Good?

Some nights you stand in the kitchen and play the music low while you wash dishes by the window. You know that you're supposed to use the small yellow sponge, sliced in half to avoid excessive mold, to wash the dishes. But instead you use your hands, small and calloused. You rub your palm over the dishes first, then begin using your fingernails to get at the smallest bits. You know that this isn't the way that you're supposed to wash dishes, but you do it anyway. Sometimes, it's just too much damn trouble getting things to come clean.

The rain has gone silent for a while, though the pansies have lifted up there gaze as in praise to the now absent god of rain. The birds are chirping outside the window in a manner that brings to mind Disney movies. The roses are beginning to droop, but the street is scrubbed clean by these spring storms. On the drive to Baltimore you have a discussion about the future, which is always tied to the past.

"I think you can be whatever you want to be," she says. "It's all a matter of encouragement and desire."

You wait a moment, keep right onto 95 before answering,

"I want to be Thor, the god of Thunder," you say. "I want to be able to pick and choose where lightning strikes."

She smiles and asks you to try again.

In the evening you stand in artificial light, the dishes clean and scattered across the counter in a manner you know she'd never allow. You think back to the warm water passing through your hands, like grace, onto a small glass bowl shaped like the world, with a blue top so much like the sky. You said to yourself, as your nails brought everything clean, that you were going to be a good father. Assuredly, this was going to be something that you were good at. You know that you've looked forward to it for so long. And you look back in your life, as a driver in some rear view mirror, catching sight of all the other promises you've broken to yourself and you wonder if this one will be broken too and how many times. Seventy times seven.

The dishes are done, and the voices of women talking about babies drift down the stairs where you are sitting in front of a bright screen in the dark. And you think that if you can just convince yourself this one time that being good is not a one time thing, that it is a thousand small moments stitched together, only a few of which will even last in either of your memories, that it will be okay. That you will be good.

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