana seat; I was peddling furiously and you were clinging to the sissy bar. I wished you had been clinging to me, wished you would put your arms around my chest, but it was nice to feel you there behind me all the same, nice to hear your laughter (all the wonderful variations of your wonderful laugh) ringing out over the silent neighborhoods and your voice at my ear and your breath in my hair.

I don’t know, can’t remember, where we were going. We weren’t, though, going to the Dairy Queen, where the moths were in full swirling frenzy around the streetlamps in the parking lot. We were headed, I’m sure, elsewhere.

We had darkness in mind, I think, the place where the futile over-light of that shitty little town gave way suddenly to a great stretch of emptiness, where the pavement turned to gravel, where there were fields rolling away into the distance, and where there was a muddy creek and there were railroad tracks and trains (which sounded, you said, like iron waterfalls, and which I’ve always said sound like something heavy being carried away) crawling off into the night, out into an America we could only then imagine.

But which we did imagine, together, breathlessly, with ridiculous hope and optimism. That place was where we knew we would eventually have to go to make our escape, to complete the process of becoming, to find ourselves even as we lost each other.

That was also the place, the place beyond our close little world whose secrets and sadnesses we felt certain we had already divined, where we would one day, through exactly the sort of occasional miracle this world is still capable of delivering, find each other again.

I am still, every day, my sister, my old friend, stunned by this miracle, still gratefully puzzled by my bounty of blessings entirely undeserved. And now it always seems to be that same magic dusk I remember, and I find myself once again in the position of trying to talk you onto the back of my stingray bike, trying to convince you to ride with me out beyond the false, feeble light of that low town, away from and out from under the people we have allowed ourselves to become; trying to get you to slow down and to listen again to the roaring silence and the moving water and the watch-winding racket of insects throbbing from the ditches, and to lie on your back with me marveling at the stars and the heat lightning trembling down the dark sky across the fields.