Sunday, February 13
SIXTEEN CENTER Last week, an insurrection, yesterday, the second impeachment, and this evening of slurry and wind that makes the old dog wary, I call my grandpa, my mama's daddy, to ask why we called his parents' land 16 Center. He doesn't know! And he laughs, can fathom no reason but his daddy's drunk whimsy and charisma in the naming of those twenty acres of Arkansas backwoods, those pastures and good timber a mile down Columbia Country Road 14. Nor does he remember how to call a hog. Nor does he remember who first called him Billy, as much his name now as Sam and for nearly as long. We leave what is forgotten behind us easily enough, detour through what rough country we can recall: his uncle Sonny Boy taking him west to live in Vegas; his grandma, Ma Gladys, in LA rescuing him from Vegas; his baby sister shot and him thirteen, holding her feet at the hospital down in Haynesville as she died; his many jobs; his longest love; his outline, a sketch he's drawn before that I want to fix in my mind. I know my questions rarely resolve past treble: I talk too fast, too high, am nearly unintelligible to him, yet we pass an hour this way. He offers some measure of a past we do not share, and it's easier to let be what is lost, to put down what I never carried. (Donika Kelly)