THE CITY - ISSUE 14

My father enrolled all the children in a local synagogue of the august weeds.
Maybe for an education... or maybe to study the painful footsteps up Mount Sinai.
The clock refuses illumination before the timeless moment of God.
So I awaken and sit upon the edge of my bed in my old fashioned pajamas.
Yawning while I put on my slippers and my robe.
I... a child of religion.*
Father sits at the breakfast room table with aromatic coffee and the morning paper.

That was my father.
Mother stood at the griddle... wrapped in a vintage 1953 apron.
"Who wants eggs over easy?" she would say.
I slurp my bowl of farina.
Butter melting like the early morning sun.
I generously spooned out brown sugar.
And I sat at the breakfast table next to the radio.
Nuclear missiles in Cuba!
But I was far too young to appreciate an early Saturday morning of complete global thermo-nuclear warfare.
So calmly I drank cold orange juice with a bit of vigor.

Mom stands at the sink washing the dishes.
You know... pink cotton dress and all.
A burning cigarette resting on the summer lit window sill.
And I sit upon the front porch with my dog that Dad inherited from a Standard Oil Station.
Makes me so sad.
She was the little soldier of all the neighborhood children.
And I?
Well I had relatively recently adopted this forlorn subway planet.
I pick my nose while I sit upon the front porch.
All alone... except my dog.
I pet her while she stands watch over the greens of my neighborhood.
And I spit out a hair from my tongue.

The milkman comes rumbling down the street.
And while he carries the orders up the driveways I slip into the truck and slide a block of ice down the troubled road of a sunlit childhood.
Mother's in the garden planting geraniums for the synagogue carefully wrapped in the hand stitched Sabbath.
And it is night and I have to polish my shoes and leave them by the hot water heater to dry.
Meanwhile....meanwhile I would catch up on my Hebrew assignment.
While my father sits comfortably in another mingling universe.
Drinking a beer... and smoking a cigarette.
All the while I sit upon the concrete front porch with the memory machine grinding childhood experiences through the chaotic tin funnel inserted into the top of my peaceful skull.
Lighting up my seratonin of backyard memories.
The slide and such.
A sandbox and my own garden of a local marigold illuminated boyhood miracle.

Dad watches a ball game.
He shall always be The Umpire of The Great Depression with an old photo album of a child's electricity.
A handful of Persian salt in the potato chip bowl.
A relaxing time of memory upon a Saturday afternoon.
Mom in the garden.
My dog sits next to me upon the front porch.
The milkman's truck rumbles down the quiet roadways of old mapped out neighborhoods.
The crabapple tree in bloom.
The front yard it tumbles through the years of osmosis.
And I sniff the fragrant lilacs.
After all it is the radio childhood with Dad watching the ball game.
And Mom giving birth to all the little babies as she stoops before the geranium garden.
Making real the station wagon filled forever with groceries, little children and vials of hospital morphine.
Buried in the mountains...their ashes in the moist soils of silence.
And new gardens give fruit to a new generation.
I stand beside the ashes.
The continuum of Motherhood forever cooking dinners the four siblings in routine crises of morbid lightning and all the shoes not yet laced.
And Dad is the salesman dressed in good gray suits.
I sit still in the hospital filled with images of every generation in all my relations.
The sunlight coming through a properly medicated psychosis.
As Mother sits helplessly before me as I sit in my hospital robe and summer pajamas and an awful state while gritting teeth silently paralyzed in a timeless morbid psychosis.