Carry Me Down Afternoon Alleys.

Late afternoon. It's the last day of her first summer and me and Violet and the dogs are in the big front window looking out. The sun has that new/old autumn angle, light slashing in from across treetops and skimming off roofs instead of plopping straight down. There is a cool breeze today. The swamp tree in the front yard is twisting up in the movement. We all watch the branches dance.

Most people are at work at this time of day. Maybe having their last cup of coffee for the day. The Three O'Clock Lightning. Bolts of eleventh hour zip to get 'em through to the finish line.

I used to get mine in truck-stops on interstates. Pull the van off the exit and watch the band in the back stir to life after two-hundred miles of wandering off down into some lonesome canyon of old novels and Discmans and USA Todays. Coffee would bring us back up. Pure wonderful bitter highway coffee would bring us together. It would tickle our hearts with a nine-foot neon feather and bitch-slap our weary blue reserves.

We'd piss out the morning brew and pass each other by the bright lit sinks and then head out with hope in our hearts, to dump in new hot joe.

And by the time we'd wandered back out through the salted cashews and No-Doze and the XXL sweatshirts with an Old Apache Chief instead of a moon in the night sky above two howling white wolves, well, we were all fast friends again. Musicians feeling the music. The caffeinated tunes of late afternoons. We'd laugh and joke and smoke for the next hundred miles, til we crashed and crumbled upon our exhaustion yet again. Modern America was built that way. Truck-stop to truck-stop, cup to cup. It's there if you want it.

These days I am in the window though. Unmoving really, except for slight shifts here and there to keep my daughter from smashing through the pane. Flanked by bored dogs the two of us sit and tap the glass. We watch occasional cars pass. She likes seeing them, smiles a little. I do this new thing where I turn my head towards the outside then back to look at her over and over again til I think I might puke. She watches this with vigilant eyes. And like clockwork, thirty seconds in, she gets the joke and giggles right into me.

I melt like cake in the sun.

It feels odd. To be sitting on the couch looking out the window, when the world is all hopped up on office brew, or garage brew. Break-room brew. Hell, I don't even remember to drink the shit in the afternoon anymore. I don't get that Tilted Sun Phantom whispering reminders in my ear. I don't see the buildings sizzling miles away in the distance. The houses of relief set upon the hard-packed highway.

I reach into a ten gallon Ziploc and pull off a hunk of Monica's cornbread. I stick some crumbs up on Violet's lip. I swig the Diet Coke (it ain't the same/don't tell me caffeine stats). We walk to the window but then say Fuck That.

We undo leashes, lasso newly awakened beasts, and decide to just head out into the late and golden afternoon.

Maybe we ain't moving eighty miles-per-hour, sure.

But, By God, we are moving people. Into the late afternoon sunshine. Out the ass-end of one season, and straight into the dripping jaws of the next.

The Hot And Frothy God Fearin' Patriot Blues.

My Pop-Pop used to start drinking early on Sundays. Up the half-block to Fayette Grill by eleven in the morning. Sometimes I'd come around the corner by Mary Anne's dress shop and see him limping up the street slow, headed for the smokey darkness, for the pilsner glasses that smelled like beer even after they'd just been washed, the scent mortared into the walls of the vessel from a thousand hard floods. I'd watch him hobble up the street. Towards his destiny. It was NFL season. He had football pools to hand in. He had Cream Ale to swallow.

A few hours later he would appear in our living room. Well, his living room, I guess, but my Mom and me and my brother lived there in the house with him and Mom-Mom: so it was our living room too really. He'd come through the thick front door and sit down in his torn-up ratty recliner and I'd watch him peer over his eyeglasses at his paper gambling slips.

"Hey man," he'd say. "Get Pop-Pop one of his sodas will ya?"

I'd go into the kitchen, to the back fridge/beer fridge and fish one out. A Pop-Pop Soda.

The TV would blare. He was a little deaf from life. Maybe he'd stood by anti-aircraft guns on his battleship out there in the Pacific at some point. Who knows. Maybe his body was filled to brim with beer. Maybe his ears were the last to feel the flood, the soft foam suds rising steadily through all the Friday Nights and Saturday Nights and Fourth of Julys and Deer Camps and weeks down the shore and football afternoons, until one day they just crested his Camel scarred throat and started overflowing into his hearing canals like a clogged toilet onto the tiles.

He would sit there in the blasting aura of air horns and crowds cheering and overly excitable announcers, crack open the can I brought him, and let the same exact Sunday afternoon wash all over his body and soul as it had last Sunday and the ones before that.

The Eagles were our team. The Philadelphia Eagles. The Iggles. They were the team. There were no other teams to consider. No second favorites. There were like twenty six teams and one of them mattered and the rest did not. The Cincinnati Bengals. The Chicago Bears. The Atlanta Falcons. Those teams made no sense to us. Their players made no sense. Why were they even bothering? Only The Eagles mattered at all. Only The Birds.

Halfway through the first quarter it would come.

"Hold onto the ball, Goddammit. Run nigger!"

I would watch him through my eleven year old eyes as he said it. His face didn't change. He sipped beer before and after the words. I felt like he must be wrong. Confused. I felt like the word must've slipped out of his mouth by some slip of the tongue, some accident.

But, then he'd say something like that again a while later. After a time, I had to tell myself there was no accidents in that beat-up old living room. That was tough for a young kid. If my Mom-Mom or my Mom happened to be passing through the room on their way back from Shop'N'Bag or something when he said that stuff: they'd give him the business.

"Sonny, watch your mouth. Please don't say those things!", my Mom-Mom would holler.

He would not look at her. He wouldn't even raise an eyeball from the TV, from the game to acknowledge he heard her. He'd sip at the can in his fist, sit back in the chair.

Mom-Mom would look at me and seem like she was gonna bust out in tears.

"He don't mean that, Serge." she'd say. "He don't mean that word."

I'd eat my Zep. I'd eat my Zep and watch the football with my American grandfather. I'd get him cans from the back fridge. I'd bristle for hours from things he said he might not have even understood.

He's dead a long time now so I am never gonna know, I guess.

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Why do people have hate in their hearts? Why is it that certain people think they know a God better than you or me? And when are we gonna learn?

We aren't ever gonna learn, huh?

Sometimes I sit with Violet in my lap and look at the FaceBook. People I don't really know respond to other people and spout off about illegal immigrants being treated at the hospital.

I try and imagine what that is like when it's going down. When an eleven year old Mexican boy is thrust through some swinging stainless steel doors into a long hall of rooms. I try and focus on his little face, the blood streaming down his cheeks where the grill of the Datsun rammed through his skull.

You can't see his skin color, by the way. In my vision: you cannot see his caramel complexion, the color of a slight creek after hard spring rains. You can only make out that there is a face in there somewhere under all that universally colored blood.

I want him stitched up. I want him to live and maybe I get to meet him someday and shoot the shit in the stands at a minor league double-header. And if he were older and riddled with flu, guess what? Same thing. Live, motherfucker. Live/Live/Live. You aren't illegal to me. Or my daughter. Or my wife. We don't see you standing on our front lawn with a long vacuum hose hooked up to our mattress, sucking out all the hard earned legal wages we have managed to squirrel away.

We see you as something worth throwing in for. Life.

Way back when he was alive, my Pop-Pop doused himself in all kinds of misery. Like Dixie Cups full of gas, he'd splash little shames on himself here and there, little insults at his wife/little hate words at the TV. It didn't take me long to see how un-alone/alone he was either. You're never alone in HateTown, but no one wants to be too neighborly with you either. There is shame involved. Fury. Self-loathing and maybe a blind walk into the Valley Of The Literal Old Book.

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You wake up in your bed in your state, You wake up in your country-ass town or in your filthy-ass city, you roll out of bed, you head downstairs and slice banana on the Coco Puffs. You suck down juice or coffee, hop in the shower, kiss heads goodbye, head out the front door into the world.

With hate in your heart or not. There is no middle ground.

Mole, Ratty, Badger, Violet, And Toad.

Me reading a book to Violet is just a bunch of crap. She isn't ready for books. She doesn't care/need to care yet. Even three pages into BEARS IN THE NIGHT she's squirming and antsy. She digs away from the story. She claws tunnels in the air, digging desperately, trying to break out of the prison in my lap. The handed-down sentence is way too harsh for a bambino. No kid deserves capital boredom.

Violet doesn't want to feed her brain. She wants to tear the pages out and eat them. She wants to eat Green Eggs and Ham, not listen to me talk about them.

But I have afternoons where I feel like I have to at least try. Something bugs me if I don't read something to her here and there. Someone must've read to me. There's the sense of duty that comes with loving books/having a kid.. You're deputized to sling certain silver bullets eventually. TOM SAWYER/HUCK FINN. A LOT OF SEUSS. WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE. WHERE THE SIDEWALK ENDS. Tried and true stuff. A trillion wobbly attention spans can't be wrong.

Lots of smart people say: 'start reading to your baby early so she'll have a life-long love of books'. I don't know though. What I see isn't someone who will someday be curled up under a hundred year old autumn elm in some big city park, devouring SILAS MARNER or HIGH FIDELITY or anything like that. What I see is a squirmy prisoner in Pop-Lap Penitentiary. I watch her claw fiercely at the air, digging tunnels to freedom. She isn't interested in the sound of my babbling tale. She needs action. Craves life close to the bone, down on the rug, out on the floor. She needs escape. She wants searchlights, hellhounds, and pitch black stumbling through a wild wood. At this point, eating dust specks and dragging yourself over to the base of house ferns as tall as redwoods is all the education she wants or needs. Later on, soon enough, she'll use words and books to escape from a hundred little prisons. But, not just yet, I guess.

Regardless, I went over to the shelf the other day and glared. What to read her anyway? I was in the mood to have a go, so what the hell. I saw THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS paperback I bought for three bucks when she was, like, two weeks old. (See, I thought these kids were gonna be all: under a blanket/heavy-lidded eyes/sweet tired smiles whenever Mom or Pop decided to read aloud). I pulled it down and started reading it to her while I crammed mac and cheese into her gaping mouth.

By page five I put it down.

Not because she wasn't enjoying it. Truth is, she was in the high-chair and I had her hooked deep with a big dinner, so she was tolerating me and the book just fine. The real reason I stopped was because it only took me a couple pages to understand that I was going to have to tuck this book away for myself. Rat and Mole and the River and their entwined tale of adventure, friendship, and talking Badgers: it was all so damn interesting to me. Why? I have no fucking clue. Maybe I was enchanted. Maybe I was attracted to the simple but elegant way in which Kenneth Grahame composed it. Maybe I just like a swarm of Christmas Caroling Field Mice now and then. And underground cottages where rodents sipping bottles of ale at the end of a long winter's day makes the world seem way better than it probably is.

I know one of these days I will sit V down in my lap at just the right moment in time. The collision of tired and curious will go down without me really knowing it. I'll just be sitting there, reading something to her again when all if the sudden I'll notice that she's with me.

She'll turn her noggin up toward me and flash her new pearl nuggets in sweet approval. Her eyes will grab mine and say, simply: Keep going, Dad. You keep that up. I'll start back in with the next sentence, and out of the corner of my eye I'll peek over and see she's on board. I'll probably stick her in there too. To walk besides Ratty and Toad and Mole. I'll have her eat supper with them, take rides in Toad's car. I'll add her to the best sentences. I'll stick her in hollow logs and on boats. I'll set her free on the banks of a forever river.

She'll be story-bound.

And we'll know right there that there's no turning back.