I know that you can’t always tell something is happening while it is happening, but afterwards, you probably remember what you should have done while it happened, but didn’t.
He cracks the shell of the egg on the edge of the black iron pan, as the egg white hits the hot butter he hears a bright sizzling. Or did he hear the butter blistering first?
- - - - -
I found out pretty quickly all I never wanted to know about making death suddenly early one morning right here in Providence on November 26, 1974, as I watched my son slide out of his mother's dark and baffling womb and into the tepid toweled hands of a rather robust nurse. The nurses and doctors didn't want me to be there, that much was clear. I was hastily summoned just minutes before, a green paper gown and paper shoe wraps were thrust at me and I was quickly ushered into the delivery room. My son had a name already. Oakley. We knew months ago that the child was a boy, after seeing it very clearly for ourselves on an ultrasound negative. Actually, we didn’t know, we didn’t want to know, we had two names picked out, one for a boy, and one for a girl. Oakley and Sally. It’s just that we knew he was a boy from the start.
- - - - -
Making death is like frying an egg once over lightly in a cast iron pan sizzling with butter.
- - - - -
Covered with mucous and bits of purple blood, and being held upside down by his ankles, all four of us waited for an unprecedented amount of time for him to say something. Finally after what seemed like a blizzard of swirling flakes, his mouth opened and an odd little child scream snickered out and lingered over the cars parked in the snow outside the hospital delivery room.
- - - - -
It snowed the night my son was born; I took a photograph out of the bathroom window. The cars in the parking lot next door were cloaked in a cold, atmospheric, pallid virginity.
- - - - -
I think the hospital delivery room was silver and had blue wallpaper with snowflakes. All of a sudden, I was alone with him and every one in the room disappeared. His eyes were the color of the room and I fell in love with him instantly.
- - - - -
Making death he turns over the egg, the yolk breaks, yellow lines snake across the pan.
- - - - -
"Mike, get the car, we've got to get to the hospital. It’s time!"
The car skittled a bit as we drove away from the curb. I remember the skoshing of the wipers and the roundness of the wheels. I remember counting telephone poles that we passed. My mouth was filled with snow falling and I was exhumed with an inexplicable yearning. The night became a single black cloud that appeared over and over again until there was darkness all around us. Three of us drove to the hospital but there was another person in the car with us. Listening.
- - - - -
I knew everything I needed to know about making life at 5:31 a.m. the morning of November 26, 1974. Oakley was a million shades of red and blue, shivering, as he made his way out from between his mother’s legs. The doctor pulled his head out first with large steel forceps, then, gently guided his shoulders out. The nurse wrapped him in a heat-foil lined blanket and handed him to me. I heard the pinging sound of the snow as it fell on the cars outside in the parking lot on 170 Courtland Street. I think it was very blue in the room, cold and blue and steel. I think the doctor was quite large and wore dark rimmed glasses. I remember I was wearing green cloth shoe covers and a green disposable gown. The room had snow falling in it, and silver clocks on several walls. The doctor turned him upside down and held him by the ankles until he cried out. Then he stuck a rubber bulb in his mouth to clear away the mucus.
MAKING LIFE
1 part black seaweed
6 parts crystalline [Etymology: Middle English cristallin, from Middle French & Latin; Middle French, from Latin crystallinus, from Greek krystallinos, from krystallos
Date: 15th century]
15 parts of tears from fallen angels
35 parts of distilled water from snow that fell on parked cars at 170 Courtland Street on November 26, 1974
17 parts of the struggling roots of plants that don't exist
3 parts of things you can't remember
Put everything in a cast iron pan and fry it kindheartedly until the yellow congeals your motives.
0 comments:
Post a Comment