Poem for a Workday:

   Here I sit, quite nearly napping,
barely working, barely working.
Pen and desk converse by tapping
their coded warnings of long hours lurking.

   The minutes pass for centuries,
barely ending, barely ending.
I'll be wearing denturies
by the time this evening's pending.

 

It never occurred to me that he'd come back, until he did. Four years later, I see him again, on the Mass Turnpike, driving home from work. I am singing with the radio, thinking of summer, and I notice the car behind me trailing too close.

I switch lanes to get distance; I don't see yet that it's him. The car merges left when I do. I'm a nervous driver, and I need space on the road, so I switch lanes again. He follows. Then he follows twice more, and it isn't a coincidence.

I can't see the driver's face in the sun's glare, but I know who it is with the sudden clarity of disaster. I've planned for this day the way one prepares for an old grandparent's death, someday, someday. Never today. I try to outrun what's coming. I panic, hyperventilate, speed home.

In my bedroom, in its sacred place, I find his business card, hold it like a talisman. Someday: it's a unit of time. It never gets closer, every day it's pushed back again, untouched. I tame my wild hands, steady my breath, and pick up the phone.

It rings through a thousand miles. I pray, "Be there, be there, be there," and the secretary answers. "Is the doctor in today?" I manage. She answers, "Yes, may I ask who's calling?" and I hang up.

My father is in his office, in the Midwest, not on the turnpike. Not walking up to my door. Someday. But not today.

This is the gift he gave me: four years of looking behind me on the street, of numb, frozen flutters in my first glance toward every tall man. I carry his inevitability like a cold torch. I am still waiting, quietly, for the day he comes to open me up again.

My freshman year of college sometimes feels like it was last week. It's still too soon to write about parts of it, a decade later, but I'm getting there. You all know bits and pieces, anyway, if you know me or you've read back.

But high school, a scant season earlier? It barely happened. I can't remember my teachers without serious effort and please don't ask me to come up with any last names. I could do it, but I think it would give me a headache.

It wasn't a great time for me. I'm deeply suspicious of people who remember high school fondly, as I think it's a breeding ground for everything awful about humans. Adolescents are just trying on their cruelty and their cattiness, to see how it looks. (Take it off, Teenagers. It does make your ass look big.) I went to a performing arts high school, where everything was just a shade worse.

Consider this: every high school has some kind of artiste extraordinaire. Try to remember yours. She was the girl in chorus who gave an annoying nickname to the music teacher, like "Mr. La" or "Chuck," and clamored for solos, singing "What I Did For Love," with an earnest, blissed-out face. Maybe it was the guy who played Sky Masterson in your school musical, tried to woo the ladies with an embarrassing Marlon Brando impression, and referred to acting as his "craft."

You knew him, he was a drummer. Or maybe she came to school covered in paint. If you were lucky, they managed to be cool. But whatever they were, they got a ton of special attention from their teachers, their parents, probably other students. They were one in a million... or at least one in five hundred.

Then you give them an audition and stick them in a school with 299 kids just like them.

I was one of those kids. Now, I didn't give nicknames or refer to anything as my craft, and I can't say if I managed to be cool or not, but there it is. I was one of the roughly 10% who auditioned, and was accepted to be a prodigiously competitive, alterna-wearing, teenaged artiste.

Maybe I'd have been happier if I were better at it. I wasn't abundantly pierced, I bought most of my clothes at the mall, and I didn't have a knack for clamor. The only solo I had, I gave away to a girl who wanted it more. I was too soft for the world of back-stabbery, and it wasn't good to me.

Putting high school behind me seems pretty normal. I imagine glory-day reminiscence is reserved for former quarterbacks. The trouble is, my new job is half a block away from my high school. I look at it every time I leave the office, and suddenly, it's a hot topic again. Everyone I work with knows I'm a singer.

It's like high school all over again — I'd meet someone, tell them where I went to school, and invariably I'd be asked for a song. Other people say, "I went to This Town High School," and it gives no hints about them, says only they are a high school graduate. But to admit where I went, it gives away too much, it is like saying, "I am a monkey! Watch me dance!"

Well. This monkey is through with dancing. If you want a song, you have to buy me a milkshake first. Yeah, it's bad for my voice. But I don't care anymore!! I've moved on!!

Okay, Chuck, maybe just one verse.