The Long and Winding Road Nears Its End

I’m a reasonable man.
The long and winding road nears its end.
A pair of kittens bounce off walls in an endless, relatively fruitless chase of tails and feathers.
The artist inside a rubber shoe, rolling about with a painted smile.

The Museum of Funeral History is in Houston. It teaches what the head knows in the warm light of day but as darkness descends, hearts bag the winner at the death and it is death, death death always death, which blows unmercifully and without fanfare for full time; we play ghost games in empty stadia.

I don’t believe he saw a single pitch thrown, or heard one crack of a slugger connecting with leather. If he saw it, if he heard it, there’s no telling if he knew what was there before him.
If a tree falls, does it?

A great writer once said that the act of writing cannot— or was it should not, doesn’t matter anymore — be cathartic. This endeavor is proving the point.
I’m not coping any better for having gotten this far, thus far.

Stray cardboard after the farmer’s market’s closed.
This pit of a batch of sour cherries.
Best press on.

“Tell the girl you love that you love her, and try to tell the truth whenever you can”

Why didn’t more of you eat the donuts. At $12.50 a dozen, and with work drying up since the virus, the lot of you should be fattening up on chocolate thunder, powdered creams, and the iced coffee roll quartered for your convenience.
God damn why is everything so expensive.
A grand and a half for a new toilet?

Chances are he won’t return home.
Chances are he’ll never read another Thor or Child or Clancy.

My dad drove me to the MacDade Mall when I was 11 or 12 or 14.
I pass it often now, the exit not the mall itself. Who goes to malls.
A green highway sign, white letters. At 70 mph a blur of history never gonna be repeated.
Gracey was there, seated behind a folding table, signing shit for a sum. The ball is in a tote, beneath a red blanket, in a closet I have little need to open. The bat, I brought that home last night.
Driving to the MacDade Mall, when I was 11 or 12 or 14, took a fucking eternity.
It is, I know now, about fifty minutes south of my childhood home but the tectonic plates of youth and anticipation, of highways and off ramps, traffic lights and one cavernous block of white-lined asphalt; it might as well have been equidistant to the severance Earth pays the moon to stay away.
Dad didn’t say a negative word; uttered nary a sigh as I recall it today some 30 odd years removed. I bet he’d have been on a golf course, seven iron in hand, Optimo Palma dangling precariously from mouth, had it not been for his youngest son’s favorite no-batting-glove-wearing, line-drive-striking, first baseman being in the ballpark of Philadelphia.
I don’t know if he knows that I’ve still got that ball, that bat, from that mall on the moon.

He was only six years younger than I am now when he met his third and final child, third and final son, his “good luck charm” as he would often say, his kid without a middle name, his oddball.

82 this month but there’s little chance he sees it.
That ain’t bad, all in all, at the end of the day; that’s one way to see it.
81 and a jingling pocket of spare change just shy of a buck; spare change to be locked into an artificial vault in miniature atop a dresser. Black and blue socks in the third drawer down.
Baseball on the radio beside his bed.
A stogie on the course, until he put both away for good.
Homemade chicken salad every time, to show how much I love him.
It was the least I could do.