“We love the things we love for what they are.”
— Robert Frost
Always running. Always hustling. To schools. To jobs. Always running to the supermarket for milk and bananas and dumb shit. Always moving. Up and down the valley. Always coming up on a slow car. Always running up on someone doing the speed limit/ 45/ when 60 would be safe and fine. Always thinking. Always thinking to myself. Always talking to myself all by myself. Sometimes talking to myself as if I was with someone else. Out loud talking. Real talk with no one around.
One day I’m standing down in a town at a chop saw, cutting pine boards for window sills.
One day I’m sitting in my bedroom writing.
In the evening I am in the kitchen and the kids are slipping through the downstairs rooms as the sun sets in the west. The sun setting down way out in front of the house and the low slashes of dusk shine a spotlight on all the dust on the floor of the places I stand in. On the kitchen floor, and over in the room by the front door, I can see all the old mop marks where me and Arle slopped up dog piss with the Swiffer. Always running with the Swiffer to push dog piss around. Then later on, I see the dust balls laying in the mop trails and it’s like tumbleweeds moving through a crop circle.
Or Roman chariots pushing across a hundred-yard mosaic.
Always over at the coffee maker emptying it out or using the side of my hand to pull sugar crystals off the counter down onto the floor. Always watching the dogs lick the dirty floor. Always seeing them getting off on the sugar crystals, even if there’s hair and dust and dead flies down there too. Always surprised at how a dog will eat two feet of silver garland just to get one mini candy cane.
Always mixing up my ideas with things that happened. Always tripping over realities when I’m dressed up for pretend. In my mind, I explore the tight crevices of an unbounded sense of creativity. But in the real light of day, I don’t do much.
Yesterday I made a graveyard out of leftover garlic bread sticks and a frozen lasagna box. Always thinking that someone will notice my eclectic genius but always knowing that that ain’t what it is, so that ain’t what they’re noticing.
Always running to the back door to drop a wine bottle in the recycle can. That can is filthy now/ years old/ get rid of it. It’s cracked at the top and it’s sour rank if you put your face down in the dark. So many fish stick boxes. So many IPA cans. So much frozen pizza un-corrugated cardboard. A trillion yogurt containers we didn’t even bother to run under the sink.
Let them worry about the fucking yogurt, I tell myself.
Cleaning it out creates jobs, I say to no one in particular.
But I don’t even know who they are. I don’t even know who deals with the yogurt containers down the line. I’m too busy to worry about that. Maybe they all go into the ocean, I don’t know.
I tried, I guess.
Back at it in the yard last Sunday, moving broken sticks and crap into a big pile. Listening to jazz in my ear buds and weed whacking the same old spots. Up against the garden walls, the rows of Mifflin County creek stone. Over by the old clothes line posts. Around the posts of my neighbors wood fence as him and his wife sit there watching me from their new lawn furniture.
I wonder what it would be like to live private. To be back in the woods, away from people.
I’ll never know. I have neighbors and they have me and we are right up in each other’s faces in some ways but we are in different galaxies in a lot of others.
Trump. Jesus. Unemployed. Workaholic.
Watching. Listening.
Dogs.
Dog shit.
Bats.
Fire pit.
Tall shiny American pickups and grimy little Japanese beaters.
Always mowing the fucking grass, we are. Always out there ripping through the gasoline, tearing up the silence, our motors crying out across the town. Sometimes we are all out there at the same time. It’s difficult. Strange. Awkward. But I sense us together in a way too. Neighbors standing up to Mother Nature together. Brothers, not by blood or mamas, but by our united desire to have our lawns look like a State Trooper’s fucking head. Tight little squares of squishy grass.
Grown men trying to lay together on a cop’s scalp.
On a Sunday afternoon.
Always trying to act like we have it all together. Property owners with their ducks in a row. Responsible citizens/ Good Christian men/ Good working men/ Average American men with Average American lawns.
A paper plate of ribs off the Big Green Egg.
Well, I don’t have one. But my next door neighbor does.
He’s never invited us over though.
Always wondering how other people see me.
Always wondering if they laugh at me as they stand in their dark kitchens and watch me mow.
Always sniffing Charlie’s friggin’ head. I like the shampoo scent if you can find it after a couple of days. It’s there, but you have to really dig around with your nose. He isn’t a big fan of that for obvious reasons. No nine-year-old wants his dad smelling his goddamn noggin while we are watching Bob’s Burgers.
Always feeling creepy when I do it. Always feeling like some kind of violator for leaning his small body into mine and trying to pick up his world via scents.
The summer wind. The creek. The school bus. Lunch/ pizza puffs/ breakfast sandwiches. His bed in the night while he was dreaming.
What would that even smell like? I have no fucking clue.
Gummy worms?
Nacho cheese sauce?
Pine?
Old Spice?
Nobody knows because nobody is bothering with studies into shit like that. Everybody is running around mowing the lawn and trying to sell pharmaceuticals and booking their vacation houses for the big summer break. No one is talking about what these kids heads smell like. Or more importantly, the poetry they are carrying around with them even when they’ve parked ass right there next to you on the evening couch with the shows on and the snacks or whatever.
Every kid is a Yankee Candle.
Every kid is a book of dreams.
Always running from the magic by my side. That’s me. Ready to stop bugging him with odd dad bullshit. But forever sad that I don’t want any of this to end.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
