My father: seems smart, extraordinary and I want to know more things about him. I want to record his life and play it back for myself. He was the strongest man I knew, the smartest man I knew, he had telescopes, spear guns, regular guns that he made in my grandfather Harvey’s machine shop. He made decks and punched out bay windows added Franklin pot belly stoves to our house. He put a teak deck on his 32ft sail boat. He planted apple and cherry trees in our yard, things that wouldn’t bear fruit for 20 years. He paints now and drives around in a VW bus.
My mother: when I come home over and over again she rubs her fingers through my hair, all I have to do is sit in front of her and she will massage my shoulders and push the hair behind my ears. I remember once driving past Harrison pond and she pulled out a pack of cigarettes from below her seat and said “don’t tell your father.” maybe that was her secret, to always have a secret. I don’t care just as long has she loves me so.
Jim: I hated him at first. I remember him coming to our shit-hole apartment on Web Street during thanksgiving, he was into Harley Davidson motor cycles and helping my mother with her “recovery” he sat at our table like he was a part of the family and I wanted to jump up and poke his rat fucker eyes out with my fork. Years later my mother moved us into the “ghetto” she was separating from my father, apparently Jim fucked around a-bit and my mom had it in for him, she was reaching independence of sorts, he pulled up on his Harley loud and obnoxious and my mother for some reason ran into my sisters room (there was only two rooms one for me and my sister shared the other, my mother slept on the pull out couch) she hid under the bed and said, “don’t tell him I am here” I didn’t say anything, he just walked into the apartment, walked into my sisters room walked over to the bed that my mother was hiding under and said “Ellen”
It was all pretty impressive and he is with her to this day by her side and I love him for that.
[Side note: this was the same apartment owned by Frank Jensen, Wesley Edholm’s (my longest running friend) non-biological father in which my good friend Tom Bauschke lived in before he joined the army to become a hero. A floor which I slept upon many of times not too far from where my mother hid from Jim]
My sister Erin: she has this amazing ability to hold it all in, out of all of us I think she is perhaps the most beautiful human. I don’t know how to explain it but when I am around Erin for some reason I don’t need to talk to her. It is almost like I can feel her emotion, like it oozes out of her. It is rare this, watching a human feel things and adapting to them. Every year that goes by she is more and more funny, I hope she knows all her potential. She is a god.
My sister Laura: god Laura is wild. I have never been able to see her other than the pictures of us as little kids. She went out in a row boat and took 15 pictures of my father’s boat Cygnet sailing about the harbor, of all 15 pictures the camera was backwards on her eyeball. You got to love her. Laura, I love you more than you could ever know, the fact that you care about humming birds and pixies. You got to meet Laura, she really tells it how it is, her bluntness cuts to the core of you and forces you to reorganize all the things you think you are.
Chris Holland my best friend: I never thought I could meet the most unoriginal original person ever, it is almost like he just pulls ideas out of the air, it is almost like he takes words and posts them upon the dry erase board and somehow makes them his own. Chris is a bête version of life. He watches us and improves. Chris and his wife and kids have created something better, their own little island…
Kim: it is almost like all the teeth in my head were pulled out and put back together again [if I only had a brain] and I walked around smiling and holding hands and pulling people into my perspective as if to take a picture and catch it. That is kim. She calls me late at night from DC and I jump up and wake up and try to think of ways to help her at 6 in the morning her time… I thumb through the phone book, I give her numbers… is my penis good enough? Can it create life? Can I start this all over again? A mother, a father two sisters and all the history that seems to fall upon us like the smell of hay and goats. I want to build with you, I want to start with you. You and me, sometimes you push your fingers through my hair, sometimes you tell me how it is, sometimes you talk to me without talking to me, sometimes you are something that you are not, sometimes… sometimes.
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