Lady’s word harvest this morning . . .
Some Moments Patched Together
Cleveland for me was the visceralness of crawling on hardwood floors as a baby, late night Shaker Heights apartment stairways – being carried up thumb suckingly asleep – orange lights streaming past dirty car window – the orange Bug with a hole in its floor through which you could see the swish of Saturn rings of salted gray road blurring by and imagine what rust must lie beneath the salting away car. Cleveland for me was Dee Perry, the voice of highest civilization – art and culture coverage. Or boogie in the silver car – Paul McCartney’s “I Love You” and “Staying Alive” and police lights.
When Mom and I were mid daylight returning to find two teens lurching away from stealing the battery from the silver car and Mom’s hot anger, the excitement of riding down Martin Luther King Drive and Dad’s stories of warnings from there, lifeguarding at Edgewater and getting beat up in basement of Shaker Heights High.
Parties where I met a jungle of gigantic adult legs in the pungent haze of undergraduate smoke, Mom parting curtains of their adoration of me to the spare room with a mattress on the parquet floor where I was put to bed, settled among adult things on clean sheets, wondering at Mom’s vicissitudes of high octave laughter behind the beveled panels of a glossy white Georgian door.
Even the daylight out with Mom was exciting midnight and always culture – the squirrelled winding road of MLK with its brown sea fans of tree branches creaking in the shuddering excitement of their candid regard – our shuttle passing under the ring stone of overpasses, bracelets on the legacy of early century greenway. The old homes of Liberty Row, Gordon, Rockefeller, Wade, Ambler Drive, Shaker Heights Tudor, stands of daffodils in springtime.
– Lady, 2.22.2022