No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
To describe the first days after he got his braces as dreadful was a gross understatement. The discomfort his dentist had cautioned him of turned out to be excruciating pain. He was constantly famished, but the bland, watery congee and foul-smelling soups prepared by his mother made him lose his appetite. He stopped talking to her, citing pain as pretext. Instead of spending time with his parents in the living room as he usually did, he retreated to his room, brooding.
“How much is she going to pay me?” Susan finally asked through gritted teeth, still staring at her dimeless four dollars.
“Why nothing! My word.” Mrs. Peck’s face turned red. “Mrs. Oliver is a personal friend of mine; one I am proud to count. It would be an insult to ask her for money. She’s in need and I promised to help her. Selfish girl. I already pay you four dollars a week. Look in your hands.”
If there’s one thing I know, it’s that going to Oklahoma is never a solution to my problems. If there’s a second thing I know, it’s that when I’m looking for a lost relative, I can probably find them at the casino, and I was looking for a lost relative I never had met. I hadn’t even known I had him until a few hours ago.
“I’m sure she is, Nana. I bet she’s looking down on you right now.” Nana Faye snorted. It was odd to see the prim point of her nose turn up in such a way.
“No, I don’t think she is. I hope she’s with Elvis now… And Jesus too, of course.”
“Ah, nothing’s really wrong, you know. I was just watching the fireworks with my friends and, you know, thinking about how that’s another year down and… I don’t know, every year I come back here and do all the same things, see all the same people; it’s like this place is standing still. But not really, because whenever I come back the town’s a little more run-down, my friends are a bit older, the stuff we do is a bit less enjoyable. Everything’s just fading or something, I don’t know.”
That had been a year ago and I asked to go back to general assignment reporting. Eventually they let me and there I was in my 40s doing what I’d first done in my 20s, filling a shrinking news hole from a shrunken newsroom for a paper with a dwindling readership competing against bloggers.