Twenty Nine

Now you sit on the edge of something. A new world lies at your feet.

Pros-When you play basketball it is now okay for you to grab, foul, and throw up random hook shots from anywhere on the court. You'll be thirty.

Pros-You can grow a mustache and wear it with pride.

Cons-What the hell happened to the last ten years? Wasn't I just turning twenty? Wasn't I just sitting on those cold steps beneath the veil of evening with words not coming to my lips? Wasn't I just playing a game of one on two in the yard with my best friend's father now passed away? Wasn't I just lying in my mother's lap as she read us all to sleep? Wasn't I just sitting at the edge of a cliff watching the sun drop behind the ocean? Wasn't I just sitting in that small classroom looking out the window and wishing to be older? Wasn't I just at Fort Bragg with my family, throwing the football around at the Inn now burned down? Wasn't I just walking in the backyard of my grandparents or my grandmother now gone, and playing amongst the white rocks? Wasn't I just striking out eight batters in a Little League game? Wasn't I just walking down the streets side by side with my mother talking about the women I almost loved? Wasn't I just pissing in the backyard in our tree fort, or eating the fresh blackberries that came from over the fence? Wasn't I just hanging upside down in a tree after falling ten feet, caught in its saving grasp? Wasn't I just crying at swimming lessons because the water is so damn cold? Wasn't I just posing for a picture with someone who is already gone and perhaps will never remember me? Wasn't I just blowing out three birthday candles and silking my hair? Wasn't I just pushing hot wheels with Charlie down our perfectly sloped driveway, smelling the hot asphalt cooking in the sun? Wasn't I just walking home in the rain with my best friend collecting earthworms from large puddles? Wasn't I just playing one on one with my best friend for the 100th time? Wasn't I just doing a thousand things that I'll never do again? Wasn't I just sitting alone, in a bright yellow room, looking at the pictures my mind conjures up of the people I used to know?


In your twenty ninth year you finish get a Master of Fine Arts degree, go to Paris, and buy a house. Thank God for twenty-nine. Really, this whole project isn't really about aging. Sure, I have your usual anxieties about time passing rather quickly, but it's far more related to the things I have left undone, the places I haven't been, the books I haven't read or written. That's why it's easier to be turning thirty than to be turning twenty-five. I feel as though I've done a thing or two.

Bonus-At a bar this evening the waitress asked to see my ID When I smiled and told her my thirtieth birthday was tomorrow she said, "Well, you look young." I understand that she was merely defending her request for my ID, but I took it as a huge compliment. I was beaming. And if you know me, I don't beam at just anything.

The degree. What do say after you've gotten an impractical degree and are fast approaching a new decade. So long and thanks for all the fish? During my last year as a student I wrote some pretty damn good stories. However, these stories aren't currently getting published, so it's hard to quantify the positive impact that this time in my life had. It depends on whether you need quantifiable results to believe that you've achieved something. Of course, I do, so the MFA is sort of a wash. The only quantifiable fantastic decision that I've made is sleeping in the next room. However, all it takes is being asked to take out the trash and suddenly I'm wondering if life and love have any meaning. I mean, I'm fickle. I forget important things that I've learned very easily. I suppose that's why I have an affinity for cats, they're unpredictable.

M: I like it when the light in your eyes dies.
S: Why?
M: Because sometimes it takes a lot of work.


We bought a house. I blogged a lot about it.Some of them I liked
Or this one

The main thing that I can take from the housing project is that housing is hard because you discover that you care about everything. And you discover that your spouse may not like the exact same style of bed as you do and the two of you will then spend hours arguing about stain color, door knobs, shower flow, picture frames, swiffers, paint colors, duvet covers, decorative pillows, mattresses et al. So, be prepared to disagree.

Paris is a great city if only you could get rid of the Parisians. Zing! You stood on the balcony and looked outside the window at the rain, then walking back towards the bed and wrapping yourself in warm blankets and sweat tinged skin.

Now I look forward to tomorrow without trepidation. I'm excited. It's the first anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday!

Elegy for a Silk Tree

The two of you walk through the graveyard arm in arm. She feels brittle, old. The graves are next to one another, beneath the black limbs of some ancient elm. The two of you bend in the wind, put flowers down, and then go home. “If not for the children,” she says, on the ride home, shaking her white mane slowly. You turn up the radio, and watch the moon replace the sun.
At the nursing home, your mother watches television with her friends. You don’t recognize any of them from your previous visit. You imagine that old country road leading to a row of grey stone slabs, an ivy colored wall to take pictures of, and picnic with the dead. Driving alone. The elderly have a strange unanimity about them that confounds you, reminds you of something from your youth, laughter, not being known. The slight burn on skin of being mocked. They are watching The Price Is Right, trying to guess how much a box of Tide costs, the familiar orange bottle, filling up the screen. They shout out seemingly inane things, and your mother pulls you down, close, like when you were a child, to whisper in your ear. “They’re a bunch of morons,” she says, “the whole lot of them. I hope they rot,” she says, half-serious, half-fearful. You pull away from the cloying scent of her neck, the smell of the old, the infirm. She turns from you as well, pulling the wheels of her chair with a strength you thought had gone out of her to yell three forty nine at the bright orange face of Bob Barker.