Johnny's

We went fishing yesterday, Dad and I, at a dead man's lake. It was almost eerie standing, fishing rod in hand, in the short grass of his lawn, well-maintained by his son over a year after the accident, while Dad sorted out lures in the tackle box and lit a cigarette, explaining that we'd need the yellow rope called a stringer to bring the caught fish home. I almost felt like we were trespassing.

But I also felt welcome there. I knew the man. I had been at this same house many years ago for a Christmas party. This was the guy who, in front of the gas station/bus stop, gave me the first fig I'd ever eaten that wasn't in a Fig Newton. He had fished with Dad in his lake just days before the accident, had told him to come whenever he wanted and take as many fish with him as he could. After, his son had renewed the offer. So off we took yesterday, in Dad's white third-hand pickup bouncing down the backroads, which I recognized from my old bus route when I was in high school.

There in the yard, I held my rod and reel, fishing line already prepped with hook and neon pink rubber worm wiggling in the breeze, and I watched Dad, cigarette dangling, hunkered over the telescoping box with its three tiers reaching up, offering every type of sure-fire lure imaginable: worms, crickets, minnows, centipedes. All species, all colors, all synthetic materials represented. He selected his first bait of choice, a white underdeveloped-looking grub, and clicked it onto the line, and together, we headed for the weeds. The grass around the bank of the water had not, apparently, been a landscaping priority for the son, as it had been for the father.

As we tromped around the lake's perimeter, looking for a nice starting point, I just followed Dad and watched my feet as they lay down little walls of weeds with each step, like how one cable television show that I once saw described the making of crop circles. We saw a mud turtle, making her own crop cirlces, apparently laying her eggs, Dad said. I wouldn't know. We found a spot that was close enough to some cattails -- "structure is good," he explained -- and far enough away from the shallow edge so that I wouldn't spend the afternoon dragging up hookful after hookful of algae.

Now, I'm no angler, but it seems to me that I go fishing to cast the line and that Dad goes fishing to change the lures. Essentially, I have no idea what I'm doing, but if I have any theory at all about the catching of fish, it is to stay in the same spot, to use the same lure, and to throw it out there over and over. Let the fish come to me if they want to be caught. If I don't get a bite after three casts, no problem. Keep casting until something happens. Wait and see, as foolish as it might be, works for me.

Not Dad, though. I think he used fifteen different lures in the two hours we were there. He was, of course, just trying to figure out what the fish wanted. I, on the other hand, am able to convince myself that if I keep giving my set-up second chances, it'll work out. Either that, or I'm just too lazy to try new things. That's more likely. But let me put it this way, I caught four fish, two of them just as we were giving up on our spot, two of them while Dad was picking out a new spinny, shiny contraption to tempt the fish with, all four of them with that unrealistically pink version of an earthworm. Dad caught one. We threw all of them back and watched as each one happily wove itself back into the lake water.

Right after my fourth bass, Mom called to see if we wanted to meet her and Wade and Day to eat. I told her yeah, that I was getting tired of catching fish. Dad laughed and told me not to tell anyone that I put a hurt on him. He threw out three more casts just in case, and I wished that he'd get something. He didn't, but I knew he was as happy for me as if he'd caught a hundred himself.

We went back through the weeds and up the hill, and I let him put my fishing rod, with the half-eaten worm with the Eagle Eye hook poking through its rubber belly, in the bed of the truck, next to the empty bucket for bringing fish home. Dad put the stringer, still in its package, back in the tackle box. I slid in the passenger side and popped open the half-hot can of Mountain Dew that he put in the truck for me before we left the house, when it was still cold. As we navigated the blind curves and hilltops on our way to Dixon to meet Mom, I pointed out all the houses and who lived in them, names I still remembered from riding the bus to school, and Dad drove and smoked and listened with the windows rolled down.

¡a leer!

I have the following: a teaching job that will officially begin in the fall, a long list of books that I want to read, and quite a bit of time. I shouldn't feel guilty about sitting around reading for a month or so, should I? Okay, good.

Here's the list.

• Lock and Key by Sarah Dessen -- I checked this book out from the public library and have only read thirteen pages. I am bound and determined to read the other four-hundred nine before the due date comes around. I have to earn my right to check out an unlimited number of books next time -- books I will check out, not read, and return late. And I want to be a librarian.
• Prince Caspian by C. S. Lewis -- I have, of course, already read this, but the movie comes out next week, and I feel obligated to re-read.
• I am the Messenger by Markus Zusak -- I bought this book on a recent (small) B&N binge. I read his book The Book Thief while I was in Honduras, love it, recommend it, and can't wait to read more from where it came from.
• Flash Fiction -- A compilation of short short stories, also purchased during the aforementioned bout of consumer therapy. I'm getting a feel for the form, reading a few pages at a time. Once, at four in the morning when I couldn't sleep.
• Malinche by Laura Esquivel -- I bought this hardback at a mark-down-mark-down price at the mall. I wanted to buy it at that fancy-pantsed bookstore in Seattle, but it was just too pricey. Now I've had it for several months and haven't touched it.
• Twilight by Stephenie Meyer -- I'm putting it on my library list. Allison, I blame you if I jump on the vampire wagon.

I'm going to pretend that putting this list on here will hold me accountable or something.

Honker Lee speaks again.

Twice I've seen a red-winged blackbird sitting on the tallest broken-down cornstalk in the acre, probably standing sentinel over its unborn. It is iconic. It is a poem already written, its existence now a cliche. Here I am, where life is like a poem rather than the poem reflecting life. So I can't write about it. Not allowed. I have to find the spin, the original thought worthy of verse, so I write about not being able to write about the bird who has been written about before. But I imagine that this dilemma, the desire to write about an oft-treated image, has already been bemoaned on the page.

So there it is. I've set up facing mirrors. The eternal picture of a picture, the repeating images, the question echoing back and forth in the dark of the rabbit hole, the portal out of time and into the place where we find an answer as plain and as perfect as a solitary blackbird on a stalk.

Alas, there is nothing left to be done.

Not home.

It has been a few months since I've had anything to procrastinate about. Now, I reckon that I am making up for lost time. I'm in Murray tonight because I'm giving some so-called presentations tomorrow to the Spanish classes at Calloway, and to think, I'm staying in a hotel. This Hampton Inn is snazzy, I tell you. I'm tempted to use this fast internet to put up a video, but I really do, at some point, have to plan what it is exactly that I'm going to say to these high school kids tomorrow. But here I am in a hotel room in the town that I lived in for five and a half years. I just couldn't help myself; I swung by Brentwood. But as it was too weird and I felt like a real creeper, I buzzed in and out of the lot before I could think too much about it. I was going to get some Jasmin to-go, but wouldn't you know that the one restaurant that I've really missed is closed on Sunday, so I grabbed some August Moon carry-out and came back here to the room to get my money's worth out of this hotel experience, watching all twenty-two Brotherhood videos I've missed out on. I caught up with Tessa at Culver's, which didn't even exist when I left town three months ago. It's like this isn't the same place, and I don't know how to be here anymore. I've closed the curtains because I've got work to do. I could be anywhere.

checking the fire

I went with Dad last night to see how the brush pile was burning. The far corner of the farm was dark despite all the lights: parking lights, flashlights, cigarettes, embers, flames, and fireflies that were in a hurry to meet the stars.

As I stood near the fire, feeling like Earth at just the right distance from the sun neither to scorch nor to freeze, I would glance up to the sky, trying to catch a spark pretending to be a star. Like when you first look at a clock and the second hand seems to have stopped, and just as you convince yourself the clock has broken or time itself has really stood still, it clicks onward dutifully one second at a time. And so I watched orange stars shake loose from the sky and whisp into the night air.

I stood in silence between the fire and Dad as he carried out his winding monologue about the fire, its heat, its size, its smoke -- my only lines, "I guess," "I don't guess," and one hand movement indicating north because he asked me if I knew where it was. Something about wind direction. Then I continued my own monologue, internally, discussing the irrelevance of north, south, east, and west once you exit Earth's gravity. A compass, I imagine, doesn't help any in outerspace. You can't head east to Mars.

Just as I was hypothesizing that north and south might exist in the solar system, Dad broke in, said his science teacher told him that all fire is trapped sunlight accumulated over the years. I could see that. These hundred-year-old trees were giving off their lives' work of drinking in light, a final catharsis. "Nothing is created or destroyed," he then said, in agreement with that teacher. "It only changes form."

I clicked on my flashlight to light a path back to the pickup, and a chunk of burning tree trunk shifted in the pile, releasing a new generation of eager sparks.

"Can you count them?"

My eyes followed as they raced themselves out of the fire and into the sky, and I knew they weren't pretending, just reminiscing.