My father calls me every week, usually on Sundays, around 3, after he’s gone to the grocery store and picked up a roast or some chicken or maybe crabmeat, if it’s on sale. He’ll make a nice meal for my stepmom and himself, she’ll do the dishes and then he’ll go lay down in the bed they’ve shared for more than 40 years. But first, he’ll let out a heavy sigh, he’ll call out loud, “Hey, Sand, I’m going to take a nap.” He’ll take out the hearing aids he’s needed for decades longer than he’s worn them, and curiously, just as he’s easing into his rest, he’ll pick up the phone and call me. This won’t be a conversation, because he won’t hear my responses, but he’ll talk. He’ll tell me about the meatballs he made, with a little rice and tomato sauce inside like his mother, Basha, used to make. He’ll tell me about Fareed Zakaria on channel 19 and ask me for the umpeenth time if I’ve watched it, thought he knows I no longer have cable, and if I did, the channels are different here in VA. My dad’s in Florida, of course. Flaarida. He’ll tell me about the stock market and he’ll sigh again as his beloved Nvidia has taken a dive. He won’t ask me any questions, as he knows there’s but much I’ll share with him anyway, since the divorce. I think he’s waiting to hear me say that I’m gay, why else would my marriage have ended? But I’m not. It ended because it was over. The same as it did between him and my mom. But he doesn’t really get it. And besides, he wouldn’t hear my explanation anyway. 

My dad calls me once a week. He’s 93. How many calls could we have left? 100? 150, maybe?

If we’re both incredibly lucky? 

Tomorrow is Sunday. I think I’ll go sit by the phone. 

I get it now. This weight, the sadness this thing that we’re all feeling is dying. It’s not a death but rather a divorce. From a marriage sure that wasn’t perfect, wasn’t happy. Wasn’t really the stuff of dreams but still it was ours, mine, yours. It was what we came home to from 10 days abroad. It was groceries on the table and dishes in the sink. It was familiar. And it had the potential to get better. It had the potential to be great. But now what we’re faced with is the reality that this thing that we thought was always under our feet came home one night and made a declaration that it wanted to do things differently, play by different rules. It wanted to follow its own discretion and not be bothered by what was fair or kind or just. It was selfish. It was cruel. The hardest part is the realization that we were in denial. We were never safe. We were never even happy. We were just comfortable. And now it’s not dying we cannot grieve it’s permanent loss. We still have to look at it across the courtroom, on the TV, Read it’s emails and fume. We were complicit. In fact we were the ones that strayed first by not paying closer attention, offering more compliments, respecting the other. As I think this I also think about how as I’m aging I am disappearing, slowly at first, and then all at once. My hair so thin, My flesh missing its fleshy bits. Even my vagina has given up. Receded in these dark times. A sexual organ that I never even knew that I had, my labia minora is gone and I miss it. I wished I had appreciated it more. Ashes to ashes and dust to dust is what they tell you but what they don’t say out loud is that that process happens right before your eyes. Skin becoming flaky and falling off in millimeter sized squares and circles. Lips no longer full enough for even a little bit of lipstick. No need to call attention to lines so thin. Encircling a mouth full of chipping teeth. What we had we didn’t know…what we had we didn’t want enough to protect. And now, well, now the future will be written in a foreign language that our grandchildren will speak from birth. There is no burial stone here just signed agreements in a court of law that doesn’t give a shit. 

My old friend and I perused the aisles in the thrift store 

Eyeing serving platters and mismatched tea cups 

We reminisced about the days when our children were so little and fit into 2T buffalo plaid flannel shirts like the one hanging on the rack.

Now they buy their own clothing. 

It’s Christmas time, or nearly, and she’ll be hosting my kids for holiday brunch.

But I won’t be there. 

She reached down and picked up a curious thing–a padlock. She said do you need a lock? I replied, “No thank you. I need a key.”

The glass panel door behind my head rattled when you hit it headfirst 

It was not the entryway you thought it was. 

The solid force threw you backwards, left you dazed. But you gathered yourself. 

Shook off your feathers. And launched yourself back into the wind. 

How beautiful to know that your wings are strong enough to fight the gusts.

And that before long, you will find a safer place to land. 

On the morning of my 58th birthday, I woke up in my old bedroom at my parent’s house. The one where my model horse collection had been displayed on the bookshelves. The one where I’d make an 8th grade nightly call to Kathy Schinner to plan out our outfits for the following day. The one where in 1982 I’d blast Journey on my stereo so that the cute neighbor boy who mowed our lawn would know how cool I was. 

On the morning of my 58th birthday my mom woke up before me and poured batter into a frying pan to cook me special pancakes. This was not something she’d ever done when I was a kid.

They were scorched on one side, but there was enough there to scrape away the good bits and feed myself. 

Not so much unlike my childhood. 

The secret to happiness, it turns out, is not to deny that the burns exist, but to choose to enjoy what’s on the unburned side. 

Lonely and leaning just like this, against a tree. –Joan Baez

And so she stands there
Tough on the outside
In her khaki Wranglers and coordinating shirt and vest combo found in the giraffe section of garanimals at Sears and Roebucks

Back to school shopping, three pairs of couderoys, five tops, one pair of leather shoes, perhaps a coat, nah, never a new coat

Not with two older sisters who are best at breaking things in–
Breaking all sorts of things,
hearts, windows at school, promises to keep their little sister safe

from the nearly boys who come over to get high and fuck when their mother isn’t home, which is most of the time

She stands against the maple in the front yard, head cocked slightly, virginal hair swinging out from behind her back

That tree is barely big enough around to hold her. It’s roots not yet deep. This world isn’t big enough either.

She will harden as she grows fatter and fatter until in high school you can barely recognize her cheekbones, once so prominent.

She leans against the tree, lonely, as her father backs the station wagon onto the street and the Collie dog barks farewell.

I used to have a keychain,
It didn’t bear my name.
My keys would dangle from it
Like my secrets and my shame
I used to keep my doors locked tight 
So no one could get inside 
I thought it best for keeping safe
I dared not open wide 
And the older that I grew, 
I had so much more to guard
My antiques and collectibles, 
the flowers in my yard.
I’d say, “Don’t assume what’s mine is yours, what is mine is only mine.”
That was how I’d hold on tight.
That way I’d be fine 
No giving meant no taking 
No letting others in
Kept my shadows hidden 
And the truth beneath my skin
And then one day a breeze blew by and on it, heard my voice
(Or, that of some angel)
telling me I had a choice–
I could keep my windows 
all closed up,
I could keep my doors locked tight 
Or, I could take a risk, 
and open up to light
Unlock everything,
let it open wide 
Throw away the keys 
that kept others from inside
And if what they saw, they hated?
Well, that was their right to choose, but if I took a chance, the wind had said, 
I’d really none to lose
Now I have a keychain 
with nothing but my name
No keys to dangle to from it
I have no secrets and no shame
There’s a keychain in my pocket, 
Reach down, say my name,
There’s a keychain in my pocket,
What once was lost, regained

I’m in a rented 2014 Gray Hyundai Sonata heading north on some road in Massachusetts there’s a Red Wing Blackbird sitting on a tree on the side and the DJ just had to switch to another CD player live on the radio because the first one wouldn’t work. He just finished playing a beautiful acoustic guitar version of Rebel Rebel sung in Portuguese. I’m on my way to York to jump in a car with Sue and Bobby Jo and go hear them perform in Durham, New Hampshire. Tomorrow I will walk along the beach, and on Saturday, my friend from 1977 will accompany me at a show where my daughter will sing original music in front of a crowd. Life is good. 

One million and thirty two years ago tonight after recording the memory of my reflection on the plate glass window, I went into the bathroom alone, undid my zipper and took out so many bobby pins. I was no longer a bride.

I came into the Hyatt bedroom and laid down next to you and we watched Letterman, or maybe it was the Tonight show. That part of the memory has faded. Either way, there was no consummation of the marriage, no hushed voices, no intimate entangling.

In the morning we boarded a flight to Cancun where you practiced with my Canon, telescopically focusing on a blond in a fuschia bikini. I saw the pictures when we came back home and had the film developed.

You never wanted me. And if I’m honest, I guess you were more my grandmother’s pick than mine. Sure, you had deep brown, pretty eyes, but they never saw me.

Tonight, I am filled instead, with the music of my friends, the sound of my own laughter, the recognition of myself in the mirror.

I can remember as a little girl, maybe even a toddler, taking my warm pink “blankie” to the sliding glass door in the family room when it would rain. I’d lie on the floor, my faithful collie dog beside me and watch the raindrops make their way slowly, then fast, then slow again down the glass. Through them I saw how the treetops in the woods behind our changed form as they’d blur and distort and then blur again. This was my childhood. Blurry and distorted. It had to be seen that way.

Sunny kids who love everyone are vulnerable in a house of pain. A house of screaming fits and dishes in the sink, a dog who hasn’t been brushed all year. There probably was another way to live, but no one ever told them, showed them, how.

And so, every day was viewed through the wet glass, clear enough for some light to get through, some color, but lacking detail enough to convince yourself that the glass was happy for its bath of tears.

I still love the rain.

Funny how little things change–I am writing this from under my blanket. I am an old woman now, my bones ache; my skin, poultry. And my once thick hair is brittle and gray. But I am still that little girl, comforted by the rain, the way it blurred the sounds of my neglected sisters, our neglected life. I hear the drops on my roof now, and my faithful farm collie sighs.