blustery november, 1992...

The sky is the color of crinkled saran wrapt, gray and heavy and bulbous, leaves, periodically raking down  the cul-de-sac of Linda Curve. I can still somehow feel the minty breath of Renae’s lips leaving what I could only be described as pink wet footprints across the stump of my neck. It looks as if it somehow might rain. Although grandma’s coffee pot is white and late seventies and has a beakerish laboratory botched junior high school chemical feel to it (mainly because it seemingly takes what seems like forever to percolate and for some inexplicable reason need to have a quart of water added to it at all times). Grandma almost always serves Maxwell House or mail order Gevalia, but for some reason today she offers me instant coffee, handing me a see-through glass silo in which the substance is contained, instructing me to put two tea spoons of the grainy almost tobacco-like chemical compound into the a mug and dissolve it in hot water.  The coffee is different from the coffee percolated at home, the coffee pot grandma gave me which I forgot to put a filter in the first time I used. While swirling a tea spoon in the mug in the fashion of a cauldron and the first scene of MacBeth, the soil-like grains dissolve in the hot water and begin to form a cosmic vortex-like swirl, accumulating at the top of the liquid in a light Guinness-colored film. At home I always add cream to the solution before alighting the coffee mug by the porcelain lobe and chugging but with instant coffee I add only sugar and periodically sip, ingesting to me what tastes like the topography of the  earth accumulating somewhere in the back of the carpet of my tongue.

 I go outside. Dad is wearing his gray sweater with a helixed zipper up front. Although it is November and the planet is beginning to elliptically

 The wind has more of a crisp feel to it, the bulb of the planet is beginning to open at the same times the temperatures are starting to willow and wane. The ladder is propped up against the lip of the gutter at an almost 65 degree angle against the lips of the gutter, my father handing me a pair of gloves informing me that he will hold the base of the ladder as I scale to the shingled pinnacle of the same house where my father lived when he was attending the same exact hallways where reane’s locker is now.   I set my instant coffee down on the cement plank that is the side of my father’s porch after one swig and begin to alight the rungs of the latter, scaling to the top.  My hands seem to clutch and scoop up the damp potpourri of leaves, dropping them the 14 feet below with an earnest plummet as the clod of mulch splatters on the damp grass forming a cocoon.    I shovel three heaps of leafy detritus out from the veins of the rooftop before my body heads south down the wooden rungs. I then head back to the porch for another caffeinated swing as dad moves the ladder ften feet at a time around the brick circumference of grandmothers abode all the while the gray wind continues to screech past my neck, wisping foliage of autumn into the direction of my carefully matted hair.

 

“Do you think you are getting the hang if this son?” My father asks in his fourth grade instructor benevolent monotone. I nod in the affirmative. Around my family I am not dubious about my appearance. I scale up the ladder again baptizing my gloved digits into the upper lip of the gutter, all the while thinking about the lips of the woman I entered last night in Westlake parking lot in the grisly seasonal rain, the temperature pattering as if tuning for orchestral movement.

 There is a quiet desolation to the beginning of the song.