I wrote this sitting on my balcony the night of my fifty-ninth birthday. The perfect nightcap to an uneventful day.
An ode to a broken down Arb clerk
I daydream about drinking a Sazerac in the French Quarter, quoting Baldwin or Bukowski to the ghosts who belly up at the Carousel Bar. The stool spins under me as I search for someone, anyone to hand my heart to, unwrapped and still beating. Just like most back alley routes, it ends in another dead end. Another boarded-up window where chances once flickered under the tavern sign.
We walk past invisible people every day. Then one morning, we wake up and we are one. Just a ghost in the glass, trying to tear out a page or two from our own biography, hoping for a fireplace big enough to burn the whole encyclopedia set.
I never caught the Illinois Central down to New Orleans, but I did take the CTA to the ballgame with my mommy, clutching her hand like it was the last holy relic left in my tiny world. The past and the path not taken... they don’t fight each other.
They slow dance to Preservation Hall, playing “Mack the Knife” for a crowd of Yankee tourists who only hear the notes and not the ache beneath them.
There’s no streetcar here in the Divorced Dad District. Just the glow of a first quarter moon sliding over rooftops and lighting up the slivers of wood on my balcony.
Across from Jackson Square... those iron railings hold stories.
Here on Lincoln Avenue... my porch holds the promise for one last glance at the tattoo runner and his lean for restitution.
Frost said happiness makes up in height what it lacks in length. He wasn’t wrong. I still duck beneath the same branch where a mourning dove croons like a widowed lover. I step over the crack in the sidewalk that I once tried to fix with silly putty and pastel chalk. I chase those smells that won’t die... GoldBond on a humid July morning, Vicks on a February night when everything felt broken.
If only Mom’s hug could still fix it.
I never stopped trying to make my parents proud. I’m ticking closer to them now. They don’t care if I’m just the guy chasing one last sunset or hunting for one more encore in a half-empty bowling alley.
The clank of the CTA over Lake Street is my hymn. The candy factory air is still holy. Maybe there is one more kegger in the forest preserve, one more one-night stand in the produce aisle…
…before I sit at the counter in the 24 hour diner just off Division Street, somewhere between memory and heaven’s gate.
