Father of the Man
“The things which I have seen I now can see no more.” Wordsworth
For Maya The child is father to the man. The man disembarks from childhood like a rat, only to learn, adult day by day, he’d lost his birthright immortality, and his taste for joy. The child of about eight pales in premonition of his fate, his metamorphosis from pupa to the nine-to-five imago of his future. Watching the flow of traffic, he picks out a truck, a white unmemorable pickup. He memorizes it, and thinks it now and again only to satisfy himself he can. All through elementary school the truck comes when he calls it, true to life. His hook. Child stamps his foot and commands his future: Yo! grown-up, stupid grown-up. You! Swear: Whatever you maylose of me, forget, distort, cannibalize, betray, Swear you’ll keep this pickup in your mind all your life till you’re as dead as I am. In the name of the father and the son. Pleased with this scheme he plants some more forget-me-nots in his scion’s prefrontal cortex: a bronze anonymous somebody important sitting on a horse with one leg bent; a trapezoid of sunlight on a wall, …or any random anything at all. I made up the bronze horse and the trapezoid. I think it was a truck. We go for a ride, my child and I, along the country road, happily chatting in our secret code, speeding past meadow field and stream, to the fresh romantic newness of a dream, our cracked muffler laughing what’s the hurry? our rusty tailpipe spewing clouds of glory.