Ron to Parts.

This is my child, he said.

I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair.

That is my job.

- Cormac McCarthy, The Road

I began to notice things in the summer of my 12th year, when the world was still dumb before computers and cell phones and that sort of thing. We were, I suspect, back then, more like the long gone Civil War soldiers, the last of whom had died out 70 years prior, than we were like these people we have become. Our brains were less dimensional/ slower/ unskilled at things we never would have imagined needing to understand. Like the veiny-handed dying men whose glory had long since faded into the musty books of unread history, me and my mom and my grandparents and my brother/ my strange dad/ my Little League coaches and the Italian people up at the deli/ we knew and understood a world much more in sync with the world that men who fought at Gettysburg and Antietam knew rather than this world unfolding all around you/ wherever you are/ right this very second.

First, I noticed the graveyards.

The cemeteries, they called the newer ones, but it was the forgotten, mostly abandoned graveyards that caught my eye. Whizzing by on my Huffy, fueled by hoagie meat, my kid breath a hot gush of oregano and raw onion, I would catch out of the corner of my eye the old headstones of people who had been dead so long that it occurred to me, as I raced towards Movie World/ plastic bag of Judd Nelson/ plastic case of Judge Reinhold, that even their bones must be nothing at that point. Entire lives erased by years passing. Vast experiences and joys and sadness culminating in absolute nothingness the likes of which I had never contemplated before.

In the blazing sun of summer afternoons, I wondered then, how my life would go. Not in some transcendental way, obviously; middle school me was far from intellectual, or even sharp in the eyes of the average American, probably. But there was poetry unraveling off my arms, beautiful paintings sliding down off my slick sweaty spine. And these things, these visions of a world in which meaning seemed to hold tight to existence (rather than existence eclipsing meaning altogether), they began to pile up around me then until, before long, I couldn’t even see the world without looking at it through some kind of artificial lens/ some sort of well-altered human construct in front of my young eyes like stained glass. Like watching your mom fry burgers on the stove through the soft pinkish bend of a cup full of Country Time. The artful thing, this creative approach to being alive, as it was, happened to me, became a solid window to peer through for me then. It happened on its own with no assistance from any well-meaning parent or special teacher or what have you. No one came within a hundred miles of really trying to see the potential in my love of books or my curiosity about foreign places, others states, blah, blah, blah. It’s not to say that everyone was too ignorant or too overworked to encourage a child to seek out his own path no matter how sensitive or aesthetically cultivated it might seem either. It was more like: if you were an American boy in the late 1970’s/ early 1980’s and you were showing flashes of (cautious) interest in reading and writing and maybe music or anything that wasn’t playing midget football or watching pro sports on TV: most people didn’t know what to do with you.

Or what to do with that.

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