Truck

I was looking at the collection of Hess trucks in the corner of the dining room. I never really knew him as much of a play-with-trucks kind of kid, but every year without fail his grandparents bought him the new one. It's a great tradition. The older ones are faded to a slight ivory now, the color of old scrimshaw. The newer ones still shine in fresh-plastic white. In some the batteries are long dead, not from an excess of play but from a surfeit of time. In others the lights still come on, the noisy bits still shout out engine revs and siren wails. He still loves them. He picked up the race car from just a year or two ago. "Do you know where the one it carries is?" he asked--then proudly popped open the top of the chassis to reveal the hidden, smaller car inside. He showed me the light that comes on in the inside of the hood.

I couldn't stop myself.

"Buddy," I said, "do you have many memories of us playing with your Hess trucks?"

I had a few of my own, dim at best, but I already knew they were too few and far too far between.

Big blue eyes. A twitch at the corner of his mouth.

"Not really," he said.

I hugged him and apologized.

Exactly.

"...don't waste your time writing stories that aren't vitally important to you. And by 'important,' I don't mean that you should set out to write great literature, because that's the one guarantee that whatever you do produce won't be it. That's the kind of thing that's decided by others, it's out of your hands. 'Important' means entertaining stories that you're dying to tell."--Comic book author/artist Bill Willingham, in an interview with Cyriaque Lamar at io9.com.

Etched

We all got to talking about photographs and family. I mentioned that there are almost no photographs of my father and me. There's no grim reason for it, no dysfunction or avoidance, just an oversight of opportunity, just us not being there when the camera was, too.

There is one.

It is me, my father and my mother at my first rehearsal dinner. We are at a restaurant in Cambridge that closed not long after we were there. We are smiling and nicely dressed, the translucent tubes snaking over my father's shoulders and below his nostrils the only subtle hint that something isn't quite right.

We are smiling because we believe I am just a few days from being happy. We are smiling because although we know he isn't well, and hasn't been for some time, we don't know that he is just three months away from death.

Aisling

In the dream we tried to speak across the span of three decades and found, to no one's surprise, that we had nothing to say, the lack of conversation filling the line with lengthy white-sound pauses.

I rarely dream of people.

Maybe it came from driving through the center of your old hometown, passing the school where I spent a summer spinning vinyl under a pseudonym, past the place where you got me my first job, the one I lost because I didn't know steamers were still alive and I couldn't bring myself to stick my hands in the bucket while they hissed because I was certain, somehow, that they would attack en masse and attach themselves to me.

The boss said, "I don't think you're right for this."

It wouldn't be the last time I heard that.

I worry when I dream of people. Because I usually don't. So this is to say, be well.