Tag: reading

Lucky You a Pen

~ johnbrandall

In 1986 my dad’s favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, lost the World Series in heartbreaking fashion to the New York Mets.  The Red Sox had twice led the Mets late in Game Six, repeatedly coming within one strike of winning the game and thereby the Series.  But bad relief pitching and an infamous miscue by the Boston first baseman allowed New York to prevail in extra innings.  

I was seven years old so I don’t remember the game well, but I do remember my dad moving from one room of the house to another, depending on how the game was going, believing superstitiously that how and where he watched the game could affect the outcome. 

The next spring my mom bought me some clothes from an erstwhile store called Venture.  Or it could have been Glik’s.  What I remember is that among those clothes was an orange t-shirt that I really liked.  The Mets wore uniforms with orange trim and their logo is orange on blue.  The t-shirt disappeared.  I asked my mom what happened to it.  Apparently my dad had banned the t-shirt on the basis of orange being a “gang color” but I suspect that the shirt reminded him of the Mets.  

~

You can’t make your bed while you’re on it.  That’s what my mom would say to me as I tried to straighten the covers atop my bunk bed, the higher of two bunks in the bedroom I shared with my younger brother.   At the end of the bunk was a window that looked out over our driveway, toward the house next door where Domino the German Shepherd lived, along with the couple who owned the house.  I could lie prone on the end of my bunk and look out the window, high above our driveway.  

Even though my bedroom was on the first floor it felt like a second-floor view because our driveway sloped down as it ran from the street to the back of our house.  On our side of the driveway was a lovely terraced rock garden that my mom looked after.  On the other side of the driveway was a steeply slanted hedge of unruly ivy and honeysuckle that my dad sometimes clipped.  The valley-like feel of the driveway put our yard at a remove from our neighbors’ yard even though they weren’t but twenty feet apart...  


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Shovel and Broom

~ johnbrandall

While clearing the porch of today’s endless torrent of snow I thought about that long William Gass story, “The Pedersen Kid.”  I wish I remembered the story better but what I recall is the story of a kid getting lost outside in a snowstorm.  The story takes a surreal turn, like an impressionist painting, maybe the kid survives, maybe he doesn’t, maybe what starts to flow from the story is the kid lost in the snow somewhere telling himself he’s alright, he’s found shelter.  Gass at the height of his artistry.

My wife was outside before I was this morning, and I said to her, to myself, “You’re making me look bad.”  My body is always cranky and stiff in the morning, I usually have a hard time putting on my pants.  I found a way into them, a pair of lined snow-appropriate pants that I fortuitously requisitioned from The Internet six weeks ago, not knowing this snow would fall, but wanting to be warm at Farm, snow or no...  


Continues a short entry about sweeping snow...