OCTOBER 2008

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The Good, the Bad, and the Lovely
By Mary Hamilton, Jul 27, 2008

Shoot, I mean, it’s French toast, right? It’s a song with a rhythm that tells me to move my feet in little twists and my hips swing side to side and my head bobs from shoulder to shoulder. My ponytail swinging ’round and ’round. It’s the rest of the band singing the chorus along with the lead singer and it sounds like Barrett’s on a Tuesday night when the jukebox gets taken over by the bartenders and the only music allowed is this kind of stomp push jump sound. It’s how the sun hits the yellow walls of the kitchen and it’s the way your boots scuff my just cleaned floor while this aw shucks band sings live on the radio and I tell you I feel like I’m right there too, the way the organ makes my skin shake and the way your hand holds my back and leads me to the left while our feet move together back and forth and we know not to step on toes, because we were born to dance like this. And at the end of the song, while the cymbals are still shivering, you pull me into a really low dip, so low, my ponytail gets wet in the cat’s water bowl.

It’s your apartment with three couches that don’t belong together, were never meant to be together, shoved into the hexagon of the living room. It’s the spiked cider and that game Greg won only by cheating. It’s the guitar sitting in the corner that Josh just had to pick up and start to play. It’s the tambourine that I gave Therese for her birthday. It’s Patrick’s violin and Marcello’s recorder.

It’s my harmonica and Chloe’s percussion on the coffee table. It’s the summertime jam session in that red living room. It’s the red I painted that room because I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. And I was sick and tired of being surrounded by dirty peach walls. And it’s the red because on my way home I passed a house with wide open windows and I could see inside to their red living room and there was a family. A whole family. A mother, a father, and a daughter. And they were playing a board game and they were happy and it seemed they were very happy and so I painted my living room that same red color and then, on the afternoon of Patrick’s birthday, we all sat in that red, surrounded by red, and we had all the windows open too. It’s the sun shining and when I looked right at it I got a yellow spot right in the middle of my eye like a crayon and it’s the tree outside the window that was so big it was like the branches were going to come right in through the window and start strumming some chords on the guitar too, but only a week or so later that tree fell down and took our electricity with it and we had to dance and play in the dark for half a week.

It’s the yellow color I painted the kitchen the day all those astronauts died. It’s that song we danced to on a patchy linoleum floor in a hot July kitchen while I baked a genuine red velvet birthday cake. We forgot to buy candles so we had to put a votive in the middle of the cake and when Patrick went to make a wish, he ended up spitting wax all over the top of the cake. But we just ate around it. The good part is the red. And then Patrick opened the window and climbed out onto the tree, the branches close enough he didn’t even need to jump and because it was the height of summer he got lost right away in the green of all those leaves. It’s the green that matched his shirt. An old uniform from his days scooping ice cream. We lost him in the tree and when we called for him to come back inside he didn’t answer and we figured maybe he had just kept climbing up up up and gone from green to blue to heaven. And we cried and wailed and mourned and tore our hair out and punched holes in the walls that made for cuts all up and down our hands. It’s a bedtime story he told me when I couldn’t sleep. He told me where he was. In the middle of a giant robin’s nest. And the blue eggs were rolling around smothering him and the only thing he could do to save himself was to break the eggs with a hammer he found in his vest pocket. But when he broke the eggs it wasn’t green or red or yellow that spilled out. It was just more blue. And, Patrick, I wish it was real.