Image captured October 2019
This story appears in my book A Creature Wanting Form.
It was a fall day when the map car drove down our old street because the tree in the little park that you loved to post pictures of every year is there in its full striking orange on the way toward dying but not just yet.
It must have also been trash day because the bins are out front by my car which is parked in a space I wouldn’t normally park in. Some piece of shit must have taken my spot. I would have been inside at the time thinking I better go pull the bins back in. Taking the bins in and out is one of the chief things a person has to do in their life.
I zoomed out and scrolled over to the main street and there’s very little traffic and the light by the intersection is green and I am coasting along right now by the still-there shopfronts that burned down a few years back and never really recovered from it when they rebuilt.
The dry-cleaning place I abandoned some shirts at. The woman there had so many customers’ phone numbers memorized. The sun-obliterated old posters on the walls.
It was fall too when the car took a picture of my parents’ house. Further along into fall it seems because the trees there are naked and clawing the sky and there are dried leaves all over the ground and swept up onto the sidewalk with the trash thrown out of windows by people in cars passing by on their way to somewhere prettier. Cape Cod for example.
I had the brief hope I might be able to see my father out in the yard fucking around with this or that but there was no proof that he or anyone else was alive there in the image. Nothing captured for posterity.
An earlier day I drove down to see my parents in person and sure enough there was my father out in the yard fucking around with this or that. When I pulled into the driveway I beeped the little hello song on the horn and he looked at me for a minute through the windshield not knowing who I was and I got out and I said didn’t you recognize me and he said that he didn’t at first.
We talked for a while under a tree he was going to take down soon. There are always trees that need to be taken down for one reason or another. Maybe because they’re rotted out and an eyesore or like the danger they pose of falling over and hurting someone. Taking the whole house down.
You could pay a guy to do it quicker but what they’re asking to do it nowadays.
He asked me if I remembered so and so.
It’s never a good sign when your parents ask you if you remember so and so because that dude is a fucked.
Another time on Easter at the house I looked through a photo album my aunt had brought with her while all the children looked at their phones and every time she turned a page one of the pasted Polaroids would come off its ancient glue and she’d shuffle it back into place half-assedly and tell me about how this lady or that guy in the photos from the 1983 Halloween party had died. The clown had a skiing accident. The flapper found out a month before it was going to happen and no one believed it. My uncles there in giant eyeglasses looking like some guy I know now. Their girlfriends as stewardesses and me going hm.
This dead fella my dad knew drank himself to death he said. He was an old friend of my parents but I think they had had a bad falling out years ago and so it was less like the mourning of someone once loved than simply registering the name of the dead in a collective book we share custody of.
Keeping you up to date on who from back home is dead now is one of the main things your parents have to offer you after a certain age.
Your siblings meanwhile get to tell you who from school overdosed.
Whenever you hear that type of thing even if you don’t know the guy you gotta go ah their poor kids and then the other person goes I know their poor kids.
They found him dead my dad said which is never a good sign. When you are found dead it’s different than having died it implies something worse. Like no one noticed for a while that you were gone.
Then my mother woke up from her vapors and came out and cried and hugged me like I’d just returned home from war which was partly true and the last of a long line of golden retrievers my dad has loved more than he ever loved his children followed behind her and crawled into my lap and nestled her head under my chin and suggested I rub her back until she felt safe.
My dad has a shrine set up for every dog he’s ever had next to his piano. There’s got to be about fifteen of them from over the years. I only recognize a couple of them anymore by name.
My mother tried to make me take some massager thing she uses on her back and I said no no it’s ok and she said just take it and I said I don’t want to take the fucking machine Ma even though I kind of did want it. She asked me again to take my comic books that had been sitting upstairs for two decades when I left. Maybe they’re worth money she said.
My parents are getting older now and sometimes I get very angry about that and it makes it difficult for me to be around them in a way. Like I’m constantly on edge. I’m not angry at them of course it’s not their fault but I do selfishly find their aging to be an affront to me personally. Even though the inevitability of their passing someday hopefully at least twenty years from now is the most natural thing in the world the one single predictable thing we all have in common the fact that I have to watch it happen step by step like this until it finally arrives seems indecent. Like watching them undress.
I wouldn’t have minded watching you grow old like that if I could have had the chance. Changing just so every season so slowly I barely noticed. Taking pictures of your tree.