Really, a good soap opera could carry the weight of the worst day in the trenches of class warfare. A bad soap opera could lighten the mood of the heaviest drug user in Baltimore. Dennis Maycomb, being well-acquainted with both, was once a loyal daily viewer of everything from Days of Our Lives to Our Own Private World.

Like many bad habits, it didn’t occur as some dramatic choice to stray from center. It simply… grew in. Here’s how: days turned to weeks turned to months after Dennis had resigned from his first “real job” and given up on his dreams of making it in the corporate world. During those days, weeks, and months, he slept on the couch in his clothes, surrounded by buckets of ice cream residue and cans of Chef Boyardee remnants, each holding a single silver spoon. During this time, he did most of his sleeping in the day and played his sad, cold sax through the night. His neighbors didn’t have the heart to complain; besides, in Baltimore throughout the 80s one would find it odd not to have a lonely saxophone droning through the night, soundtracking their dreams. It was comforting, in a sense, to call a spade a spade.

More often than not, as he snored through the flicker of daytime TV, Dennis would catch himself listening to the plots of other people’s dramatic turmoil and supposedly fantastic sex. As the world turned, he began to listen with his eyes open. The stories tended the wounds of his psyche like a hospital, generally balming his sore, loving heart and spoiled passions. After a while, he considered them all his children. His search for tomorrow began to revolve around the guiding light of the young, the restless. The days of his one life to live were fed by another world from morning to the edge of night.

By the time he was able to admit to himself he was watching them on purpose, he was already hooked. Line & sinker. The man was slowly being trained to be an all-consuming, perpetually-dissatisfied, self-obsessed-but-inexorably-critical, tragically beautiful spouse of learned helplessness. But he loved it. He was married to it, and being married was a Good Thing. It felt fantastic.[1] The only things that got him out of the house were trips to the store for sustenance and visits to his mother’s house for quilting day.

Quilting day with his mother was still happening every Sunday despite her terribly erratic drug habit and his adamantly consistent soap habit. Quilting day was the time the two of them had to just be, to be in the world together like always, to remember who they once were and who they dreamed to be.

Dennis had grown up with quilting Sundays as a sane fixture amid all the worldly tumult. And there he was, barreling on through what was left of his twenties with only this cornerstone of tradition to keep him tethered. He loved his mother dearly, but he had lost the argument about drugs to a killer combination of “I’m a grown-ass woman who raised five kids by my damn self and I think I’ve earned the right to do what I want” and his own guilt for being the only one of those five who would still come to see her.

Minnie Maycomb was an incredible woman: strong and stubborn, caring and creative, daring and dedicated. She was a widow and a working woman and a Baptist. She had indeed raised those five children on her own and come out with just enough money to put them into college before collapsing into a pool of pain. The byproduct of perpetual overwhelm. Besides the good creole coffee and cigarettes that got her through most of the havoc of pushing her kids to grow in a harsh environment where she herself often questioned the toxicity of soil and inadequacy of sunlight, her first drugs were prescribed for chronic arthritis. Then rheumatoid arthritis: stronger painkillers. Then a string of racist doctors who couldn’t diagnose her problems and wouldn’t prescribe her a damn thing. And, well, you know what they say: one opiate can lead to another, and down the line you go.

Dennis didn’t fault her for this, but he did require her to lay off it when he was around. Likewise, she did not understand nor condone his “filthy, pompous, privileged, delusional trash TV” habit and had asked him to avoid bringing it up in her presence. They made a deal, and quilting Sundays continued amicably like always.

As her youngest son, Dennis had the great benefit of hearing all the stories and instructions and motivational speeches times five. All his life, the things his mother had said were repeated by each of his older siblings, until they could be worn on the inside of the skin. His eye would trace their patterns at night while he fell asleep, moving from one piece of perfectly-placed information to the next.

Quilting was a natural source of connection for the two of them, and the pieces they worked on together resulted in mammoth spreads of storytelling and warmth.

“Every square is a story,” she’d say, “and every story fits neatly into the arms of another.”

This woman was chronically misunderstood and historically undervalued, as far as Dennis was concerned. As he’d grown older and had begun to conceive of the vast rows of spiky cultural odds thoroughly stacked up against her, he found himself in awe of her unbowed strength and her undauntable will to continue through every obstacle. In truth, had you inquired at the grave after her life was complete, what had kept her going was a determination to give her children the life she’d wanted for herself. Determination has its impacts, its gifts as well as its costs. Dennis alone was certain she was an unsung superhero. So he hung on to every word, cherished every lesson, carefully cut every square. Even in the wake of her deteriorating health and dangerous wanders off the deep end, he knew she was a rare and precious jewel of humanity. His biggest fear was that she might die one day without anyone else really appreciating the genius her life shined into the world.

So Dennis had helped her make quilts for years, from the time that he could cut a straight line. They gave away every one they made. The woman was steadfast on this point: she would not sell her art, she would not attach a price to the prayers they made into form, and she declared so from the beginning: “I certainly do not need the almighty dollar, the White Man’s Divinity, the warmaker and dreamkiller, to assign any particular value to the creations that pour from my heart, thank you very much.”

The quilts they made together held simple truths, spontaneous secret-telling, and intricate harmonies of loving attention. When they gave them away to churches and AIDS clinics, nursing homes and schools, they liked to imagine the thousands of sweeps of the eye that each story would greet. “This is what they’re for, wrapping little dreamers up to grow in the warm cocoon of stories and safety. That’s the only way through the day, it seems. Gotta rest well through the night and make sense of the life that’s inside.”

Like most people, she was very good at giving the advice that she herself had needed to hear.

And Dennis lapped up every bit, even when the woman turned up pregnant without memory of the circumstances. Even when she declared herself to be the Mother Mary, finally being gifted an unexpected reward for all her years of selfless service.

Shortly after he found out that his 50-year-old mother was pregnant, believing herself to be the next bearer of immaculate conception, refusing the advice of her only companions in the world and several “blind, racist, no-good, non-believing doctors,” Dennis received his own aftershock of said epicenter. In comparison to the earthquake of his mother’s situation, it was such a quiet bit of information he uncovered, but it rocked the structures of his life so thoroughly the only stone left standing was the promise to be at his mother’s house with his supplies Sunday morning at 11am sharp.

“Mama,” he said when they had gotten settled inside of their billowing nests of cut fabric, “how is it you always say there’s something big behind the little things?”

“Well, now. You see, it’s like everything we see, Denny. It’s how the sun, that huge star all those millions of miles away, it grew the—what did you eat for breakfast? Well, nevermind, you’re eating those cakes now—it grew the grains that made the flour that I squished with my two hands to make that scrumptious cake you’re nibbling on.” She passed him a paper towel out of nowhere. “Don’t get it on the upholstery, young man.”

“Yeah. I know. But sometimes you say it’s something bad, something gone wrong, something Evil secretly controlling every last little thing. Don’t you say that sometimes?” he prodded gently, knowing full well she entered that territory quite often. He didn’t want to push her into a manic, tormented frenzy, especially not in her condition(s), but he felt he needed some sort of ground for his trembling realization.

She peered at him over the reading glasses she had fought tooth-and-nail against. “Would you pin those circle pieces down while you chatter? Thanks.” She took up a pile of red stars in one hand and a needle in the other, musing as lightly as she worked. “Well, now, you know I have lots of thoughts on that, quite often. And I do declare, I’ve seen the work of the Devil himself here in this life, I’ve told you more than twice. But I’m thinking now in a new way, a different way, since I’ve been blessed with the Immaculate. I can feel new life growing, a Miracle coming from within. And sometimes I get this message clear as a bell: nothing is wrong here, there is something Big at work, something Divine in play, and it encompasses every last little ripple in the whole stinking Universe.” She grabbed another handful of smaller stars, these ones purple with polka-dots. “Including your control freaks and dreamkillers.”

Dennis was pensive, preoccupied by the multitudinous, screamingly loud reactions to her sentiments, all firing off inside of him. Immaculate. Blessed. Stinking.[2] When he finally spoke, it was to ask about the direction of the circles. “Which way do you want these leading, Mama?”

“Oh, Dennis. Not like that! Well… Well, now, that’s just fine, you know what? It will be like that after all, let’s change it on the spot. Keep them leading over this way, it will be like ten thousand suns in one long line to the center.” She took a sip of her soda and licked another thread. “Ooh! I’m getting so poetic now that I’m With Child. I’m liable to find myself in tongues soon. Bless us this day.”

Dennis nibbled a bit more of his delicious cake. Good God, he loved that woman. Good God, she was going nuts. Good God, she made a delicious cake though. He took a long, deep, adult breath and allowed himself to allow her the space to be Mother Mary, even as he knew the strength of his own conviction that the Evil of the world was destroying her life one delusion at a time.

“Mama, what about when things look like they are all linked together in a bad way?”

“Now, honey, you’re gonna have to just be more specific than that, Mama can’t hardly hear you inside of all those little veils you’re wearing. Just spit it out, boy.”

“Okay, okay,” Dennis blushed his shame down toward the ten thousand suns. “You won’t like it, though. I’ll have to talk about what I said I wouldn’t.”

“That’s okay, Denny,” his mother gave him a calm nod and patted her belly under the quilt. “I’m not doing what I’m not talking about anymore anyway, so we’re home free.”

“Well, I guess I’m not doing what I’m not talking about anymore either,” he sighed. “Not after this. Mama, I saw the production label that comes up after every single soap opera.” Her eyes flicked up at his words, watching them issue from his sad mouth. “And wouldn’t you know: Proctor and Gamble. Proctor. And Gamble. Proctor and corrupt-assed-no-good-shithouse Gamble!” Minnie frowned her smile toward the quilt. “Sorry, Mama. I just… I can’t tell you how mad, how furious… how terrible…. They own every last show! Every last episode!”

“I know it comes as a surprise to you, dear. But I could tell you, in my day, they were named soap operas for a reason. Everything seems to lose its lineage around all these wires and bright lights and clangity-bang.” She caught him with a look on his face no mother wants to perpetuate, so she stopped talking. “I’m sorry. Please, go on.”

“It’s just… Look, all I wanted was a little comfort, a little place to rest my mind, you know? And I didn’t even know I wanted it until I had it—then it’s all I wanted, just to let my brain be swept along by the storytime, the wild extremes of emotion, and most of all—and you’ll hate this, I know—how real it felt! I’ve just been some guy on a couch; these people were corrupting bank officials, saving dying babies, having affairs and then cheating on their paramours with their spouse’s secret lover, evading the death sentence because it turns out they’re a ghost from the eighteenth century and can’t die anyway!”

“Dennis. Good Lord.” she couldn’t help herself. “You know that’s not real. What’s real is you have grown accustomed to letting them tell you what’s real. What is real is you spend more money on electricity than on food.”

Dennis let the fight go by. She was right anyway. “Not anymore! Never again. I saw it. I saw it at last, the little clue they’ve hidden under my nose the whole time. Proctor and Gamble! They’re still stealing from me! Stealing my nice ideas and then corrupting them into something ugly and feeding them back to me like I should be so lucky! And the worst part is, it’s not just me! They’re feeding glamorous lies and awful role models and useless dreams into millions of people’s heads, and you wanna know why?”

She looked on with a high-mileage sympathetic frown and simply nodded.

“So they can sell more soap. And more razors. And more stuff. And more lies, stuff, razors and soap. They have a corner on the whole homemaking market, filling heads and emptying pockets! It’s a sham! It’s not entertainment! It’s not even real marketing! It’s hypnosis! It’s a sham!” He got so worked up, he stuck his little finger with his big needle. She handed him another paper towel, on cue.

“Oh, my dear boy. Oh, my dear, honest, hardworking boy.” As the Virgin Mother now, she was beyond any shade of “I told you so,” merely full of loving compassion for her sad, grown-up, disappointed little boy. “It does look awful, doesn’t it? That company of yours, it has its greedy little hands in everyone’s pockets, I know. And it seems like it’s beyond redemption…”

“Beyond redemption!” Dennis stuck the needle through the edge of another sun. “I’m telling you, they’ve been this way since square one![3] I went to the library, Ma! I found out they’ve been investigated for everything from swindling, to child labor, to price-fixing, to even a Satanic emblem on their logo. It is beyond beyond redemption.”[4]

“Denny, I know this is hard for you, especially after all those days you thought you were getting some kinda therapy there on that sad little couch.” She rocked back and forth, cuddling her work in her ample lap. “But an evil mastermind tinkering behind what looks so big to you and me is nothing—nothing—compared to the Benevolent Force of Good [5] that turns the earth and shines the sun and grows this little blessing in my belly. Miracles, around every corner! The great Hand of God stirring everything into place. Why I tell you…”

She went on like that for the next hour, happily singing praises of the new life the Sacred Sovereign had bestowed upon her, completely and immutably convinced of the way that the world worked.

Dennis could only sit, sew, and listen.

He had no room for anything else.

This was his mother, and she was dying one stitch at a time.

Months down the road, when the baby came and the virus had advanced into full-blown AIDS, Dennis watched his Divine Mother on her deathbed, treating the child like a glowing Lamb, like the Gift of the new Aeon, like her doorway to Heaven. Through pain that had long since blown the charts, she was stoic, untouched, beatific. She named the baby Morning Glory, for the dawn of a new day and for the flowers that grew outside the last window she lay behind.

Dennis never found out for sure if she was openly lying to herself the whole time or if she was simply altered by that one last trauma, altered in a way she could not come back from, living in the shadow of some fairy tale she sewed together to blanket the suffering world.

When he received the baby in his arms, he sobbed until its skin wrinkled up like their mother’s. Then he bundled it in a quilt and drove it home like she asked. A week later, up to his elbows in sudsy baby bath, he received the call.

He moved outta that town the day after the funeral, driving all the way to the West coast singing the mantra of his new life to the new child of his mother’s DNA, singing, “Something’s gotta change, something’s gotta change, you know it, something’s gotta change, baby girl, something’s gotta change.”

 

-**

1. Etymologically speaking.
2. IBS?
3. Quilting joke.
4. I, too, went to the library.
5. The BFG!

Dennis blew clouds of precious mammalian warmth into the frozen night air. As usual, his engine took three or four times to turn over, and it spurted out a chunk of phlegm upon this awakening jolt. How sweet, it was imitating its owner.

Watching the ice crystals form on his windshield, he said his daily reminder prayer, the one that helped his foot find the gas pedal and his steering wheel find the Taco Shack:

Oh sweet Lord, thank you for my life. Thank you for caring for my mother’s spirit. Thank you for Glory and all the love she brings to the world. Thank you for this opportunity to learn humbly in your service. Thank you for this abundance so that I may afford health insurance. Thy will be done. Amen.

Having coaxed his chariot into forward motion, the gentle giant crept along in the crunching ice toward his nighttime employment. Arriving at the Taco Shack exactly at the moment his heater kicked in, Dennis chuckled, patted the dash, and prepared to meet the overnight shift. Here is what we are willing to go through in this day and age. Here is what we call forward progress, upward mobility. Free burritos until dawn and a bonus every paycheck for doing what no one else wanted to do!

This night, in an unscheduled urge of sheer compassion, Dennis let himself sit in the car for a few minutes with the heater on. He just sat still for a blessed moment. It was weird. But he let it happen.

Sure enough, the feels came to be felt. And he sat still for it. Breathing, and warm, and alone.

Nothing was ever happening at the Taco Shack. It seemed his job was generally to make sure this was true. And so, it seemed: nothing happened. He was there, things moved around, but nothing was actually happening.

The hollow sound of that feeling reverberated through his chest. Dennis closed his eyes and let his head rest forward on the steering wheel. No one would see him in this defeated slump, in a frigid dark place where nothing was happening.

Nothing was happening.

Happening. Like last month, somehow years ago, before the Frozen Fog hit, when tiny Glory had come strolling home from school with a handful of what looked like glitter and puffballs. As she came closer, Dennis noticed the handful was moving around in her little paws. When she really landed, beaming one of those Mother Goose smiles that made her eyes go all cartoony, it was clear what she had in her hands. Bees. The kid had a handful of fifty-some perfectly happy honeybees crawling around the holy grail of her cupped hands. The bees seemed huge, tame, and totally unphased.

These bees, Glory explained, were found inside the school cafeteria, having swarmed when the weather turned, hiving up in the speech team’s multi-tiered State Champion trophy.[1] The bees had come from the school greenhouse project, most likely, though how they got into the trophy case no one knew for sure. (“Very carefully,” Marma had said.) They had been discovered that September afternoon by an overzealous lunchroom monitor who had been lingering nearby looking for something to make wrong and fix. She had been lucky in her duties; she found the hive, promptly making it very, very, scarily Wrong and showing up with drama, squall, and fanfare to have it Fixed. The teachers and custodians that gathered had been hellbent on calling the authorities to get the bees removed, when Morning Glory Maycomb walked up gently, quietly, undisturbingly, and, tugging on the sleeve of her favorite custodian (the one who had gotten her math book off the roof when some idiot jerks had thrown it there) she declared her intention to manage the bees herself.

Now, the entire team would have shoo-shooed her and/or patted her on her naïve little head, had it not been for the principal, Ms. Vouvray, who harbored not only a profound respect for the diversity of individual specialties and aptitudes, but also a personal liking for her daughter’s best friend. With a shrewd eye, she recalled that Glory had led the honeybee project in the school garden, which had been a glowing success and Ms. Vouvray’s first witness of a child so unafraid of bees as to let them crawl in her ears. In an act of staggeringly gentle authority, as was her specialty, the principal had singlehandedly pacified the lot of teachers and the concerned maintenance team, assuring them she would personally oversee the safety of the lunchroom throughout the entire bee removal process.

“It was a piece of cake, Dad,” Glory had said, holding the evidence in her delighted hands, spreading the spacious pearls of her smile. “I called to them first, asked them to sing me a little song that I could sing back to them. They did, and it went like this: Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzahzzzzzzzzahzzzzzzz Ahzzzzzzz Bzzzzzzzzzz!”

Dennis had grinned indulgently, giving the song ample room to exist. It wasn’t “got a beat, you can dance to it” good, but it had a certain live-jazz quality, so he nodded in time.

Glory was blasting along, “And then, so I sang it, and then we were singing together, and it was just the same, and they let me walk up and open the glass and carry out the trophy without disturbing a second of the music! I told them in my mind that we were going to have to move so they didn’t get hurt, and they said they would trust me. We just kept going Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! Buzz-buzz bzzzzzzzah! all the way out the door, and then Ms. Vouvray closed the school door behind us so no bees could come back in.”

“Wow, MG. You’re made of magic, kid. So…” Dennis, enjoying the story, was still standing in front of a child with a handful of bees. He tried to adult without rushing. “So where did you put them next?”

“I know, that’s what I was worried about, right? Because they had left their bee box for a reason. I think they didn’t like having two queens. But so we were walking, Ms. Vouvray and me, and one of the bigger fluffier bees came out of the trophy and buzzed around my head a bunch. I had to take deep breaths to hear what it was saying, but it wanted me to go over to the big oak tree across from the playground, so I did. And guess what was there!” She dropped her voice on the last sentence emphatically, confiding a sacred secret to the man she called father.

“What? A flower. A honeypot? A little yellow bear.”

“Nooo!” Glory giggled, shaking her beefull hands, causing a few of her fluffballs to sputter out and buzz around in excited circles.

Dennis backed up a few steps despite himself. (Dadcode: no fear. Make it look like exaggerated interest. Smile, blink, raise voice.) “What, then?”

“It was a big hole! A big, deep tree hole up high! So Ms. Vouvray held me up to the tree and I put the trophy sideways in there so they could fly around and make their new home. It was the perfect size for them, because I had to put my hand in to fish the trophy back out. And it was… warm. It was warm like a cinnamon bun. And buzzy with happiness.”

“Well, I don’t think those bees wanted to live in y’alls trophy case any more than those teachers wanted them there. Nice one, Glory!”

She stood there grinning, squealing every time the furry little buzzers crawled over the sensitive parts of her hands and arms. Dennis watched and waited for more, but no further information was offered. At last he could not hold it: “So, how in the… What…” (Steady, now, Cooldad: don’t hit all the alarms.) “I mean, why did you come home with a handful of your friends?”

“Oh, Dad. They came with me! A whole bunch of them flew after me when I left the tree, and Ms. Vouvray didn’t see, so I sat down and shared my apple juice with them. It was still in my coat pocket from lunch. And there were so many of them, they had a hard time sharing when it was in the juice box, right? So I poured it into my hands. They liked that. And then school was almost over, so…”

“Soooo?” Dennis batted his eyes at her like a gossipy teenager.

“Well, I didn’t go to my last class. I sat and talked to the bees instead.”

“MG.”

“I know, I know! But I was dismissed by the principal!” The sagacious child almost, almost took on the tone of a whiny door hinge, but only due to the sudden memory of her first and only grounding.

Dennis was hardly disturbed, maybe because of the lame logic of justification, maybe because of the affect that a child with beehives for hands had on his openness to non-normative experiences.

“Okay so, let me guess: then they told you they wanted to come home with you, and here they are. You just scooped ’em into your hands like pebbles, huh?”

“No!” Glory giggled, relieved for the welcome space to keep telling the truth. “They crawled into my hands on their own. One by one. And we walked home.”

Raised eyebrows. Pursed lips. Squinty eyes.

“Really!” she exclaimed. “They’d already gotten used to it with the apple juice. I told them it would be safe for them to travel that way, and they went with it. Well, most of them, and then lots of them liked to swirl around me as we went. But they all came along! We just kept on singing the Buzz song!”

And Dennis again remembered how much he loved this small human.

“So. I see. Now: what exactly are you planning to do with them, O Beekeeper?”

“Oh, Dad!” Glory laughed. “I wouldn’t have let them come if I didn’t have a plan!”

“Oh, good. You have a plan.” Dennis felt the muscles of his jaw go tight, despite his general trust for the eleven-year-old.

“Okay, look. The bees in the tree had swarmed into the trophy from the bee box. I think they swarmed because there were so many of them so fast, and then they had to have been in the trophy case for at least a few weeks because they had a new queen already. These bees are a second swarm split from the first swarm, which seemed safe because it was pretty big and had plenty of drones and nurses.”

“Nurses?” Dennis repeated absently. In truth, he had just chosen a moment to accentuate a safe word, so that he could calm his nervous system from hearing the word “swarm” so many times in a row.

“Right, the ones that help the larvae grow up.”

Mm, larvae. Not better. Dennis decided to stop asking questions and just wear the listening face for as long as he could. Lotta eye-blinking and nodding. “Right. Go on.”

Go on she did. “So, I figured if the first bees had swarmed–” Blinking, nodding. “–then the hive might have other swarms in mind too–” Continue breathing. “–and so I went to the bee box and found a new little swarm cell hanging down–” Ugh, the addition of “cell.” Wince. Blink. Nod. “–and so I very carefully pulled it off, with the help of the bees, of course–” Of course. “–and then I asked my mini-swarm if they could raise this queen, and they said yes, and so then we all walked home together!”

Glory was beaming, as a child making a book report on a story she clearly adored [2]. She was resolute, calmly stating facts. She looked at him as if they had arrived together some obvious conclusion. Dennis failed to see the plan, but that was possibly due to the sweat running in his eyes. He took a long moment to pat his face with his t-shirt, gathering the resources to navigate toward proper fatherly participation. When he looked up again, nothing had changed; Morning Glory, Buzz song, handcups, mini-swarm. Realizing he was out of his element completely, Dennis had chosen the only fatherly action available to him; he bowed. He had become accustomed to the kid knowing more than him [3]. MG was actually literally training as a beekeeper, and he, Dennis, had been terrified of bees for as long as he could remember. It was clear to him who would call the shots on this one. He cleared his throat and made homage to the Beekeeper: “Well, where are you going to put them? And what do you need if you’re gonna take care of them here?”

Morning Glory would have cartwheeled across the yard, had she not been holding dozens of bees. Instead she squealed into a joyful whoop and wiggled head to toe. The beecup remained somehow undisturbed. Dennis registered that he had bowed to the proper Queen. She spoke: “Oh Dad. I’m so happy you asked. I already thought about this, the whole way home. There’s a perfect spot behind the garage. I told them we had to ask you first. Come on, I’ll show you!”

Dennis had stood still for a moment to watch her bound off in that direction. Steady, clear, purposeful, and confident in her gifts. For just that moment, there was a lightning-strike of recognition: this is the kid he raised. This is how she is. Something he was doing was working, and working really well. More salty water gathered in his eyes, this time without sting.

“By the way, I had a dream just like this, except it was llamas, not bees, and I was huge. Oh yeah,” MG had turned around to wait for him by the garage. “And they were stuck in a mud puddle, not a speech trophy. But I washed them clean in the ocean, and then they got even softer fur and it turned all different colors in the light, so people stopped using them for cargo and started treating them as equals, trading water and gardening and carpentry and gold in exchange for fur cuttings…”

The buzz had continued well into the evening. As the seasons swooped and plummetted, went to ground and ripened, fortunate conversations would spill from this unexpected adoption of pollinators: juicy, authentic connection points for the potentially-strained parent-adolescent dynamic. But that day, in that season-opener, the thing was just happening.

Happening. Dennis considered these regular magical interactions with Glory to be good examples of things happening. That’s what it was like when things were happening.

As he blinked into the flickering dashboard display of his erratically-purring mule, he took a big sigh and regained the ability to move forward with his mandatory adulting. He turned off the car, zipped up his coat, and stepped out into the frigid night. Time to make sure nothing happened.

As he walked toward the white light of 24-hour dining, he cast his ice-tearing eyes skyward for just a moment. There, encircling the perimeter round the fake adobe castle, was a huge halo of purple cloud.

Dennis raised a poofy glove and rubbed the frost from his eyes. Nope, nothing the defrost would change. Surely enough, this midnight hour was blessed by the presence of some angel’s headwear. The underside of the lavender ring echoed neon orange from the colored lights of the only businesses open in Everett, the only dining options offered to the poor local meth-makers.[4]

The cloud seemed to swell in his regard. Something was happening.

Time stood still. What angel overlooked his work? What divine being sanctified his choice to sacrifice sleep and bodily well-being in an attempt to provide for his unique and gifted little lamb? What strange weather-mage curled its embrace around that exact spot at that exact moment?

Dennis continued to stare at the halo as he walked slowly, waiting for motion to prove it holographic. He ran into a bush, allowing it to steer him back on course, but not allowing it to remove his eyes from the ethereal ring. Was it moving now, or was it just him? Were the stars and indigo nighttime inside the circle now moving farther away? Or was it just his breath adding to the pulsing frozen vapor?

A horn blared and a car screeched its tires within inches of his toes.

“Get the fuck outta the way!”

“This is the drive thru, old man. Not the goddamn observatory!”

Hilarity ensued inside the low-slung 80’s Cadillac as it jerked forward to exchange bills for warm steaming bags of, well, mostly flour, hydrogenated oil, and filler. Muffled yelling. Menacing laughter. A pair of eyes and forehead pressed against the rear-view in the company of a long single finger.[5]

Dennis moved off the pavement, but kept his eyes in the sky, prioritizing his relationship with a seraphic cloud over his relationship with ill-mannered tweakers. The halo remained, darkly luminescent, seeming to breathe his breath.

It was suddenly too personal for Dennis to handle. He wondered if no one else could see it. He looked away. In front of his face, he saw the reflection of his own face in the window glass of the Taco Shack; stunned, tired, old. These are the words that came, as he noticed through the glass three of his employees taking turns staring at him and laughing. He took a deep breath, let it out in a puff, and prepared to assume responsibility for the store with the drive-thru and the mockery and the fake food and the dirty money. Opening the heavy back door of the taco joint, he glanced up one more time in a reverent pause, adding a silent prayer for his life, his Glory and his mother’s soul. The ring was beginning to disperse, blurring the lines between the eye and the air, the cloud and the sky.

As the door closed behind him, sealing him into the bright fluorescent, mono-odored box, he heard a cackling of either crow or crone; which one, he was never sure.

**

1. Notable to Glory was the fact that they had chosen this golden bowl among many golden bowls, rather than holing up for hibernation in the soccer team’s giant vaunting device or even the cheering squad’s formidable urn. The pollinators wanted to spend their winter with the joy of the speech kids’ unapologetic, nerdly awesomeness. Glory and Marma heartily approved.
2. But don’t take her word for it…
3. A good practice for any parental hopeful.
4. “Meth-maker, meth-maker, make me a batch! Fry me ‘til blind, cause me to scratch!”
5. “Meth-maker, meth-maker, sell me a batch! Suck up my mind, rip up my cash!”

Glory’s father had recently been awarded with an Excellence and Efficiency award as a ten-year employee at the Kimberly-Clark paper mill. How those ten years came to pass, however, was a touchy subject. The award was received like paycheck & health insurance & performance review: without fanfare.

Back when he was a young go-getter just out of engineering school, Dennis had offered up an ingenius idea on a polished platter of naiveté. To his new employers, Puffs (a subsidiary of the prestigious Proctor & Gamble), the just-barely-twenty-one-year-old Dennis had developed the idea for a bathroom tissue enhancement he called “quilting.” A longtime admirer and apprentice of his dear mother’s quilting skills, Dennis had looked for practical ways to apply this inspiration in the “real world” of mundane employment. Being a gay African-American male in the summer spice of 1980’s Baltimore, he had more than one Good Solid Reason to become a Respectable Business Professional who could really Bring Home the Bacon [1]. Thus, young Mr. Maycomb brought a family legacy, made of passion, creativity, and fondness for soft things, into a presumably-dreary career on a staff of nameless thousands working toward the production of premium quality facial and bathroom tissues.

Eureka! he had thought, bubbling over with enthusiasm on his way to the last day of his first week plodding along inside the gates with the rest of the Nerd Ignominious Herd [2]. So excited was he to share his idea with the higher-ups, he thought nothing about the insidiously stacked power dynamics that might come into play; his only sensibilities were for the upward mobility of his career and the comfort to weary red noses and rear ends that his invention would supply. When the management team called Dennis in for his first-week review, he spilled the beans on the spot, sharing his well-formed ideas and diagrams with confidence, hardly stopping for breath until he sat back to grin into the faces of the white, middle-aged, heterosexual, imitation-Armani-wearing executives. Go-getter, he thought to himself.

They were highly impressed, but also heavily conditioned and extraordinarily cut-throat, so it showed very little. Dennis was nonplussed as the interview continued in a below-average way, full of mundane daily-grind questions and little pep-talk slogans. By the time they stood to shake his hand and dismiss the meeting, he had convinced himself that there was some special etiquette that was in play, something to which he would surely be made party when his promotion came. It did not, however, come. Dennis was not made any kind of party. After the weekend passed and a deep, vague anxiety had begun creeping into perfectly pleasant moments, he began to feel the effects of ostracization. Resentful. Isolating. Pitiless. [3]

Ridiculous! thought he, refusing to admit that a bunch of toilet paper flunkies could have such a powerful effect on his self-esteem. But as the next week wore on, the worry began to show on his face. It slowed his footsteps and buttered his fingers. It spiked his dreams and spilled coffee on his new tie. It crept along in his shadow.

By the following week, he had made up his mind to Be A Good Cow [4] and concentrate on making little advances. Maybe I came on too strong, he figured, Maybe I intimidated some of the upper echelon. Maybe, he reasoned, there is a mandatory hazing period during which I’m supposed to learn the rules of the gig before I start improvising on the song. (Denny was also a damn fine sax player who sat in regularly with other astronauts of entertainment at jazz clubs of the local underground, so he was no stranger to such rituals.) Yes, that must be the case. I need to pay some respect to the order of things so they don’t think I’m here to steal the show.

To his utter dismay, after two more weeks of exemplary bovinity on his part, the general manager of the Puffs operation team announced to a staff-wide assembly that they were proud to be releasing a new product, set for production by the end of the following year. This product, the first of its kind on the market, would revolutionize the facial and bathroom tissue industry. It was entirely unsettled whether the resounding “oohs” and “ahhs” were actually present in the roomful of TP people or if they were merely a radical hallucination grown out of Dennis’ darkened corner of dismay, but either way, the collective approval in the room produced the effect of a suckerpunch to the gut. When they actually said the word “Quilted” with bright toothy smiles on their self-congratulatory faces, Dennis found himself in need of more than a tissue. Sweating like a cold drink on a summer day, he ran from the room unexcused and posted up in a bathroom stall to spill his guts and shed his tears.

HOW could they DO this? he wept. HOW could I have been such a FOOL? he moaned. WHO the fuck do they think they ARE? he shat. WHEN did human beings become such ASSHOLES? he farted. WHY does the Lord let beauty be used for EVIL? he wailed. WHAT the hell is this life ABOUT? he shuddered.

After depleting his reserves entirely in that toilet stall, he found himself lost in an almost Zen-like emptiness. Minutes blurred. The toilet seat began to deliver its egg-shaped temporary tattoo for overtime sitters. In the quiet of the cracked tile and the leaking sink, Dennis found Great Clarity [5] on three things. One: he had worked himself sick as a dog for a company that didn’t value his well-being one iota. Two: the bathroom was out of toilet paper. Assholes. Three: he was going to walk out that door and present his resignation, right after he used the leaky faucet for a bidet.

-**

1. Not every phrase can be an instant LMFAO success. Let’s look at these abbreviation fails. GSR also stands for Galvanized Skin Response, so no good. RBP could be any number of things: Regular Baptist Press, Rolling Big Power, or code on the stock exchange for the Rainbow Group. (Knowing Dennis, it was the third, wearing the costume of the first, with a wish for the second.) Lastly, since the British Horseracing Board became defunct, BHB is mostly likely to refer to Black Hole Bang, which would offer a good deal of counterintuitive perspective to the context in which “bringing home the bacon” is perceived as a valuable behavior.

2. Nice try, Dennis. National Institute of Health.

3. RIP is definitely taken.

4. BAGC? Is this a major 7th?

5. GC: Gas Chromatography, okay this one counts.