Brown

It is the color you might have thought boring. It is the color that I have found contoured, nuanced, subtle, riveting. 

Like dark furrows scratched into my own eyes, your tannins were clay in my hands, dirt in my fingers, stains on my jeans. The scorch of the earth in a smudge against me. 

There are no brown sunsets. There are no browns in rainbows. No brown in storms and no brown in hail. 

But there are storms in your eyes, hail in your stares, light in your gaze, if seen at the right angle. 

The brown suns in your eyes have drawn me into their orbit for so long. Like bourbons melting liquid gold in a glass and like ice coloring riverbeds. Your browns have temperature and texture, tempest and tenure, and they unveil in an unblinking stare when they burn coal black in an evening. 

Your browns are the golds that I have sifted in all your gazes and they are the remains of a color that I alone can simply treasure. Nuggets at the bottom of an effort where I have dipped into the water of you and swirled til I have left only your stare and its priceless image. 

That I can simply recall when I choose to clench my eyes shut into a black that reveals your brown. 

Incendiary

I didn't know you smoked. 

Pause. A glance. Askew. 

I rarely do. 

I'm not judging. Just making a comment. 

There is that move, the female form as it inhales the lit cigarette, the embers burnishing bright drawn by the inflow of oxygen as her lip purses around it, the slight narrowing of the nostrils and the movement of her head to slightly turn away, the mouth slightly askew to blow the gray smoke down and out so not to cloud the distance. It is like a dance move. 

And the look after. Like an annoyance. A "what now" kinda gaze. 

But to me it reminds me of an old and interesting saying. Because I have always been somewhat partial to a kiss in the middle of a cigarette. The depth of it, a different kind of sense. A more physical connection for some mad reason. 

The saying:  I feel sorry for anybody who kisses me in the future because all they will taste is you. 

Disbelief

I was told of the non-existence of Santa Claus in the clear sunny afternoon in our kitchen in San Diego, a day when the formica counter was green and yellow light filtered through the gauzy kitchen drapes.

I was 10.  And I guess my mom had had "just about enough of this nonsense" so she told me a true story that in its truthfulness ensured I had been living a lie for quite some time.

You see the story went something like this...when I was say 4 or maybe 5 I was awakened in the pre-dawn hours of central California...where my grandparents lived, a valley city that brought such deep fog in the winter.  It was cool, almost cold and if you looked past their house in the distance you could just make out the mountains and in some cases the winter snows.  The valley was flatlands, fertile, rich with raisins and nectarines and we pulled and plucked these fruits to stave off the boredom of spending yet another day there.   Christmas was a 3 day affair...Christmas Eve at my paternal grandparents, Christmas day at my maternal grandparents and then the five hour drive home with my younger sister to get to the real presents. 

Looking back, I realize the heaven of having such family in proximity, the triad of the bloodlines, the ability to drive in minutes to see the family tree.  At the time though I'm certain I felt it was a special hell, particularly since the good gifts were a day-trip away back at our home in San Diego.  (Although I do take a special pride in the time my maternal Grandfather asked me what I wanted and I told him the Kiss Destroyer album...this was a few years later of course, '76, and the thought of that dear old man shuffling through music stores seeking a Kiss album continues to make me smile.  Also the fact that my Grandmother had a compact record player that looked like a suitcase with a small speaker and it became the machine that played that Kiss album haunts me to this day...)

I digress...but such is the taffy pull of Christmas memories, the collision of times when there were chimney fires because my uncle decided to stuff all the wrappings up the fireplace and the subtle sweet moments when an evening grew quiet in the comfort of each other...

So anyways. 

I was awakened that early morn, the evening still heavy on the land, the fog a gray blanket and really in the darkened neighborhood there was nothing to see.  It was that one TV channel that is always on the blink, nothing but cable snow.

But then I heard it, probably because about 15 of my Mexican relatives kept saying "can you hear it" but against their din I heard the slightest of high key notes of a bell.  And it was in the distance...and we had walked onto the porch of the house that my Grandfather had built...a reference I was to make 85 years later when I delivered his eulogy about a family that was hand-built by him...and as I walked the porchline I did hear something...I did hear what sounded like a bell.

Against the backdrop of the night I could see the road, tar black and moving into the distance, and the fog hovering slightly above it...and the bell seemed to be getting closer.  I could feel the crush of the family behind me, the cold of the night and as I looked I swear I saw a red light beacon coming down the road.

There were no cars, no streetlights.  No stars.  There was an evening, quiet as a church, enveloped in fog, the cusp of a Christmas and I was hearing a bell and seeing a red light moving towards me.

The rest of the story gets a little fuzzy.  Lots of hands imploring me to go back to bed, go back to sleep...my grandmother:  "Timmy, you need to be asleep when Santa comes."

Okay.  Like anybody is going to sleep after this event.

Needless to say, I stamped that memory in my mind like a coin-maker's strike...an indent upon my heart, a flashbulb in my brain, and when one of my neophyte elementary school friends laughed about Santa and said that he didn't believe anymore I just stayed silent.

Because I knew.  Because I had seen.  With my own eyes.  Awakened in the sweet twilight like the man in the book, when light was dim and the rest of the world was asleep...I had had my moment and I knew what I saw.

7 years old, 8 years old...didn't matter.  My smugness was the truth. 

9 years old.  10.  I was debating teenagers on the existence of something that they hadn't seen.

"But I'm telling you what I saw"

In that kitchen, there on Belle Glade Avenue, a corner house across from Lake Murray where I grew up playing baseball and had a pool and my parents had parties and we were happy and got our first dog...in that kitchen my mom broke the news to me like she had dropped an egg.  Oops.  Sorry.  Let's clean that up.

When she wanted to bring up a serious subject she called me "Tim". 

Today, 40 years later, she still calls me "Timmy".

I remember turning to her...we had been cooking or helping or baking or something.  But I remember her height above me, and I remember the matter of fact way she admitted the truth.

"Tim, that was your Uncle Steve.  He had borrowed your Uncle Benny's army flashlight with the red lens.  You really need to stop telling people that you believe in Santa Claus because you saw him."

Bam.  Needle skips off the record.  An icicle falls and shatters. 

It wasn't a collapse.  It was just the realization that something fragile but treasured can break so easily.  Can break into a place where it just cannot be put together again.   Faith dissipates, but faith to a child is not the same.  Trust is just a hope.  A memory is ideally written in ink but sometimes it is written in pencil.

I absorbed the story, but I also held onto a piece of it...like the way you clipped out an article from a magazine.  You ripped out a memory to preserve.  You decided on your own conclusions.

Many years and a couple of kids later I still can see that twilight gray and the single penetrating red.  I can still hear my family behind me, wondering at the moment that was happening...many of those on that porch night have gone...or have changed...

But to me, Christmas is that moment, when things stopped for a second, and all the things that they had told me could happen did happen...and I was there with them when it did.

Say Something...

There's only so many ways to describe the traverse of taillights...

Only a few ways to describe colors at a time of an evening when the colors rinse the sky in their altering shades...

So many limited ways to describe...to define, to literally run out of words without being redundant.  Without being repetitive.  Without waste.

Without soon tiring.  Without soon just giving up.  Without giving in.

Something like this....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iC8tP9Oo52Y

Protocol

 Why are you being so fucking polite?

She had asked the question in an afternoon when yellow haze filtered into the restaurant, really the bar area, early enough so that there were few companions but late enough to ensure the Fall sun fell almost horizontal through the windows.  He had taken a draw from the big pilsner glass in front of him.

Am I?  

Yes.  And I don't like it.  

This amused him a bit.

How would you like me to be, then?  He looked at her, the slash of sun like a mask across her and her eyes were narrowed.  She didn't look anything except annoyed.

I want you to be real...I want you to share with me and expose to me what it is you're really thinking.  I want the good and the bad.

That sounds awfully like a wedding vow, he said smirking.  Her annoyance ticked up just a bit more.

I'm being serious...these one word answers and generic responses are bullshit.

He turned to face her, and his knees aligned with hers.  He moved his slightly so their legs alternated, almost like intertwined fingers....hers, his, hers, his.

You forget, he said.

Forget what?

He inhaled, and let out a bit of effort.  She was still looking at him, eyes a little wider signalling expected response.

I tried that before.  Her eyes opened slightly.  And it got me nowhere with you.  Her face softened.  The contours and angles smoothed a bit...her whatever she felt (anger, impatience) morphed into knowledge.  She dropped her eyes...and he felt her legs tighten slightly against his.

Okay.  Okay, fair.

So please don't ask me to do it again.

She looked up again.  I hate your politeness.  I hate that facade.

You built those bricks.  You're initials are stamped on each one.

Her features tightened again, taut.  He felt the slight anger in a way you feel opening an oven door.  Just there for a moment.  She turned her legs and they escaped the grasp of his, he let her go and picked up his beer.

Outside the wind had picked up a bit and the gray hairs of an evening poked through the veil of blue as the sun quietly moved past the horizon.  They had walked to the parking garage and it was concrete and steel, and in the ante room near the elevator they had stopped.

Why did you come? She asked.

Why turn down a chance to see you.

But if you're not going to say anything then why bother?  

He took a slight step towards her, and with his hand he slid it just along her jawline so that his thumb was on her cheek and the rest cupped her face.

Because I cannot get you off me.  I cannot wash you away.  I cannot paint over you, cannot simply whitewash you from me.  It's not just stupid words, stupid sentences, it is like a disease, an infection...an inflammation.  It is a sore, a bruise.  It is not enough...not even close to being clearly ever enough, to describe, to define, to convince you of what it is.  You'll depart here, you'll leave and I'll remain but you will still cling.  A least to me.  And no words will bring you back, no paragraph will entice you.  So just let me politely wear you, in private, where nobody else knows that you are inside of me.  Except you.  Now.

He let go off her face and took a step back.  And that's why I'm so fucking polite.  Because I risk sharing shit like that...so you can be...bemused...amused...whatever.

 And he remembered when he was walking away, when the wind had picked up and hurried him away from her like a bundle of dead leaves, walking in the same direction as nightfall with streetlamps and car
lights merely yellow colors, how politely she had looked back at him, and had politely refrained from a word.