Chapter One – In Butter and on French Bread

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Part One - Either - Fiction

Chapter One – In Butter and on French Bread

1

I was born in butter, balled in a second child rush in 1975 New Orleans as Ethan Karl Baker.  My parents, Timothy and Sara soaked in a Sunday late afternoon disbursement nine pound roly-poly tax deduction.  The doctor was a greyhound-breed of man.  He was sleek and distinctive, indiscernible between his aggravation and joy of such everyday miracles.  Consultations and preparations for a tennis match and cloud watching were postponed for a nine hour sequel labor and a negotiation for a cesarean procedure room. 

Sara was having none.  Timothy was a yellow light, half-go defaulted and worried, but definitive in the end.  He objected to the objectives of proper medical advice, as profitable as it may have been to the equation.  Sara was not going to miss the tail-end of this parade outside the jurisdiction of her own volition and thresholds of physical pain. 

I came out silent with a crumpled maw.  This invited immediate panic amongst the close knit audience for an interminable pod of seconds until a siren call erupted.  My reticent lips quivered into a stutter of epileptic proportions.  My head was purple with a fuzzy lion mane aura moist and balanced.  The professional first hands to hold me set me free-range on the upper gullet of my mother.  My limbs shimmied like a trained police canine slinking with bent elbow under barbed wire impediments to the breast.  The movements were not for feeding, but for the differential in temperature.  My contributions to my transport were irrelevant as my motion was propelled by other hands.  I was determined to try.  This environment seemed frigid.  What was, was not going to be anymore.  Better to keep solo-quiet.  All these faces could be dangerous.

The hound man’s nursing assistant handed Timothy steel sheers.  My father saw the umbilical chord like his entry to a department store ribbon cutting ceremony.  Numerically dispensed weeks of flaccid male pregnancy were surrendered to this graduation.  My dad could finally be tangible.  His movements were entirely masculine and proper again.  This was a productive and necessary encounter.  Absent his intervention, his son Ethan would be forever cuffed to his mother.  This would inevitably be difficult when passing customs security screeners and when riding public transit.  The scissors descended and eliminated these inescapable awkward moments.

2

Sara’s blood started to run.  The flood cracked like a government constructed levee.  Buzzers went off on the attendees faces.  The greyhound barked orders.  I was grasped and swarmed into a hive via a heated carrier-cart.  Dad’s heart was bifurcated.  He was abdicated from culpability by Sara, “Go with him.” 

One slant wife, the other son; the wheels rolled the hallway.  I witnessed the wonder of concealed incandescent tube-lighting.  Sheathed gloves prodded and inspected for an eleventh metatarsal, a tertiary testicular bean for the bag, and the proper inflation time on my wind-sacks.  All seemed standard and workable and in the expected quantity.  Triage is triage when entering such perfidious battle zones.  After a rushed assessment of purple to flush skin tone, I was left to warm in a parking lot of infants. Coos and screeches harmonized into apathetic silence.  The sensory overload of American health care quelled the cherubic arias.

Timothy soaked in my scale summation.  He left his finger extended in a mini-wave to an organism that was no longer cellular matter, but a social security number waiting for registry.  First English lessons began.  His little ox progeny curved a stare into a roving distance of windows and ceiling.  Blurry faces discerned a cautious optimism about my newfound predicament.  Dad’s face was scratchy like a pin cushion, impinged with an alien nature.  The lab room was full of monitors, sanitary safeguards, and the quiet.  My father idled in a crinkled blue work-shirt and his scruff-sand paper beard. 

3

After an interminable and splendid pair of hours, the door of the nursery swept ajar.  A nurse sold Timothy into the hallway.  I was tethered to a shopping-bin warmer cart. 

The nurse informed Mr. Baker, that the doctor stemmed the bleeding.  These types of occurrences were routine.  Well, not in Timothy’s twenty-four years.  The debate of what constitutes a daily anomaly was quickly evaporated in Timothy’s gratitude for not having to deliberate alternatives. 

Sara must be breathing, whole and capable of responding to an interview or at least letting go the drink of her day into her husband’s cup of hands.  Maybe Timothy could listen like a Roosevelt fireside chat as a flickering sponge of concern.  My father could convey in structured silence that the specifics of this sequence had not gone unregistered to get to the output. 

My father was not going to let a single drop of his wife’s sentiment seep through the wrinkled folds of his palms.  My father would be there for her.  This was his job.  What else was he going to do without a uterus?

Timothy and the nurse hustled to find Sara sleeping.  My mother lay silent, monitored in green-pad digits and written-line chart quips evaluating the internal recuperation.  Timothy grazed his hand through his thinning jet hair and exhaled progressively deeper.  The turnstile nurse said, “It is better she sleep when she can.  The doctor will be available later.  We can discuss the medications.”  “Whatever you think is best.” 

Timothy paced to the bedside, raised his unpolished fingers to his wife’s wrist like a recovered treasure.  He embraced her hand like a coin that he had spent hours searching for, presumed consumed in the belly of the family dog, but there unyielding swollen to the point of recollecting Sara’s wedding ring. 

Sara stored the ring in her nightstand after some number of thirty-something weeks to avoid the pressure on her skin during the pregnancy.  Timothy fixated on the alabaster space encircling the digit, smiled and maybe a tear collected in the duct, but it managed to avoid descent.  My father bit his bottom lip into a concave linear presentation to his exhausted audience.  He bent to knee.  In the sphere-of-silence he uttered a prayer with gracious words in uncertain progression with cognizance of the tasks at hand. 

4

My father pre-mapped the layout of the room as he entered.  Timothy pulled up a yellow and orange seventies-style arm-rested chair.  The light through the window dimmed past twilight.  The cattle drive of evening traffic reds and whites flashed in code to fifth-story onlookers.  Timothy knew Sara was sleeping.

My father remembered his too-recent time in the army, on the tail-end of Vietnam.  The scenes spun: the fall of Saigon in seventy-five, the guerilla nature, a seventy-three pull out, human cost, friend’s forearms, spaghetti bodies, and the cacophony of choppers.  It was dirty and cumbersome, peasants revolting, counterinsurgency, scarlet hamlets, chemical defoliation birth defects, banned Buddhist flags, Hmong tribesman, phantom Tonkin torpedoes, Kent State targeted students, one-year, ten-Tets, the dangerous illusion of victory, détente, the silent majority, and Timothy’s seventy-one entrance. 

My father was a late comer.  He claimed to never kill a target, but men died.  Babies were blown up and limbs redistributed in operation-linebacker number two.  War lingered in seasons from rain to dry.  In the end, doesn’t it all come back to oil and contracts?  Philco was the precursor to Halliburton.  The fuel of the movements on the highway out the window and the blinking lights. The trek to Saigon moved on frequent winds.  One hundred and sixteen years tied up in Timothy’s three. 

The commotion raced on the twilight road proving points.  I bound in the nursery blissfully ignorant.  Sara was dreaming.  Timothy hoped she was in a reverie of blessed things better than these anchors of blood and hobbled machinery.  Foreign civilian ways became domesticated.  Timothy was on the finish line.  The starting line straddled between was and is.

Timothy remembered coming home with the remaining men, the plane coming down.  The bureaucratic exit was like checking out of a hotel, but collection agencies kept sending bills for damage done to the room months after departure.  A South East Asian hideaway could one day be in Kigali or Kabul or Fallujah or Darfur.  These jungles and deserts were lottery numbers.  Timothy was here for his Ethan now.  One day his Ethan could trade a pocket of kudzu for a sandbox.  My father wanted to soak the moment in or at least try to keep his neighbor’s cat from pissing in the novelty.  When my father came back hand waves were the hardest to reintroduce.  Simple civility was a brash concept.  Parish lines and family visits, the redefinition of mandatory and sacrifice had different lights up on the tree that Christmas.

5

Departing and re-entry, Timothy remembered the revolving door.  He was grateful to see the new wallpaper for his first born.  Conceived in seventy-one, some cycle before take off, my father found out in a letter over in the fertile rice patty.  My brother was makeshift progeny, planned in the Catholic way.  The couple called him Tim, not junior not T.J., just Tim. 

Sara picked the moniker.  My mother did not want to have to let go of the sound in case she had to quit saying the name around the house.  The name was like a page from a genetic-masochist playbook left on the nightstand.  It was insurance for some light reading before bedtime for the next fifty years.  The flipside of the down was a lagniappe token of heritage in case baseball gloves or stick-shift lessons were never part of the equation.  At least the boy would have something.  So Tim got a palindrome catchers mitt as a conditional consolation prize.

Being there for the birth today was a virgin-run, a big deal in the grand checklist of life.  Tim was with Timothy’s mother Jennifer circling the cedar floors of a shotgun home in Uptown New Orleans.  A four-year-old waiting to count the sands in the hourglass of termed out labor.  Peeking an eye at his freshly baked sibling was not part of sterile modern American birthing.  Tim liked to stay over at grandma’s house in his Cookie Monster sleeping bag and eat K&B ice cream.  Grandmother Jenifer read Tim stories.  Grandpa Kurt, also known as King Baker or Sir, made his rounds.

6

Mr. Kurt Lee Baker was a master mason, a man of callused hands, the kind an audience member could stab repeatedly with a moderately-sized dinner knife and would not be surprised if the blade bent back into a rubbery flexing retreat.  Kurt was a veteran of World War Two, complete with a D-Day pinball sling out a Higgins’ stern, a true New Orleanian.  He presumed himself an expert on pragmatic topics like construction materials, the-way-things-ought-to-be, gender roles and all things Republican. 

Basically Lyndon Johnson was a pussy and if Nixon would have needed a third linebacker Kurt’s ass would have been out there.  Kurt could have strangled some gook mother fuckers and would pantomime the whole thing if you let him.  Usually when doing so, he had a highball with whiskey in one hand.  So most of the asphyxiation had to take place with a single thumb and four fingers, but from the texture of the palm one got the idea Kurt could have completed the feat if given the opportunity. 

The Baker home was his castle.  Kurt meticulously monitored the grounds.  If a trespasser had the nerve to perambulate through his grass, rather than use the brick walkway Kurt laid, he might shoot the transgressor on the spot, or at least put the fool to work at some inane, but “character building” task if the miscreant happened to be his son.  In actuality if the dolt were anybody else, Kurt would not tell the lawn-smasher shit.  Kurt would put on a spurious ingratiating smile and offer his new friend a beer. 

Kurt liked to cook in his work-pauses when other men were over, never when Timothy and his brother Ryan were growing up.  Kids were a dominion and responsibility of Mrs. Baker.  When Kurt’s buddies came by to drink or listen to the game on the radio or pretend to ass-hump Mrs. Johnson’s co-ed daughter from over the fence, the grill was lit.  Mammal muscle was charred.  Meat without a minute risk of un-obliterated bacteria remaining from the napalm-death flame-chamber was served. 

7

Jennifer ran relay trips to the market on cue to get the seventeen different Kurt mandates.  Typically these sundries included cigarettes, incendiary devices, liquor, popcorn, and chocolate-covered orbs.  The cocoa confections were a “little-somethin’-for-yourself” to the Mrs., but typically ended their nugget existence gorged in midnight raids, by an unknown big fingerprinted assailant.

Jennifer was a union teacher, which irritated her husband.  Participation brought certain economic and abstaining-from-child-rearing benefits to Kurt.  Kurt chose to sweep that flaw under the rug when it negated some aspect of his political ranting. 

Jennifer was docile, not very social or adept at injecting her own antidotes into jovial occasions.  Jennifer was neither gregarious nor fixated on obtaining a verdict from anyone on any matter outside her betrothed arbiter.  Jennifer managed to get by on occasional needlework and walks around the block as avenues of personal expression.  She enjoyed Scrabble on the rare occasion she could find someone to play.

Outside of balancing Kurt and the kids, Jennifer attended to the needs of her own parents.  My grandmother kept pace with their medical care and lent an attentive ear.  She was health conscious and did not really care for chocolate.  My grandmother was allergic to mint, but would always run errands to bring her mother ice cream. 

Her father was a seaplane pilot running trips down in the Gulf of Mexico.  He was retired and had lost most of his hearing to his wife’s constant nagging.  There was nothing on this earth that was going to make that man leave that woman.  Jennifer would watch him sit there and take it.  My great grandfather placated the hen. 

8

Kurt was not a man of planning.  He woke up, decided what the fuck to do and everybody did it.  Growing up, it was kids dressed for Catholic school, in uniforms pressed, wife with breakfast ready with a smile and lunch made for Kurt to take.  The kitchen better be spotless and the meat and potatoes on the table when Kurt came home.  The routine was not asked for, it was understood. 

If Kurt wanted something else the juggling act started.  It usually involved the whiskey or the smokes.  Kurt would find fault in Ryan or Jennifer and explode so he had an excuse to run off to a bar.  The remaining triad would eat dinner quietly and clean every crumb so that when the ringmaster returned Kurt did not have to answer or ask.

The man worked hard from the genetic knuckle up in the way that nepotism is challenging and a surefire way to identify the optimum candidate.  Kurt could build with mortar, bricks, cement, wood, or nails.  He was a versatile commander of blunt objects, like a rhinoceros with a tool belt.  Kurt ran his own masonry company that he took over from his father.  Kurt’s father tried to screw Kurt out of the business.  Kurt threatened the old man with quitting to get the patriarch to sign the papers. 

One Monday Kurt changed the name since Kurt did all the work.  Kurt threw the dinosaur Mr. Archibald Baker a bone every few months until he croaked.  The paradoxical part is for as much shit as Archibald gave his son, Kurt would never say a bad thing about Archibald in front of anyone else.  Kurt defended the cantankerous senile bastard.  If Jennifer or God forbid Ryan said anything about Archibald, it was a belt for one and probably not too much different for the other. 

Kurt’s lens was often through remanufactured glass.  Kurt was not selfish in the diplomatic sense outside the moat surrounding 1422 Oak Street.  Kurt was rotary man of the year in 1964, determined for that damn eradication of polio and lounging around with the other fine men of purpose and great distinguishing characteristics of Uptown Orleans.  Kurt had a gavel leadership award, “service above self,” up in the living room that never moved.  The trophy was like a testament to his jurisdiction.  It warranted polishing and the extermination of the precept of a spider from ever contemplating collecting a web.  Those little bastards were monitored.  No insurgents in this unit.

Every year Kurt was head of the beer booth at the carnival fundraiser for St. Stephens Catholic School.  The rotary club volunteered.  In maintaining Catholic tradition, alcohol was served.  Kurt did not drink.  The ticket-taker extraordinaire chatted up the lawn-care aficionados in an annual caucus.  Kurt was on stage.  He was a stamped impression of reliability with lined up cups frothing-to-go.  Kurt’s self-run public relations unit bricked a circular walkway, one he would recycle for years.

9

Timothy was treated well.  He was the kind of kid that took his vitamins, self-corrected, a bit over aware.  The boy was rarely rude or antagonistic, but low in the tank on empathy, hunkered down.  The boy was contemplative, succinct and pensive while implementing a young age of reason and a little-Houdini type ability to disappear when the knives were being thrown at the older magician’s assistant. 

Timothy had one erupting moment of teenage angst in his parent’s purview.  Timothy printed in black spray-paint, “It’s All Bull Shit,” on his bedroom wall one Monday in his senior year of high school.  Dad never explained too much why, only that when Kurt got home he paid for it and had to paint over his insurrection.  Sometimes I wonder if my dad just wanted to put some crimson in the bull’s eyes before the monochrome set.

Ryan was older, the-brunt-of-it, the reason Kurt and Jennifer got married after Kurt returned from the war in the autumn of 1945.  His entry into the world was perfunctory.  A military token, kept in his father’s pocket like a scar from an ambush.  Good soldiers follow orders, the chain of command with sight unseen.  Kurt rarely looked at Ryan in the present. 

Ryan was a rearview mirror sort of child, a reversing glass reflecting the path not taken, all the more glaring because Kurt was infinitely close to what he was not as he starred into what Ryan was.  Sometimes the most appropriate definition of an emotion is in its antonym.

Ryan was energetic, rambunctious, and resembled a caged gibbon.  The boy was bottled; the kind that did not say a word when the belt came out and took solace in the admiration of the other inanimate objects in the room as to how well he could take the strop.  

Ryan had laborious dissertations funneling a flood of rage to restore equilibrium on the local neighborhood kids in the days that followed.  One goober resorted to bringing his lunch money in his sock so Ryan could not detect the loot.  Ryan ended up with a new pair of sneakers hidden under his bed like a trophy and a mace-sock full of change.

Ryan took up football and started at middle linebacker in junior-varsity and varsity his senior year.  Kurt made four games total in the career of Ryan Baker.  All but one Ryan played like shit.  The last of Ryan’s senior year, Ryan dislocated his elbow, while headhunting for Kurt.  Ryan did not leave the game just tolerated and fixated on busting brick faces below each mask.  Crumble young man crumble. 

After the last game Ryan’s father took the family out for burgers and fries.  Kurt stared at Ryan’s shoulder above his newly-adorned sling.  Kurt gripped his right palm inside his left thumb like on a pistol trigger.  Kurt’s first instinct was to hold the fingers in stasis to avoid the intimate contact.  There was a danger in that potential tactical transformation for taciturn to tender.  Kurt fired his hand over and popped Ryan on the shoulder.  In the tremor Kurt said, “Good job out there son.” 

Ryan holds those five words like bullets in a chamber.  Different days the words are for different targets.  One to blow up his demons, one to shoot his shackles, one to save Rapunzel, one for the passing crows, and sometimes Uncle Ryan keeps them just to fire the fuck back at his dad.

10

Kurt was raised in the house of Archibald with three siblings and rotating boarders in the first half of the twentieth century.  The depression was tough.  Packrats were pragmatic.  Mom was a hoarder, before hoarders were called hoarders.  She failed to efficiently disseminate her amassed resources.  Clutter was a constant.  Counter tops and corners were like layered wedding cakes full of superfluous and mandatory ingredients.  The agglomeration marked the union of events and people in time.  This was the kind of litter one made sure to save a commemorative chunk for the freezer to thaw years from the baking. 

Unread mailings, newspapers, Collier’s magazines, receipts, lists, schoolwork, twine, advertisements of the early 1930’s, and leftovers not making the rank to be retained as icebox worthy were strewn.  Cockroaches were intermixed in the flotsam like pirates riding on driftwood in a treasured ocean.  The buggers became commonplace like family pets.  The skittering legs teetered in scavenger mode.

Kurt was the oldest.  At fourteen he was scouring the kitchen for a semblance of actual dinner to filch.  In the clutched mass of household goods, Mrs. Archibald Baker would often neglect obtaining sufficient rations for the brigands.  The children resorted to pilfering food when resources were available.  The children stowed rations under some heap cataloged for future use.  One such reserve in the stockpile was a box of oats.

After coming up empty on one expedition, Kurt shoveled out the box and shook the oat-chest free.  The sound of the contents bore an irregular sifting, as if there was an interruption in the tide of alabaster flecks.  Kurt held the box to his right ear and listened intently under the purview of his sisters.  The aberration of auditory stimulus was second-guessed with a visual inspection with Kurt’s eyeball imitating a plumber’s snake drain-camera.  His eye was pressed to the exit hole of the food source as if the cubic contents would not be shrouded in shadow.  After a thorough olfactory perusal and all five senses were utilized, the mystery was unceremoniously dismissed.

Kurt set the box on the living room floor.  The brood exploded.  Cockroaches marched like cloned troopers evacuating the Titanic.  Charcoal thoraxes scurried six-legged cutters in a scattered swarm trickling over the hand-powered washer, nylon stockings, and assorted homemade birthday cards.  The girls froze.  Their brother went into action. 

Kurt mechanized into an automaton of stomping and smashing.  Stacks of essential debris toppled as the whirling dervish committed insecticide in a manner befitting a Kansas tornado until every one of the buggers was detonated into yellow mush.

The siblings stood in awe of the massacre.  The girls were immobilized during the melee, but quickly extricated themselves once the circus ended.  Kurt still fixates on staring into the gun barrel of that box, knowing he had no idea what lied beneath.

Kurt was trying to clean the smears when Archibald came home and saw the living area torn asunder.  The splatter of fresh carcasses encircled Kurt.  Archibald went equally ape-shit.  The belt came off.  The room shook like a snow-globe of letters, fur, and abdomens.  Kurt took it.  He stood station, on-post.  The younger girls were independently innocent.  They were off braiding each other’s hair or some other feminine ritual according to the usual suspect.  No mom to be seen, a house was full of mess and a man-in-charge.

11

Fast-forward, Timothy creaked back in the harvest-golden yellow and pumpkin hospital chair and let out a sigh.  Timothy paused from reflections and the prognostications of what his Ethan was going to be and who his Tim really was.  My father rubbed his thumb over my mother’s index finger like a number-two pencil eraser.  Maybe B would be a better answer than A. 

Children are separate, each their own.  Genes are an incalculable computation of iterated variables.  Helix ladders are displayed in a quotient of reactions, mannerisms, tendencies, athletic competencies, and propensity to endure personal anguish over idiosyncratic environmental stimuli.  The rungs exhaust one and invigorate the other.  All we offer the child is a name for our own concoction of inherited benefits and detriments.

Parenting is a segregated mind-field for each.  The coordinates of buried booby-traps and bounty often walk a father in contradicting paths.  How we get there and who we are with can be all the difference between glory, perseverance and utter failure.

12

Timothy met Sara at Tulane University.  Sara was an English major in her freshman year in 1967.  Timothy was a history major with a hint towards pre-law for a stateside furlough.  Arts and science perpendicular, the two were mapped in the confluence of the spring semester of 1968.  Sara was from out of state, escaping someplace else to explore the Big Easy.  She was in the Sophie Newcomb College on campus, living in an all-female dormitory near St. Charles Avenue.  Timothy was a Paul Tulane man on a military grant. 

The campus was full of ancient oaks and adjacent to the streetcar line, which could be used to explore the French Quarter and other non-scholastic endeavors.  Sara was involved in theater and played Ophelia in her sophomore season in Hamlet.  Timothy was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps.  He was using the corps to fund his measured-in- hundreds tuition and occupy his time drilling to be or not be in Vietnam.  Sara’s father had money from a lawsuit when he sued his neighbor’s home owner’s insurance over an accident that he set aside for such an occasion.

On top of her other assignments, Sara enjoyed reading the dictionary to apprehend new words.  She was a lover of words.  If Sara could wrap her mouth around a virgin polysyllabic verb she would imbibe it down in euphoria.  It released my mother’s inner vulnerabilities to break new ground with a pre-documented socially-contracted tool to express a novel idea amongst her consciousness. 

Sara kept a journal.  When flipping the sheets of a new author she would denote the excavated treasures in a gold rush to her notebook to stake her claim.  Some of her favorite words were simple, but elegant and meaningful: conundrum, love, principled, luminous, undulation, vagabond, and rebirth.

Sara met Timothy outside the rear of Gibson Hall exiting into the concourse to head to the library.  Timothy was leaving Statistics.  He dropped his text on the second step when Sara was headed for Introductory Philosophy.  Sara flew over in a perceptive manner befitting a courier pigeon and rectified the mishap with a peck on the young rogue’s shoulder.

Timothy was struck.  Sara had long blonde hair; the kind cheerleaders detangle and address copious amounts of attention to glisten in the basking eyes of a crowd. The locks appeared to quaff without considerable effort, cloud-like, pristine in a bastion beholden to a realm away from his Louisiana mire.  She was the kind of woman Timothy’s mother would have told him was beautiful.  Such unrequested suggestions might add the seed to alter his behavior, to act weird in some oedipal complex of command. 

Timothy’s words slipped out like spies soaked-in espionage, blended-in plain-language untraceable, generic and steaming with extrapolated calculations underneath, “Hey, I know you.” “You dropped your book,” Sara replied in a knit camisole, a yellow blouse, denim jeans and a pair of white sneakers.  She smelled of yellow flowering jasmine like a proliferating vine with the aroma of spring.  The two stepped aside from the path of students marching to class hills.  The green leaves applauded.  Happenstance altered towards permanence.

“I saw you in the play.  The language, the Shakespeare, it’s hard to follow sometimes, but I think I get the gist of it.  The guy killed your dad, but you, you were amazing, pretty, pretty, amazing.” Sara was unaccustomed to such indulgences.  She was always an uncertain-sort of girl.  The kind boys would look at and make assumptions that she had more people to occupy her time than she had, but inside Sara was riddled with self-conjecture and doubt.  Sara sought advice on a regular basis and rarely had a reliable font.  Her mother had become distant, half-way off the deep end.  Her dad had his moments, but loquacious he was not. 

Timothy’s compliment left Sara ajar like a petal that hinted to blossom, before the aggregated others could slip concave over the stamen and its sequestered anther pierced that subtle light into its bosom to begin that beautiful-ache of a beginning.  However like most girls given a compliment, her first instinct was to run.

“That was me.  I wanted to play Gertrude, but ended up with Ophelia. I did not think I was ready.  I do not really get Shakespeare either, but I’m studying.  I write a lot.  My professors call it purple prose.  They say it is hard to follow.  ” 

Timothy smiled wider underneath his more reasonable and pragmatic grin on the canvas between his cheek bones, “Can I take you out some time?  I promise not to poison you.”

“I don’t know. I’ve got this project on Nietzsche.”

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“I’ll think about it.  I am in Newcomb dorm, name is Sara Barnes.”

“Timothy Baker.  I’ll find you.  Thanks for the book.”

13

Timothy spent four days until the following Monday before readdressing the situation.  He was meandering that undulating line between coy disinterest to magnetize Sara’s attention and letting her dare know how he felt.  Women never seemed to give Timothy a straight shot.  He tended to fumble his words when being direct.  The ones that liked him best heard from him the least. 

Timothy had been on the tip of that great lesson to rarely pull and paradoxically push to allow the female to come out of her bud to him.  But Timothy never really believed in the physics.  He would falter in the rare occasions he got far enough into the playoffs to have a meaningful outcome.  But in the potential bee sting of his newfound Ophelia, Timothy would do his best to assail those castle walls valiantly and with a measure of southern charm despite whatever may be hiding behind the curtains. 

Sara was focused on her studies, reading about Emerson, E.E. Cummings, and Voltaire.  She worked diligently to banish the great evil of boredom.  In her free moments Sara sat on a bench outside the music building to read and listen to the eloquent sounds dancing in through the open windows into the quad.  Sara tried to accomplish being herself in this intellectual world constantly trying to mold her into something else.  She wanted to believe what she could do and say was valuable, worth listening to, worthy of someone’s trust.  With that Sara could risk her own curiosity and stumble into her own spirit.  Cummings seemed to concur and Emerson declined objections.

Sara’s life was changing not in the subtle way of millimeter measurements that a parent pencil-marks on doorframes.  This was like Darwin in leaps of evolution, transitions of a self.  This was the cataclysm of braving that stark plank of truly learning how to think for ones self.  She slurped the texts around her like soup bowls of a broader palate to partake in saffron stigmas emerging from their crocus.  The words were elegant and rare unimagined in this American oat-mush.  

14

Timothy came calling after his microeconomics course.  Sara was up in her room listening to Sergeant Peppers and secretly lamenting Otis Redding getting on planes.  Although it was finally ok to talk about such colorful spectrums, Sara still felt a bit awkward when she did. 

Timothy came to the front docking bay of a desk and processed a cordial and non-threatening summons through the pipelined chain of command to request the pleasure of the young Ms. Barnes’ company.  Sara came down in a daisy motif sundress.

“Do you want to get out of here?”

“I’m studying.”

“So, you want to get out of here?”

Sara was not use to the pliability of expected routines.  She was taught that when one deviates and goes off without prior notice or forethought the probability of extinguishing one productive path for the sake of another was most entirely certain to reward you with uncertain results. 

The glint in Timothy’s blue eyes hung on the countertop of Sara’s consideration like a set of keys to a parent’s car.  Ready for the taking, permission being moot, there was a roustabout at the ready to set sail.  Sara let ambiguity prevail. 

Sara asked if she needed to bring anything.

“Just you.”

15

Sara whisked her sandals out the door turned a glance towards the twilight sky over the music building.  Before Sara could ask where they were going, Timothy held out three playing cards face up pressed between his thumb and index finger.

“Pick a card.”

There was an ace, a deuce and a jack, all spades.  Sara was not sure what to make of the mad-hatter display, but her Alice-face pinched her dress above each knee, and asked inside, “What ever does this mean?”

“I am a democratic man.  I thought you should have the right to vote.  I have three evenings planned and depending on what card you choose that is what we’ll do.”

Sara’s sense of wonder and doubt swirled like a dreamsicle, part pondering the safety of the vanilla and titillated at the orange, the raspberry, a little bit scared, but excited by the chocolate.  Which would she pick?  Did it matter?  But it had to; the choice has to matter, even if it didn’t seem like a choice.  Timothy could have one itinerary.  Independent of the selection, the same evening may unfold.  How would Sara know? In the choice there was trust.  Sara chose the jack.

“Excellent, Jackson will be elated.”

“Who?”

“Jackson he’s my finance professor’s bulldog.  We’re going to be taking him for a walk.  Professor Hopkins doesn’t have time in the evenings in spring to take Jackson out as much as he would like because he sits out by the third baseline for the baseball games.  I made the mistake of losing to him at the Zeta’s poker night last month.  So I sort of have to walk Jackson at least twice a week to avoid other travesties of higher education.”

The two set off down Broadway and picked up Jackson for a stroll through Audubon Park.  The night was temperate for the Crescent City.  It was not summer yet, which would mean the air would have felt more like inside Jackson’s mouth rather than the gentle-nudged less humid air of May. 

Spring brought out the best in the city.  There were no hurricanes.  Festivals played.  Mardi Gras was over, but the city was out on her porch steps waving and watching to be watched in the pace of a sway that could only be explained that if you slowed downed enough to notice, most people act like they know you even if they do not, want you to be happy even if you are not, and offer a drink even if you are already drunk. 

The park was pillared by mythic Southern oaks.  Moss hung like banners for this old-city America.  They were right off the river sprawling upwards in witness to the city’s sedentary pace.  On hot days the branches became oasis shade.  On nights like tonight the shadows from the gray-lamp moon hid their gargantuan nature into a cloak of sequestered peace.  The city, the university, the trees lined a set of castle walls to where a girl could let her hair flow, lose a shoe, and prance in the grass.

Jackson was on leash, tongue hanging, enthralled in passing insects and wary of the anthills.  Timothy and Sara began to talk effortlessly.  The times, the horsehair swirls of oral history were beginning to brush the canvas.  The crimson, the royal blue, the stark charcoal black, the effervescent green, the embattled whites and wave-like yellows streaked across the page-turn of each step.  The pawns of the conversation tiptoed.  Rooks rushed.  The revolution around the oval of the park’s path circled back towards campus.

Sara perked a healthy interest at Timothy’s antidotes.  She enjoyed the insights of Timothy’s advice when requested.  Sara found a new confidant in Timothy’s silent ear.  Timothy felt the sense to keep watch over Sara’s shoulder in case a malevolent stranger chance approach and his emerging subconscious find the need to protect her. 

After a two-hour walk the student’s returned the professor’s dog.  Timothy made the point not to stare too long into Sara’s green eyes.  He could tell the view was going to be problematic. 

16

On the amble back, Ferret Street was empty except for their eight-footed pace.  Sara relayed a time in upper elementary.  A cattle traffic jam shutdown carpool.  The divergent verdant streets of New Orleans retorted.  A Ford Mustang bolted through the corner stop sign.  Timothy pulled Sara back onto the curb.  He gripped her in his arms.  His chin pinned her shoulder.  Timothy imagined if he had the power he would lasso the car, pluck the tires from the rims and chuck the rubber rings into the Mississippi.  He would ask the bandito-bandoleer driver to offer the little-lady an apology. 

Sara felt the lightning-chill of being alive stretch through her spine.  She aroused like a convex feline with dilated pupils vibrant and virile.  Timothy grasped her shoulders and twirled Sara face-to-face.  He kissed her with an ebullient passion.  Adrenaline-fueled blood pumped.  The mechanics of their coronary processes escalated like an engine approaching a limit warranting a throttle adjustment. 

In the vibration a calming tone set.  The kiss clung like a swimmer trying to hold his breath for that last possible second.  Then they both breathed.  Eyes focused.  Timothy’s smile liberated to its full diameter for a moment.  Then it slipped back into its pocket-pouch of military discipline, sheathed and ready. 

Timothy walked Sara back to her dormitory, thanked her for the evening and applauded her sense of humor over some of Jackson more rudimentary and masculine practices.  Sara asked, “What were the other cards for?”

“I’ll guess you are going to have to let me take you out again, if you want to find out.”  “Deal.”

17

Timothy had drill practice in the morning.  His uniform made Timothy a pariah on one end of campus and a fortunate reminder to a son’s freewill on the other.  Hereditary economics of socialized learning, hybrid-logic and madness coursed through Timothy’s college veins.  Death was sounding a Viet-Cong gong on every television.  Psychedelic-guitar-solo births were tripping off transient-doppelganger versions of Timothy to Canada, to Mexico and to South East Asia in droves into the grove by mandate and by choice.  The selection sat there in a scholarship envelope, a stayed execution that was ticking in his shaved head, 1968 and a senior year a skip away.

It was not the idea of death that weighed on his thoughts.  It was committing to being alive or stating he had a choice in the matter.  It was to actively integrate the hope that his return mattered beyond the army having to pay for a pine box rather than a jump-seat on a potential return flight.  Timothy was training in officer-to-be practices to ensure other random beetle drones all needing love who kept aiming high on purpose did not get killed.  That might seem noble and practical, but in the end what could Timothy really control? 

Trying to control war would mean there was a sense of order to conflict. God had a role in madness.  Saying phrase A instead of phrase B or leaning harder to the right instead of the left would uncover the steely resolve to persevere through Dante’s field trip.  Logic was inapplicable.  The only choice Timothy had was to do.  Not to try, just to do.  Live in the immediate.

Timothy studied history.  He focused on America and Africa and their interrelationships.  Each had empirical flaws.  One stole other nation’s children and dispersed the natives for a blood code of breeding Africans imprisoned at birth in a tyranny of money worship.  Trail-of-tears buffalo skins and buffalo soldiers shipped.  Covered American tattoos and stitches, chaos and choices were sodomites.

18

Timothy’s marks and his average were average.  Excluding the nadir of his failed calculus experiment, Timothy’s path seemed clear, except for Sara.  She sat out there in his midnight confessions like that ball-of-hurt down the road.  She was the sweetest friend out the thicket.  He could play the second spade and pretend. 

For a week after the dog walk, Timothy wrapped up in traditional pursuits to prevent imprinting himself as a yippy Pomeranian instead of a wolf-like Mastiff.  Timothy had the ache.

Sara contemplated Timothy’s return in her gender-constrained communication penitentiary.  She could discuss it with her roommate.  She could script out stanzas in her notebooks espousing a pontificated apocalypse or the revelation of his ace in the hole.  As long as Sara had this uterus she was tethered mute.  Sara was passing the sad mood drifting another Saturday night to Sam Cooke songs, when her roommate said, “Somebody’s waiting down stairs for you.”

Timothy stood six-one, gunnery grin, aiming on-scope to the step of the stair.  His blue eyes blazed on-target contacting the apex in Sara’s smile.  The wax of Sara’s cheek lightened the room.  The reflection beamed a luminous stretch with each descending pace towards him.  The grunion sat on the beach.  Her California high tide was ecstatically waning externally into his pocketknife smile.  The self-made man had to reign it back in or he would blow it.

“Good to see you.  ”

“I was wondering when you were coming by,” Sara responded.

“Well what will it be?”

Timothy held out the two remaining playing cards like damnation and paradise.

Sara took the ace, slapped it down on the countertop of the check-in desk and said, “Let’s see what you got.”

19

Timothy took her by the hand and headed for fraternity row on Broadway.  The Dekes had a party, smoked out and glamorous.  There was minimal degradation to honest woman uttering clamored breathes of, “No.”  Most of the upstairs sex was consensual and bared the woman’s liberation stamp of approval, at least the kind spelled out in Greek letters.  Short and emotional, this was the kind of female populace that would imagine something magic like democracy to include in mature discourses on love making.  Broadway was a colored spectrum of college life.  The cliques and the gatherings held the New Orleans and not New Orleans of it all. 

Sara was on the edge of her pace.  She was a believer in the dreams that girls had desires to ride rattlesnake speedways chasing mirages of men.  If only the consequences could be promised to them in certainty the way society would be if women could hand out rings.  Timothy was not an initiated man.  That much Sara knew.  He had other clubs, but did have brothers from other regiments.  Edmund was one of them.

Edmund greeted Timothy and Sara at the door of the Deke house with a shoulder bump one-armed hug and a slap on the back.  Edmund said, “Glad you could make it, you said you weren’t sure if you were going to be able to come.”

“Well that was up to this one.  This is Sara.  Be nice,” Captain to be Baker replied.

The entryway was cluttered with bodies dancing to purple haze Hendrix with little wing room for the couple to pass into the amalgamated mass.  Edmund directed them to the lounge of the red-lettered frat house, where he and a select group were playing a transcendent-toke game. 

Timothy pulled out Sara’s chair, was handed two beers and sat.

Edmund announced, “We have a fresh fish this evening, Miss Sara to join us in another round of Psychedelic Hypothetical’s.  So please give her a round of applause.” 

The crowd hooted between puffs of homemade smoke in leaned-back clapping as Edmund continued.  “The way this game is played is we go around the table.  Each person has to come up with a hypothetical question.  Roll this six-sided die.  Ask the person that number to the right.  That lucky bastard gets to toke from this bad-boy.”  Edmund held up an especially impressive blunt.  “That motherfucker has to breathe in, count to six and try an answer the question to the table’s approval.”

The scalawag crew of intellectual neophytes and want-to-be Ginsberg’s were already three miles down the road of this game.  It was Mr. Mark Dirnt’s turn.  Mark rolled the die with a two, which set the stage for Timothy’s entrance into the discourse. 

Mark smirked out an inch of a cough and said, “If you had to compete with an Olympic athlete in his sport, but that dude has an explosive case of diarrhea which event would you be so piss poor at that you would still lose even if you tried your best?”  Timothy being presented with Buddha’s great path to enlightenment, breathed fire, slithered a squirm in his chair and felt like a goat in his response. 

Timothy was a modest athlete surely he was devoid of talent in many organized athletic pursuits.  Images of Greek discus throwers chucking stone in their underwear while crapping bounded.  Runners pulling-up-trou mid-stride; surely he could beat them.  Gymnastics might be impossible, but the tumbling and pommel horse had to be hindered by the stomach spasms.  Was diarrhea truly the great equalizer?

Sara sipped her drink and giggled.  Timothy pondered the frat house humor, “I pick swimming.  I can swim ok, but I am not that fast.  I tend to occasionally suck in water, but the guy would be throwing smokescreens from the next lane over.  That would be it.  He would cloud my ass before I could get going.  I don’t even think I could finish.”  The crowd laughed.  One of the sophomores in the audience belted out, “That does make sense.”

So next it was Edmund’s turn.  He rolled a three, to Sara.  Sara stared down the smoke and radioed in on Mr. Ed.  “If you could ask God or Jesus or whoever you believe in, one request or question to share with the rest of the Earth, but you would gain five pounds that you could never lose for the rest of your life for each word in the sentence, what would ask him?”  Sara thought of her family, the bodies in Vietnam, diseases like polio, the circus, looked down at her waist line and said, “Why?”

Ed belted out, “Just like a woman, more concerned with how she looks then helping a brother out.  How about food for everybody, peace, fucking pot in every front lawn like centipede blades?  You want some question that doesn’t even have an answer?”  Timothy piped in, “I don’t know man that is pretty deep, why?  Wouldn’t you want to know why?  Why are we here?  What is all this shit?  Maybe people would just quit working if they knew why.  Sit on their asses and stare at the sky meditating on the why all day.  I like why.”  Timothy raised up his hand in a slow motion high five to Sara.  The two interlaced fingers at the zenith and made puckered demure smiles. 

Sara diminished the seriousness of the roundtable, but she did like how Timothy stuck up for her.  It made her feel close.  Next it was Timothy’s turn.  Timothy rolled a four.  It was back to Edmund.  “Do you think America would do better at winning wars to overthrow regimes by dropping food, medical supplies and propaganda letters from planes rather than bombs to help build a consensus for insurgency?” 

Edmund exhaled, “So whoa, we buy food instead of megatons.  We keep spreading that word with bread and bandages.  We wouldn’t even need to send our kids over there man.”  The sophomore chimed in, “Yeah until the rebels own government shoots down your fucking plane before it gets there, steals your food, and heals their wounds before butchering the poor bastards.  I’m all for this peace and love stuff for us man.  We don’t need to be there, but those bastards are going to get steamrolled without guns of their own chief.”

“We can dream,” Timothy added.  After a few more questions the room was getting cloudy.  Timothy wanted to spend some better sequestered time with Sara.  “Thanks for the good times.  Sara and I have to get rolling.”  Timothy took Sara’s hand to the streaky-lit street.

“That was pretty intense, funny, but intense. Your friend Edmund is a trip.”

“Yeah he’s a cool guy.  I roomed with him my freshman year.  He’s from North Carolina.  His dad was always trying to psychoanalyze him.  Edmund comes up with some far out stuff.”

Both their heads were hazy.  The two found a green patch in the courtyard outside the dorm to lie down in the grass.  Every other random passer could stare.  It did not matter. 

Timothy and Sara peered up at the city-stars and wandered a conversation about nerdy things they did as kids: what things looked like when they squinted, what the lives of ants must be like.  The night bustled.  Eschewing being lady-like Sara kissed Timothy a slip second before he kissed her. 

Sara pulled the bottom of his nape towards her with their torsos parallel.  Their legs never wrapped to Pandora the passage into unwholesome public behavior of fully uncouth parameters of their parent’s generation, but the inclination to do so swarmed.

It was sometime around midnight when they collected their hems.  Timothy walked Sara to the dorm door.  He wished her goodnight when she said “Can’t wait for the deuce.”

20

Monday morning brought Timothy’s Middle Eastern history and culture class at ten a.m.  Professor Dylan Fuzizi was a life-long walking-emphysema Petri dish.  The man sounded like an animated ashtray, as if the depository of tobacco smut remnants could sprout legs and arms and scrape out a guttural scratching post of a voice. 

His lectures were trials of endurance, mini-marathons of Arabian baksheesh and barefoot problems of the past.  Even though the messenger converted student earlobes into dartboards, Timothy appreciated the illumination of divergent vantage points other than mainstream American.  Timothy enjoyed the class whether it was a display of the sole of a foot or the ignominy of disrupting paternal-powered hierarchies.  Negotiations started with a good faith in bullshit to demonstrate respect for a counterpart.  Dogma had nothing to do with Jesus.  These were vast lessons of the world worthy of contemplation, even from the mouth of a hookah-pipe left-handed orator. 

Sara was in an American history course studying Abraham Lincoln.  Sara admired Lincoln in the sense that one can admire a historical figure for what he said and presented as himself in the days before television or internet presidents.  One is left to ponder how Abe was with his children, in the bedroom and in the private silence of conversations with his wife.  Did he worry like less mortal men?  Did he tip his haberdasher? 

Some of Sara’s favorite quotes from the martyr were, “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage earner by pulling down the wage payer.  You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.  You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.  Important principles may, and must, be inflexible.”  Sara was a strong believer in self-determination.  At any moment the world could change.  Sara felt it better to live by her own volition than wait for assistance or be told no.  Sara was going to take charge with her ballot as the peaceful successor to any bullet life shot her way.

Sara elected to hunt over to Timothy’s class which was letting out.  Sara spotted Timothy from a non-conspicuous distance with his buzz-cut black follicles flaring talking to a classmate.  Sara walked up with her history textbook between her hands crossed in an x over her breasts.  Her eyes glared up like fish hooks.  Timothy dismissed his previous discourse with haste to talk to Sara.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” Timothy exclaimed. 

“Well I want the card.”

“Now?”

“Yeah, now.  I am calling dibs on that deuce. Pull it out your wallet and let’s go.” 

“How do you know it is in my wallet?” 

“Because I know you.  You are a prepared man, including random collegiate ambushes.”

Sara inherently knew Timothy was a man like her father, who kept his wallet as an efficiently packed footlocker of necessities.  This included folded bills, notes and receipts of utmost importance stripped down to the minimum.  This included promises of time to keep for young women they were falling in love with as tiny reminders to maintain their cool under fire.  The aforementioned deuce fell into that category.

“So whip it out and let’s go cowboy.” 

“You are quite the confidant vixen today, aren’t you?  And right you are.”

Timothy pulled out the card like glow-in-the-dark body paint illuminating the traces of where his fingers had been to a pitch black room.  The wrinkled card shown out a numeric representation of a pair slapped into Sara’s hand.

21

Timothy and Sara grabbed their unlocked bicycles parked by the Student Union.

“So, New Orleans is growing on you?  You’ve spent some time down there?”

“Yeah, I’ve been around a little bit.  The feeling of the streets is just so different.”

“Well, put your books in my backpack, grab that bike.  ”

Timothy and Sara peddled down Ferret towards the river bend.  When they passed Broadway to the smaller streets, they rode side by side.  The duo made passing comments on the architecture.  The sequestered lawns were tinier than most suburban areas.  The blades were tucked back behind wrought iron gates or nothing.  The partial and complete nudity of New Orleans American grass made a stark contrast.  The houses had been there longer than any structured patch from where Sara grew up, but infants by European standards.

The pair ended up at a corner grocery on Adams Street.  It was a homely looking commercial establishment plumb in the middle of a string of residential houses.  Zoning laws in New Orleans were more of a rough guideline.  Enforced rules were highly dependent on who you knew and if you did right by the neighbors and the district councilman’s campaign war chest.  Like most places in New Orleans, the best food purveyors were hole-in-the-wall joints that your-mama-and-them know about.  You should not judge based on the paint on the walls, the sparkle of the signage, or the commercial predictability of the word chain.  Most of them came in single family names of an immigrant or a slave like Dooky Chase’s, Arneaux’s, Dunbar’s, Manale’s, and in this case Deanie’s.

Customers were met by a long delicatessen counter backed by a chalkboard menu.  Ceiling fan’s turned on a rotating wheel belt on the ceiling of checkered tiles.  Sara was surprised at the intricacies of the interior decorating to what appeared as nothing more than a convenience store from the outside.  There was a line of experienced loyal patrons conversing with each other waiting to place orders. 

These were neighborhood folk, not scrawny-necked college kids, but people on breaks from working, from doing, from productive pursuits, but smiling at the prospects of familiar French-bread treasures.  A middle-aged Italian man, with a prominent Navy tattoo leaned over the counter to take an order.

Sara relinquished her take-charge attitude for the solace of her Boudreaux Beau’s native expertise.  “Deuce Louie’s, dressed to go.” The ticket scripting Sicilian called out the request to the busybody crew of sandwich slicers.  Timothy and Sara stepped to the side for the next man in line.  Timothy paid for the order. 

“What’s a Louie, I don’t see that on the menu?”

“Well, it’s not, but it is.  It’s named after the owner’s son, who’s named after that trumpet player up on the wall.  But it’s just kind of a tradition of people knowing to order it here.”

A ding sounded from the top of a glass-windowed case holding Chisesi ham, hogshead cheeses, and iced Gulf seafood.  A black lady in a pressed white apron held two paper wrapped torpedo tubes belting out, “Deuce Louie’s dressed.  Thank ya darling.”

Timothy gripped the namesakes and pulled out his water bottle and made a request to the counter lady, “Dorthea, would you be so kind to fill this up with water for me?”

“Sho baby.”

Sara subtlety repressed the urge to outwardly admire Timothy’s confidence navigating the local establishment with such an affable accord.  She simply smiled, offered to hold the bag of goodies and thanked Timothy for his contributions while glancing up at the photograph of Mr. Armstrong.

22

Once outside the riders headed towards the levee to a grassy patch next to a bench overlooking the Mississippi River.  Timothy unpacked the food from his backpack and prepared a mini-picnic in the noon spring sun.  The levee was one of the few consistent spots in the city to capture the kiss of a breeze. 

Ships, steamboats, and barges lumbered in a mosaic drift.  Hulls shined in the reflective solar rays from foreign and domestic ports.  They carried grain, petroleum, humans, and consumer goods to and from Middle America.  The river was a pacemaker on the heart of the country, keeping the rhythm and the blood flowing.  The delta was the mouth spitting sediment the North no longer wanted into the Gulf.  Yankees coxed a Nile gravity to slurp up oil and fruits from Louisiana to Brazil to Spain and Asia.  Traffic was guided by the river pilots; local men in a fraternity of families with a stranglehold on the cushy and integral jobs of avoiding the shallow water pitfalls of this “better know it like the back of your hand” mudslide.

As the river-show swayed, Timothy offered Sara a napkin and the bicycle canteen as he un-wrapped the first of the white parchment cylinders.  The Louis was a marvelous local creation of simple, but elegant means.  The po-boy was harnessed in Lidenheimer French Bread with bunches of boiled shrimp dressed in a remoulade sauce, topped with fried green Creole tomatoes.  What would otherwise seem rich was common fare down at the end of the river.  The Gulf splurged the city with shrimp and oysters harvested by local denizens like the grocer’s Yugoslavian uncle. 

The bread was baked en masse and consumed like no Catholic city outside of Paris.  The tomatoes grew like weeds in the fertile delta soil.  Remoulade was basically just ketchup, egg, horseradish, mustard and spices, but mixed with the skill of somebody’s mama who learned from her mama.  The land provided for the people.  They may have been poor, imperfect, and struggled, but they ate well.

Timothy handed over the first to Sara and unsheathed his own.  They spent the early afternoon munching and sharing.  The couple talked about their families and where they would visit if they could go anywhere.  Timothy and Sara pointed out social foibles.  They ended up pressed side to side holding hands with their forearms crossing their abdomens sitting watching the cloudless sky.  The pair fell in love in the subtle silence, without warning or notification.  There were no streaming messages, just a presence like a uterine wall attachment not there and then there.  It was difficult to know the moment, but certainly present upon inspection.

Sara and Timothy rode the bikes back in a peaceful want of more and patience to be.  The couple spent the next year and a half learning, loving and being.  There were many lunch dates, musical excursions, French Quarter sojourns, kisses and embraces of privacy.  The slight breeze buttoned in the grass by the bench next to the Mississippi River set the seal. 

23

Timothy graduated in the spring of 1969, and proposed with the ring hidden in a box of playing cards after asking Sara to play one night after a seafood pasta dinner.  After Sara’s graduation the couple married in a church off of St. Charles Avenue with a planned second-line to the round table club next to Audubon Park in a January wedding.  It was beautiful and full of fervor for those who could attend.  The day was plagued by a twice-a-century snow fall, which kept guests from crossing the river including the band.  The joy was palpable; love and warmth were abundant despite the lack of snow tires in southeast Louisiana.  They had become one.

Timothy shipped off to Fort Hood and to Vietnam three weeks later.  He never made it to law school.  Tim was conceived in the send off.  Letters were later mailed.  Risks of a non-return were elevated.

Timothy’s mind snapped back to the present.  The window, the chair, his wife, his newborn Ethan in the waiting warmer, years of thought dashed in seconds of now.

He had to get moving.  Things needed doing.  The night was elongated like taffy muscle, stretched and tested.  The humorous intersection of exhaustion and joy precluded desperation for the creation of striated tissue.  Timothy focused on being functional: conversing with in-laws and on-pin newly-ordained-again paternal grandparents.  There were cousins and uncles and payphone alerts passed out in Morris code for the newly named.  Timothy no longer smoked.  There were no cigars, just a flurry mixture of hope and trepidation scurrying across the sanitized professional medical air.  There was work to do. 
Continue to Chapter 2