Into You Like A Train

  Parallel Lines      Most of my adult life, I never really thought of myself as having much in common with my Dad. Though, we often don’t want to be like our parents. After 9/11 he became more conservative. Caught up in the anti-Muslim hysteria, he excused a bunch of local kids who beat up a Sikh gas station owner in Pennsville thinking he was Muslim: “They didn’t know any better.” When he found out that I was going to a demonstration against the upcoming bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in 2002, he called me “a goddamn liberal!” “Dad, I’m a Marxist.You know that. I’m not saying that the people who attacked the US shouldn’t be brought to justice. But attacking a whole nation and punishing its citizens for the act of a few makes no sense.” There were other differences too: I’m not really into guns, head cheese or dressing like a cowboy. But there are a lot of parallels in terms of disposition, temperament, and even interests. Maybe those interests stem from the tw...

On the right: The factory gate at Dupont Chamber Works in Deepwater, NJ, which my Dad passed through for 35 years.     That Essence Rare   I have always bristled under the yoke of wage work. I always understood it as an imbalance of power. Someone is making money off of my labor. I don’t know if it came from seeing my Dad work, understanding that “work weren’t no joy”. I think that is from the Clash, “The Equalizer” on Sandinista!. That song kinda spelled it out. [lyrics] I learned a lot from The Clash. “The men at the factory are old and cunning/You don’t owe nothin’, so boy get running” (“Clampdown”). Maybe that’s where I first grasped the concept, but I knew my Dad hated work, too. He was a creative person who read books, liked art and music, and was often doing art, whether it was political cartoons or pen and ink drawings. But he had a family to support. Sometimes all that anger and frustration would build up. Sometimes I was on the receiving end. I always wanted my ...

  Reclamation One after another, the losses just kept piling up. Only recently did I realize how much I’ve lost. Looking through old photos: my ex-girlfriend, Heather, standing on the shore of the Black River on our first camping trip together; Otis, a black cat looking above the rim of a white claw foot bathtub; Loca, the calico, stretched out on the windowsill, another cat she’d been watching on a fence in the distance; my Dad sitting on a park bench in a camo t-shirt and sweat-stained straw cowboy hat at Fort Mont; a smiling Grandpop Dunham with a cross tie clip, proudly clutching the New Testament; an old black and white photo of Grandmom Stolar beaming, kneeling beside a horsie rocker with her sons, my Dad and Uncle John; My Uncle John’s portrait in his school teacher tie and jacket, I can see the sadness in his eyes; and Eli, my three-legged cat napping on my lap, my air cast ankle in the background. They’re all gone. Those sentient beings that I loved and once touched are go...