No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
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.
To come, and Grow green The vineyards. To bless, and Swell the grapes To the core.
"Thanks, God. Thanks for the life you’ve given me, it wasn’t such a bad life. Dying at twenty-five isn’t so bad, it’s going out with a bang, right in the middle of the good part..."