Today, a fox from Sonoma, CA, bought in a shop off the central plaza. I lived in Livermore, California briefly, back in the latter half of 2005, with my bother, sister-in-law and niece. Many things in my life had come to a head that spring: end of the first post grad school year, cobbling life together via adjunct teaching and a return to admission counselor work, back in Pennsylvania, my relationship of 4+ years unravelling. It all needed to change if my creativity, my happiness were to thrive. I needed to challenge the comfort I felt myself sinking back into and live. And so I packed up my car and headed west, driving across the country on a spirit quest of sorts to figure it all out. I wrote a prose poem about this that I’ve never published, and thought I’d share it here:
Moving Image #4 [Contributor’s Note]
Scratching down the things I see on the backs of gasoline receipts America crossed one August Pennsylvania trees Ohio flat Michigan rain a plastic bag flock swarms a farm in Illinois they twist white sun-caught and lunge gray underside cornstalk-perched Monarchs criss-cross Interstate 80 circle a biker distract him the silos the grain and missiles the silos and smokestacks of Iowa a man with powder blue toenails climbs into a pick-up truck lakeside bonfire suddenly the road ahead the same color as the sky Remember Terry bumper stickers and that was Missouri cows and man-made watering holes border every highway in Kansas a man dressed as the Jolly Green Giant hair dyed skin painted green grabs the shoulder’s metal girder hidden in the overpass shadow Oklahoma oil wells dot the landscape like scrubby brush a hammer line see-saw surrounded by hay bales and corn the yellow-red tops of stalky crops and the western hemisphere’s largest cross in Texas of course where miles of warehouse church crosses rotate to form the barn silo XXX-s but this descent into New Mexico desert as storms canvass and dawn striates the mesas and petroglyphs that alien landscape stays veins my face long after I rise into Arizona find my way into the valley up to the bay and I abandon my car oh California.
I enjoyed California, but the perfectly pleasant weather every day began to grate on me after a while. I’m an East coast boy: I need some drama to my weather, those overcast days that let you stay in and read guilt-free. And I found I missed New York City. I used to travel to it frequently for my admission job as it was my travel and recruiting territory, and found it calling to me once I got to the other coast. My best friend, Aimee, had recently moved there and needed a roommate. So I decided to move back after Christmas, just in time for 2006 to begin.
2005 marked the first Christmas my parents didn’t spend at their home in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in the 30+ years they lived there. They came out to my brother’s place, along with my younger sister and we did the holiday out there. It’s all a blur now as I packed what I could to transport back on the plane and rushed to sell my car. But this fox reminds me of wine country and golden hills and taking my niece, who was 3 at the time, out on night walks with flashlights to search for the neighborhood cats.
