Pulitzer

I remember being asked if I would miss this house. This house, I mean, with the blue paint on my bedroom walls – the dusty blue rose paint. Smells like Marionberry, I always thought. That chap stick I almost ate when I was a kid.

Back then I muttered.

Well, I haven’t really thought about it.

But back then was back then, as in years ago, and now I have thought about it; and as soon as they asked me I began to think about it.

So I purposed in my heart that I would stay.

The living room is not vaulted or anything fancy, but preserves a certain aura of detail and nautical exploration. All of the Mumblegroves and the shadow box portraits of trailing Lobelia and the driving pictures of when I got my license and the stale pop-tart half eaten on the counter.

The ceiling is made of wooden slates and drapes down from the center rod, forming a symmetrical fjord, casting all manner of homey thoughts around. Bumblebees.

There is a dark brown couch in the center of the living room that I sometimes lay on, back to the cold leather, bum to the crack, head pressed right up against the arm rest. . . .  I lay there and my eyes do as any eyes usually would and look straight up because my head is looking straight up.

In the foreground I catch the light.

In my peripherals.

Those marble white peripherals stained by a healthy dose of optimism. And it’s not that I don’t like the reality of things, it’s just that I hide my face until the bad stuff has retreated into the shadows again, and that’s why I like the shadows in this house.

There’s lots of them.

Lots of places for bad things to hide.

The light is a safe place too, you know. That’s why sometimes I lay on the couch and stare up. Because at the top is the dark wooden slates and they are quite homey — homey enough to cause a good bit of, well, love, welling up all inside of my breast.

The ceiling is the ceiling of Noah’s ark, for sure, and my house is a boat-house, and I am drifting on the open sea, lingering in the wailing waves and the whispering whimpering whales.

I would like to be a whale.

Whales don’t have to leave their home – it’s all around them in the flow blue, like the dining ware but even more real. I’d like to paint my world blue if I could, but then I’d be tired of it just as soon as the job was done. You know what makes the wide world nice? Eh?

Other colors besides blue. Red in the anemone and coral in the sea stones and a dull mustard yellow all sprayed around every so often and the sun still seeps in where the shadows can’t reach but there’s still enough shadows to hide the bad things….

All I am doing is laying on my couch and looking straight up at the ceiling.

I remember when I was asked if I would miss this house.

See. I would. I would miss this house. Yes yes yes. Because it is a boat and I wish I could be a whale but I cannot.

For a while I thought I would just miss the memories of this house. Surely all worth missing, to be sure. But what about the other stuff? The sentimental stuff. I have this curling bed that I slept on all my life, a day-bed with curly cues on both sides of it and in the back a large headboard covered with swirls as if it could be some creature that has turned to the good side, with golden cockerels on the ends. Eyeballs.

I never sold this house even though I am old now, old like the ancient mariner, old like Jack Sparrow’s ghost.

Too old to make similes in my favor. They all fall away and in real life I’m just a dried up skeleton really, with white hair sticking through my pink scalp here and there.

I thought and thought about how I would manage if something got in the way of my things.

Sure, there could be a forest fire, but that never happens on the mountain where we live, up in the hills, up in the misty moony hills where the sheep roam and moan.

I can see the sheep sometimes, if I look straight out the window and I can see the white specks moving on the mountain. The moose are the ones who come down and eat my foliage. They’ve been eating it for years I can tell.

There could be an earthquake, but we’re not in the flat zone where the ground is jello.

Nope.

There’s also the truck and the boat. I like those almost as much. They are, perhaps, even shinier than the house.

I could get in a wreck and total the car.

It’s been broken before. Bunch of stuff. But I don’t drive it anymore

The boat could ram up against some rocks and get a leak,

I could patch it. Already have probably. But I don’t take the boat out anymore

Overall not much can happen to my stuff. This was my parent’s stuff too. They kept good care of it and so will I. I like this stuff.

If I were to choose between loving you and loving my stuff, they would both be about equal. I loved my parents more than my stuff, but now they’re dead.

Will you take care of my stuff when I’m dead? I wonder if you will. You should. You should love it as much as you love me, because our memories are here and we had plenty of fantastic adventures, but we never traveled because I have mild separation anxiety and there are things I do not do.

Like travel. I decided that when I did not go to college. I do not like being somewhere else. Even if I haven’t been there, I don’t want to go.

I DON’T WANT TO GO.

So I don’t.

You should really take care of my stuff when I die.

You are my kid, after all. My curly haired child with the looping hairs wrapping around your darling ears.

Gift giving. I never was good at that. Well here. You can have everything. Please take it and take care of it and don’t sell it and stay living in it, even if it breaks down. And if it breaks down you can fix it!

Please fix it! I have all of those marble top tables and if you go upstairs and go all the way to the end of the hallway to my big little room than you can open the closet.

Glass! Glass cake-plates and glass banana boats and glass wine glasses! There are lights too – turn on the switch, yes yes.

The beauties.

Each is a spitting image of the sun, all dangling in their own prism colors.

Please do not touch. Just keep them there. They like to be there, in their own places, just like me.

“Pappy?”

Anchor’s eyes flick up from the wrinkled page. He raises his moth eyebrows curiously.

“Are you an I goin ta live in Grandma’s house?”

Anchor’s forehead is wrinkled, a mirror of the creased lined page he gently holds.

The page smells of his mother, is covered with his mother’s handwriting. Neat handwriting. Done correctly as in the fourth grade work books where pupils practice capital letters on wide-rule.

“No. We are going to sell Grandma’s house and Grandma’s boat and Grandma’s truck. We are going to sell her glass-ware and her day bed and my day bed and the couch. Everything else we give away.”

Anchor’s daughter is bewildered, at first, as if the worm she is hopping towards has been aimlessly thrown toward another bird.

She begins to cry.

“Now now now,” Anchor pats her head. “We have the memories in our head and in our heart, ok? Do you remember when you and Grandma were making brownies and you put too much butter in? When you played her ping-pong and you beat her by one?”

“Ya,” she folds her bottom lip under the top one.

Her eyes are low in her face like an owl.

Her eyebrows are thick like squirrel tales.

“You remember—“ Anchor begins, but his daughter wants to speak now. “Ta flour figh’ in ta kitchin? Or-or whan Moe pulled ta carrots out oh my hans?” She is on the verge of giggling. “Poootato ‘kins! Boggle boggle boggle!” She shrieks.

Anchor grins and scoops her up. “I have an idea for us, ok? We are going to travel! Disneyland, Europe, Israel, it’ll be fun.”

So he sets the lined piece of paper back in the safety deposit box with the other documents, and the lock goes “CLICK,” when it is shut.