Exposure:Words from Images Contest 2011

Horses for Fairies
(Written in respone to Paul Schonfeld's photograph "Cold Coffee")
http://www.messyscience.com/

By Jodie Liedke

Grandma stayed alive by prescribing herself two daily items: coffee and chocolate, coffee to keep her awake and chocolate to keep her soul sweet. The combination also happened to decrease the sporadic swelling of her Alzheimer’s.

Doctor Meyer said, “If it keeps working, do it. She’s old anyway. Not many years left in her.” That was the first time I had heard a doctor speak in “normal language,” but it also sounded like he was talking about a horse instead of my grandmother.

That summer when I went to visit Grandma, I watched her closely, waiting for her ears to point, her dentures to grow down and thick like Chiclets, and perhaps a muffled neigh to slip from her lips. All week, I waited for her to forget my name again and call me Allie, my cousin’s name, like she did a year ago. She didn’t. The coffee and chocolate had yet to hit its peak.

In the short Wisconsin summer, she took her coffee and chocolate outside on the patio in the morning. Coffee—always straight, no creamer, no sugar, nothing but blackness—and chocolate, always milk chocolate, no fancy filling. She told me years before how she and Grandpa had gone to McDonalds for breakfast when they were giving away free samples of what she called “crap” (a vanilla latte). “We tossed it before we even left the lot,” she had said. “They are always trying to ruin the good things in life.”

That Friday morning in July, she had had her coffee and box of chocolates on the patio as usual. Friday was her least favorite day because she’d have to wait a whole three days before “Young and the Restless” was on again (another “good thing” in life, according to Grandma).

It was three hours later when I had gone to check on her. She was slumped in her chair with her eyes shut; the red sand from Tomahawk’s roads had settled in her dyed box-blonde hair. Next to her, the box of chocolates was empty, and the ceramic coffee cup was half full. She was quiet. Grandma was never quiet. She always had something to say or someone to insult, especially the mail man. She always complained about not getting her mail; the post office was cheating her.

On the surface of the coffee lay what looked like a white butterfly, the kind I used to catch in the fields with my sister when we were little. We’d cup them in our hands and the let their wings tickle our palms as they flapped, trying to escape. We used to pretend the butterflies were like horses for fairies. Instead of holding on to the mane, the fairies held on to the butterflies’ antennas. This butterfly’s wings were spread flush along the coffee. Its tube body exposed upright so that the veins were clearly visible like a leaf’s.

It was positioned perfectly, almost too perfect. It was too perfect. I picked up the cup; it was still a bit warm. The butterfly, still alive, didn’t attempt to peel its antennas from the thick liquid or flap its wings. It just lay there, floating on top, waiting for someone to scoop it out with an index finger.

Grandma’s ears were small, not like other older people’s ears that had doubled, along with their noses. Her mouth was open in a squashed “O,” exposing her upper dentures that had fallen and now rested on her tongue.

I set the coffee cup back onto the wooden table that she had dribbled red paint on last summer. She had decided to paint the mailbox: “Damn post office keeps missing me. They won’t miss this though.” She held up the half painted mailbox. “No one misses red.”

I took a seat in the chair next to her where Grandpa used to sit six years earlier. I waited for Grandma to call me Allie, for the fairy to come back for her horse.

A Break

To all my Readers:

I have started a new project that will take me a year to complete the first draft. Because this requires my full attention, I will be taking a leave from "You're Never too Old to be Eight."

Peace . . .


Jodie

Hiding in the Clothes Racks

My sister and I would hide in the clothes racks from our mother when we didn’t get what we wanted. Like a revolving door with no entrance, we’d peek out from the circular rack stuffed with a clearance winter wardrobe searching for Mom after just swinging a tantrum in the open aisle.

She didn’t do much . . . no, any “real” clothes shopping. She made most of her own, and ours—hand-me-downs from our cousins. (The boys outnumbered the girls so that was a factor for us both becoming what most country girls in Wisconsin were—tomboys. The biggest factor: Dad thought we’d both be boys. He’d have to wait another seven years.)

So, going to Kohls instead of Pick’n Save was like a trip to Wisconsin Dells. Mom needed underwear. It was the only item she couldn’t make and refused to go cheap on; silk or satin, she didn’t do cloth underwear.

We never did and never would get what we wanted after putting up a fit, but it was more of a game to us all the same. It was the reaction out of Mom that we were eager to buy. But, she never once gave into us. She adjusted her purse strap swung over her shoulder, waved a good riddance over her shoulder and kept on walking. It was only when she disappeared out of view, did we leave our clothing caves and stalk her through the store, dashing behind piles of jeans, the jewelry counter, or the occasional pillar.

Mom searched through the underwear, looking for her size as though she was unaware of our spying. This only made us want, need her more. When we returned to her side, she said nothing like she hadn’t even missed us. This made us only want her more.

My Mother Bought Me a Crucifix

I hadn’t been to church in months. I didn’t plan on ever going again. It was just something I had decided like to drink only two nights a week instead of five. So, when my mother and father came to visit, she picked up a palm-size crucifix from one of the small Amish shops on the way.

After I had ripped the tissue paper away from Jesus’s thin wooden legs and arms, I said, “thank you” and poured myself two glasses of wine—one for my mother too.

“I thought you probably wouldn’t want it . . .” she began as I handed her the glass.

“No,” I took a swig, “thank you.”

I have only ever returned/turned down one gift in my life: a Hanson t-shirt that I got for Christmas from my father. I regretted returning it a year later and still do. It was one of the few things he had ever picked out for me by himself.

After they left, I tacked Jesus above my bed adjacent to the dream catcher that hovered. . . . I still have nightmares. I can only hope that the crucifix won’t be dud either.

Singing an Elegy in the Sumac

I had this favorite sumac that I used to climb when I was little. It was the tallest and thickest one out of the grove. It was just beyond our property line on a small gorge that dipped down into the crick that ran down from the ledge and then alongside our lawn and the neighbor’s.

I could sit between the two wishbone-shaped branches perfectly like I was the corner piece that the slender tree had been missing until I found it.

It was different from the spruce that I climbed where my father buried our first dog, Smokey beneath; different than the purple maple that Uncle Alex had to trim and cover the nubs with tar because it was diseased. When I seated myself in the sumac, it was as though I sat on the very edge of something I knew everything about and nothing about.

The tree’s branches, like forearm-thick jump ropes, allowed me to swing, sway, and sing over this line. At any minute they could snap. I could have broken my neck. But, that feeling of being in control and out of control, at the same time, can never be reproduced beyond the climbing of that sumac. It was naturally dark.

Chocolate for Supper, Cigarettes for Dessert, and a Pot of Coffee as a Nightcap

My grandmother—the one who lives off chocolate, cigarettes, and pots of coffee—never puts up with bullshit even from a three-year-old having a fit.

My parents called me a sensitive child. I liked to call it never truly satisfied even though I had a tendency to cry if you looked at me wrong. (A lot of people looked at me wrong.)

While my mother tried to comfort me during my outburst, Grandma Kate scooped me up from the living room floor and plopped me down on the steps outside. “When you’re done crying, you can come back inside,” she had said.

When Grandma opened her mouth, you listened. She was not only Irish, she looked Irish. Made you shut your mouth.

There are times in our lives when we can’t stop crying, stop pitying ourselves. This is when we need a tough, thick, blue-eyed, blond hair woman to put us in our place.

Everyone needs a Grandma Kate to let us know that you are responsible for your emotions—no one else, no matter if you are three or twenty-seven.

Do I have to peel the whole orange to find out if it is sweet?

My mother used to peel oranges for me when I was younger. Small uncoordinated hands and a tough thick peel just didn’t work together. Even now I hate peeling. I’m just too impatient.

To spend three minutes undressing a piece of fruit, picking off the thin white covering below the peel like hairs off a black wool coat is not worth it when you find out the coat is not yours and the fruit inside is bitter.

Much like when I was younger, I’m tired of eating oranges unless the seller can prove to me that he is not selling me a “nut” instead.

But, how would life truly be if we didn’t bite into a nut every once in a while: simple, too simple?

Bring on the cashews, almonds, pecans . . .

I Don’t have a Religion, I have Faith

Written last Friday night in my mole skin notebook:

I’m sitting here in the “crying room,” the place where parents go with their new born babies that haven’t learned yet that you have to be silent in church. I have sat in there many times, growing up with a “young” younger brother, and every time, I feel as though I’m being interrogated like I’m behind a two-way mirror. Only an orange peel thick of glass separates my family from the rest of the congregation.

I am there for one reason and one reason only: TRADITION, or in simpler terms—my mother.
Every year it is the same routine: My mother tries to curl her hair just perfect; it falls before we even get in the car. My father makes sure he has a piece of gum in his mouth to keep him busy and complains how we have to leave so early when there are never any spots open in the pews anyway. And, Jesse puts on his “best” holey pants for the occasion. Me, I just follow the Liedke train.

I don’t have religion in my life. I have faith. And as Elizabeth Gilbert said, “Faith is belief in what you cannot see or prove or touch. Faith is walking face-first and full-speed into the dark. If we truly knew all the answers in advance as to the meaning of life and the nature of God and the destiny of our souls, our belief would not be a leap of faith and it would not be a courageous act of humanity; it would just be . . . a prudent insurance policy."

Yes, we can believe in something greater than ourselves, but why not see what is in ourselves first? I do not have an insurance policy.

I don’t want to need because then I have to feel. That would be the easier route. . . . I have NEVER taken the easy road. And, you know what? I’m not going to start now. I’d rather take that chance of falling again.

My Mother’s Talking Boots

My mother threw out her high-heel cowboy boots some time ago. “They weren’t practical anymore,” she had said. My mother is a lot of things, but practical is the sugar-coated version and nothing was ever too sweet for her just expensive.

My father and she made money working 12-hour shifts at a mozzarella factory just outside of Oakfield, Wisconsin. In fact, that was where they met while in their twenties, so they were never about to waste cash on “things” that had no use. After she had my sister, me, and later my brother on her hip, the boots were gone soon afterward, hidden in the back of their closet—you couldn’t burp a baby standing in heels, at least not for too long.

But before she Goodwilled them, I had my fittings. In an oversize t-shirt and just her boots, I’d stomp around the house just to hear the conversation they made on the floors: soft and muffled across their bedroom carpet like a secret, clickity-clacking laughter on the kitchen linoleum, and hollowed echoes of arguments bounced off the living room’s thick plywood. (They were still saving for carpet.) My small feet inside their real tan leather let the boots have their own voice. That I could only hear if I’d just let them wear me.

When my feet grew too big, fourteen at the time, nine and a half, the talk from the boots stopped as though they had nothing more to say. I couldn’t squeeze in them if I tried.

My mother didn’t just get rid of the cowboy boots because they were “impractical.” My mother didn’t want to be reminded of where the boots had been, what they had seen. When I came downstairs in them she always said, “Gee, I haven’t seen those since . . .” She couldn’t even put a date on it. I think that made her sad, forgetting that is. She had forgotten the youthful voice inside those boots, a different voice that had spoken when she put them on that reminded her where she had been before—before the factory, my father, her children.

But I too remember her, barefoot, smiling as she flipped chocolate chip pancakes in the frying pan while I danced around the house in those boots. Maybe overtime her taste buds changed. She had new sweets in her life—everything that had come after the boots.

Look Under the Bed

My father made me watch Gremlins when I was six.

I was trying to avoid the family popcorn event by acting as though I had important coloring to do at the kitchen table, but Dad knew what I was really doing.

“It’s not scary. Get out here,” he shouted from the living room.

I only remember parts—a slime-green claw to the face, the singing of “Hi, Ho, Hi Ho” in treacherous unison, Spike, saying “Bye Bye, Billy,” and the narrator telling the audience at the end of the film to check under their bed for they might have a Gremlin in their house.

While Jenny slept safely on the top bunk, I checked under my bed every night, for years until I eventually forgot the warning.

Twenty-one years later, I watched Gremlins again. This time not afraid but disappointed for the fear was gone, a part of me like someone had sliced off the tip of my ear and left me like a cat without a tail—unbalanced.

Sometimes you need fear. It lets you know you are alive mentally, for life, like movies are unknown in their outcomes (unless it is a really bad movie). You have to wait for the ending that will happen no matter what.

Gremlins could be as real as many things in this world that cannot be explained. But, we’ll all still continue to check under or beds looking for it.

Demolition Dad

I always thought I could draw, but it wasn’t until I got older that I found out that looking at a picture and recreating it did not make you an artist; it made you a thief.

My father is an artist. If you ever met him for the first time, he’d tell you he’s a cheese maker, a warehouse manager, or even a bull shitter, but, who my father really is is an artist.

Jenny and I would sprawl ourselves over the hood of another $100 junker, the size of a row boat, that my father had picked up from someone who got sick of repairing that car. It was perfect for the demolition derby that was held every year at the Fond du Lac Fair.

We’d watch him paint the car with familiar faces—cartoons, always cartoons—Goofy, Mickey, Donald, the classics. He’d sketch using pencil, then tuck the #2 behind his ear and outline the characters in black Magic Marker, working intently as if Picasso was peering over his shoulder. Jenny and I would have to move an arm here, a leg there as the marker got closer and closer to us. We couldn’t get close enough to “this” Dad.

Then came the color—reds, blues, and of course yellows since that what stood out from the stands. Color gave Goofy a soul, especially when Dad colored the pupils in black against the white. Nothing seemed more alive than when given eyes.

Dad always had the best dressed car in the pit. It was always a shame when after the run we couldn’t even tell that Goofy had ever been there—the hood crushed so far in that his body became accordion-like. Hours of creating gone in just minutes.

My “real” Dad can be seen through what he makes with his hands: demolition cars, ice shanties, tree stands, sand boxes, swing sets, hitches for Ford Focuses. . . . Some people may say, “that ain’t art.” And, I would tell them, you have never seen an artist at work then. It is not the product; it is the process—that feeling of what will happen next.

I Didn’t Steal that Candy

(Written in my moleskin note pad at Popcorn.)

Honesty is an idea that is man-made: “Truth.”

Yet in reality it is truth that saves the individual not the group. Honesty, therefore, has many definitions. I used to steal candy out of the big clear plastic bins in Pick’n Save when I could finally reach them. Mints, butterscotch, Tootsie Rolls, whatever my small hands could grasp fast enough before my mother turned around. Only months later did she find a blue mint in my jean pocket while doing wash. You better believe I deserved a cuff for that one. “You know that is wrong,” she had said. (I knew.)

People do a lot of wrong, and they know it. But, it only hurts and becomes dishonest when we get caught; caught taking something that is not ours and then trying to change the definition of truth so the line is so fine that you can’t even see it like a string of fishing line.

Love is a synonym for truth; one cannot survive without the other. . . . Love is also another word which has a definition that is intangible but many believe can be held. Things, things, things are what people think they need. But then they “get” and find that they have been given one thing, one feeling: boredom not love.

Boring is that stale feeling in the morning, that dry taste coffee leaves in your mouth after too many cups or getting that one toy you wanted for Christmas which you play with for a couple of hours then wish for something else.

Love can be dull, but truth is never boring, for it cannot be defined when you’re young or when your old. You just have to believe in it.

Milk Man’s Child

My mother insisted I take all my photo albums from the house the last time I visited.

“Why? What am I going to do with them?”

“Well, look at them of course,” she had said.

This idea of looking at photos of the past doesn’t make much sense to me. Photos are not real. You cannot taste or feel anything from them—they are paper. The people in those photos no longer exist; they are not real; they have changed: gotten older, cheaper, or lonelier. I don’t want to be remembered as who I used to be but what I am. And, even that is debatable. We can never know truly “who” we are, just how other perceive us to be.

My mother told me once that she has not one baby picture of herself. “Grandpa and Grandma didn’t have time to take pictures,” she had said.

I have many baby photos. They are me—dark skinned, bug-eyed, thick limped—they called me the milk man’s child. Yet, they are not me at all. Time is what is captured in photos, nothing else.

As we get older photos become more and more important to us as though if we don’t document our life, we never existed.

I’d rather not exist than to be remembered at a shot in time. . . . You want to remember me? Remember my smile in your mind and your mind only. That is where I want to live.

Garbage Bag or Halloween Costume?

My mother is not the creative type; she will be the first to admit to this, so our Halloween costumes were either hand-me-downs from cousins, repeat offenders, or something my mother threw together last minute.

We never won a prize at the local costume judging in Oakfield. (Andrew Greshhammer always won; his mom was good with a needle. I remember how jealous I was when he came out in his full head-to-toe scarecrow costume from The Wizard of Oz.) Nothing my mother dressed us in could even compare. I had been . . .

a ghost, yes, just a white sheet with two holes in front (more than once)

a hobo, Dad’s plaid shirt and old cotton Grande factory gloves with the finger tips cut off

a punk rocker, Mom’s black leather bike jacket and a whole big can of pink hair spray

a hunter, rolled up Dad’s camouflage, painted my face, and Jenny put a fake bullet in my head . . . this was probably the most elaborate costume just because of the bullet . . . I carried one of my sister’s old bows, without the arrows of course.

The best costume my mother ever put one of us in was Jesse. I remember walking up to the first house in Oakfield as the old woman clutching the large bowl of candy stared at my brother, 2 or 3 at the time, as he shuffled up the drive, holding my mother’s hand. With each step he made a swish swish sound as if someone was following him closely from behind sweeping up his foot prints.

The old woman glanced from my brother to the corner of her lawn and then to my brother again as if she was trying to distinguish between two things. As my brother dipped his hand into her bowl for a candy bar, she looked at my mother, “That is a very interesting costume. I would have never thought of that.”

“Didn’t cost a thing,” my mother replied, proud of her so-called creativity.

“No, I would say not,” the woman said.

Jesse was the perfect size for the pumpkin printed garage bags that people used to put their raked leaves in to use as lawn decoration, the ones sitting the old woman’s lawn.

“And I may not be able to reuse the bag, but the newspaper inside is still good, a little wrinkled, but good,” my mother smiled. . . . My brother was a garbage bag, but a cute, cheap little garbage bag none the less.

I laugh now, but I will probably wrap my kids in tinfoil and have them go as leftovers; oh, and then still reuse the tinfoil . . . a little crinkled but still good.

Talking to God with my Communion Dress Pulled Up

I used to think I could talk to God.

When you are younger, having a conversation with God was easy because, like believing in Santa Clause, it was easy to have faith to consider the impossible.

My mother still shows, especially men that I bring home the video of my first communion. Not because she was so proud that day, but because I had the ability as a child to act like a complete idiot on what was supposed to be one of the most important days of my religious life. I wore the same white dress, gloves, veil, shoes, and yes, even socks that my sister wore two years earlier. I remember it was the only day that I actually enjoyed wearing a dress. (All the other girls had to too, so I didn’t stick out like a tone-death girl in a choir of angels.)

On the video, you can find me dancing around our dining room, singing a Disney tune and oh, yeah lifting the bell of my skirt—gravy stained from the meal earlier—to my chin, exposing the white underwear I had underneath to Jesse. My brother laughed every time the lace trim of the white fabric brushed his blonde hair. Religion and God were easy, fun. No one told you, “Hey, you might be wrong about this.”

After our dog Smokey died, I’d go out back into the cow pasture that connected our property with Van Egtern’s at the time, and sit beneath the branches of a blue spruce that grew over where my father had buried her. I asked God for a lot of things—a horse, Jenny letting me borrow a shirt, a snow day, things I believed were possible, for God was not a possibility; he just was.

As I got older, I stopped asking. Not only because prayers didn’t come true, but because I wanted less and less. I needed less and less. My mother would say, “You don’t have to need something to talk to God.”

“What do you say to him then?”

“You ask for strength to love. You ask for him to watch over the ones you love,” she’d answer.

“Well, isn’t that still asking?”

“Yes, but you’re asking for others.”

I have prayed for others, but it has taken me 26 years to pray for only strength, which I’m still unsure of what that means—strength. What I want is to know that God is still there if I returned to the blue spruce behind our house. That I could talk to him like a friend instead of a stranger.

Sleeping with Mom

I used to sleep with my mother when my father went away on his almost three-month-long deer hunting binge.

My mother didn’t like to sleep alone, especially as Wisconsin got colder. “You don’t want your poor mother to freeze to death do you?”

I’d crawl in the old—every-time-you-move-squeak—bed beside her. Both in flannel pajamas, we’d prop pillows behind our heads reading for a while until we started to yawn, telling each other that it was lights out.

That is when it happened, when it always happened, like a rerun that played every night on the TV, she’d close her book, click off the bed-side lamp, and curl toward me and clamp her feet on mine. I’d scream, tell her to stop it, and she’d laugh as though she didn’t know her feet would be so cold like something out of this world, too cold to come from even Wisconsin.

It was a routine, expected. But yet every time the lights went out, I wondered if maybe that night was the night when her feet wouldn’t be cold, or she’d forget to roll over. I didn’t want to get too old for that game.

I liked to be close to my mother. She was an entirely different person when she slept—vulnerable, innocent, young as if she was not much older than my eight-year-old self. Her face appeared softer. Her breathing calm like she didn’t have to work a 12-hour factory shift at 4:00 a.m.. . . . And I thought, as long my mother could be eight in her thirties, I could be too.

I haven’t slept with her in years, but I can feel the scream that came from between her icy toes.

Swallowing a Basketball

I tried to push a basketball down my throat yesterday.

With both hands gripping it tightly, as though it was a melon and I was testing its ripeness, I cupped my lips around its dimpled curve.

Leather on lips.

Grit lodged between my front teeth, from what the ball had rolled off the black top drive way where my father and I had played game after game of horse, 21, around the world. Green chalk lines graffiti the drive way: squares, numbers, and lines until the rain wash them and our game away. (If I won, it was because he’d let me.)

I pushed the basketball in farther, my tongue helping it along. Wet, wetter yet, I can never choke it down—too big, too much.

Then I realized as my lungs, a life all its own, asked me to stop as it ate less and less air. It was not a basketball I was trying to swallow but my life, a part I wanted to forget. But, I will never forget because memories cannot be eaten only tasted again and again like eating that first slice of hot apple pie or lump of coal, both bitter in their own way.

This World inside “The” World

(From Journal: County Line Lake, Watersmeet, Michigan)

August 13, 2005

Here I’m, once again, in the stale trailer—a musty moth smell that will never retire like the old owners. The night is cold; socks are welcoming to bare feet. I lay here underneath my favorite quilt, a wedding present my parents received. Twenty four years of marriage lay under the very same cotton squares: fights, secrets, and love.

The next morning, lying on the pier, the lake appears identical to the picture taken last year, yet the sky is bluer like God turned up the cool tones. A dragonfly suns itself upon my bare belly as I try and get some sun. Two fishermen cast to the shore from their small boat, slowly and silently trolling through the water as if they don’t want to wake anything below—a creature that is not local to the lake.

On the shore, my family’s paddle boat resides on its belly, waiting for someone to turn it upright—give it some use besides a home for spiders. Stringy clear threads are wrapped around the rudder again and again like spool. A dried-out lily pad on the bottom, sucked of its green by the sun, is brown but not dead. Nothing is ever really dead, just forgotten about.

This world is far from “the” world.

Witching for Light in Michigan

There wasn’t a light in the pea-green outhouse when my parents had purchased the small plot of lake-side land in Upper Michigan in ’95, during a time when you didn’t have to be from Illinois and rich to do so. Electricity was the last thing they’d install. “That’s what they made candles and flashlights for,” Mom said.

First they cut down the thick patches of pines and birches alone the shoreline so that you could actually see the lake from a top the hill where the green, trailer sat from the previous owners from Florida. It was a summer home for them, a mansion to us. The trailer sat like a time machine forgotten about: the roofed sagged, the floor had bullet-size holes that had to be plugged up, and mice had taken over every cubby. It was ours just the same.

A year later, a local friend of our family from Watersmeet, a well witcher, came out with a willow branch in the shape of a wishbone tucked into his back pocket like a sling shot. He walked slowly back and forth across the sandy property as though looking for gold coins until the tip of the branch pulled his old arms downward: If the branch could have spoken, it would’ve said, “Here! Here! Dig here! Here is where the water is!”

Years later, electricity came, like an announced visitor that wasn’t welcomed to supper. For, no one likes to set an extra plate when everyone around the table wants seconds—takes the hunger out of things.

Light, unlike water, is not something you need. . . . You can think in the dark.

Stopping at the Gas Station for Candy Necklaces

Every time my father would squeeze Jenny and I in the cab of his truck, his fist bumping my knees every time he’d shift, he’d stop by the gas station just outside of Fond du Lac on 151 and come out with candy necklaces: one for each of us. Pink, blue, white, yellow, orange—all colors that looked different but tasted quite the same. But, because it was from my father, he didn’t surprise us with much outside of Christmas, I wore it around my neck like diamonds.

My first broken heart—like all firsts—you remember forever because like the first time you ride your bike without training wheels, first hug from your mother, your first beer, you don’t forget that feel that taste of being alive. My mother said she was “staying out of it,” but my father, he was there.

He sat down on the edge of my bed and said two things to me: First, “There will be others.” Second, “You want me to get my shotgun?”

My father is naturally a closed man, but he is an honest man that knows that candy necklaces are sweeter than diamonds just like first loves.