In Dallas-Fort Worth it was entirely my fault. I imagined in a flash of madness there was a Charlotte, South Carolina, and we were flying to the wrong one. Mind follows any suggestion. Body joins with chemical panic. It began in simple fashion in front of a computer at my office in Oakland. Tall woman showing how to book my flight. There is a Greenville, South Carolina and a Greenville, North Carolina. My name is Brief, as in the amount of time I’m going to spend here on earth. A bobsled for a country called Heart Attack racing to the finish line, perfect run. I grabbed my traveling companion by the lapel and said, “We’re fucked!” A flash, I said, quick. Insinuation, a thought, off and running.

In front of that computer the girl promised me it would be easy. I hesitated to use my card. “What are you doing with it?” she asked. “Well, I’ve been thinking of taking a flight to see my brother. He and his wife just had a baby.” Come, I’ll show you how. We made love on my boss’s dusty couch. Not the sofa in his office – leather and fine. The nasty one in the storage room at the warehouse. Drunken sex, which was fine, and then she held my hand and led me to a computer on the main floor. We used McCray’s cubicle, I know. We stained his upholstered chair. McCray purchased the chair at an antique shop in the city. I know, because once he led me there excited, an attempt to influence my buying habits positively. I ended up getting a leather CEO’s on wheels.

He had this old chair with gnarly, upholstered cover and we. I didn’t know her name. After using it thought about throwing it in the bay. I was ticked off, after reading an editorial about how California no longer matters. The author of the article the one out of touch. California will always lead, Dad told me growing up, always rebound. “People forever trying to count us out.” I nodded, vaguely sure what he was talking about. All six boys went to state schools. Sister went to Wellesley. She did not write the article. I neglected to use a proper email address. “Let’s do the public library,” I suggested. “No way,” she. “First, it’s closed, second, I want to get you in your office. Cameras in libraries.”

She was a conspiracy theorist. Politicians and bankers always making fun of conspiracy theorists. That’s because they’re the ones in control. You should see what’s going on with Iraqi oil. A drunk man at the bar spilled the beans. He used his credit card lavishly. He wore a fine suit.

We are running out of July. They are almost here. Brother called today and pinpointed his arrival: sometime between Saturday night and Sunday night. A friend of the family’s, living in New York City and trying his darnedest to be the grandest, wearing tights and playing in Twelfth Night, a famous theater in the city, on some street, at a certain time. We are not going to make it and the friend is simply going to have to suck it up and play for new acquaintances and strangers and hope for the best in those tights. Mother sent their itinerary. After stops in Los Angeles, Hawaii, Denver, and New Orleans, they’re flying to Hartford and will more than likely be on time. Monday is the day. Then shall commence a mad gang of wanderers, searching for fun and connection, pondering the Berkshires or Cape Cod or a game at Fenway and Father will be paying for it all because his sons - grown now of course - are still boys. They have not acclimated to America’s speed. Perhaps there will be a visit to a cousin. Maybe a barbecue. Grill up those veggies, man. I am anxious, I await, already the social calendar has rendered this summer packed and gone. To say ruined would be rude. So I’ll report it as absorbed. Wonder what fall will bring. A person must be able to get away, allowed to disappear on occasion, adventure the high seas and risk life and limb and engage the surreal. Engage things not normal. Swim in the waters of the unknown. Then reappear, back to the wife and the refrigerator and the dishes, take care of responsibilities, contemplate kicking the cat, tabulating how many hours of television he’s watched this week. Read the paper. I can feel their presence already, I can smell them, sense the force-field of family. I’m looking forward to it and I’m bitching simultaneously. To fall to one’s knees and cry, “When will this ever end?” invites the wrath of nature. And since I don’t yet want to die, I engage this up and down ride, wince at the pain and enjoy fleeting moments of pleasure. Where are they now?

- - -

First brother phoned and pinpointed his arrival somewhere around Saturday night or Sunday afternoon. He drives from Asheville. He screams in a station wagon up this country on an interstate. Perhaps he’ll camp at Tom’s Creek; maybe he’ll walk up the creek into the hills; he’ll see a man who drives a Mercedes with a small poodle. He’s just killed a child and he won’t marry the woman.

Tody Wode set the book down on the nightstand frustrated not by his inability to concentrate, which was fine, but by the years that had gone by since he had last sat reflectively and done nothing. It is the realm and duty of the poets, he reasoned, this meditation. And people don’t do it anymore, not in this practical, rational world. He realized a few times, in the car next to his wife as she listened to NPR, again, that modern living was all about the input of stimuli, or the material of other people’s thoughts, or the complex inextricability of our societal web, and not the simple, clean thinking of the unaffected individual. He had these thoughts as the car bombed over the bridge and as a supertanker lolled underneath and another refilled its bosom at the base of the refineries. The refineries with pipes and lights and steel, painted to blend against the brown hills, to appear innocuous and even public relations-wise in-noxious. He possessed these thoughts on the steel bridge in the tonnage of vehicle and a baby on the way and NPR on the radio, again, and the years upon years of books and then he had them again in bed, last night, laying next to Mrs. Wode the Wonder, the Volvo station wagon broken down and their neighbor with a Volvo station wagon and college stickers on the back window and a bumper sticker that said “Harvard Crew” and memories of the Charles River and autumn and those insane nights whereon he lived his poet brilliance that was rare and simple and finally ended with real living. Tody, remember those days? Shit. A thought, a thought, one clean, simple thought, unforced, arrived without effort, an uncomplicated arrival upon the whim and muse of Nature, from elemental watching, seeing. What did you notice last night? “That I noticed,” he answered. He turned the radio off for the drive to his sister-in-law’s house, his niece’s house, the casual Saturday of commonplace and real life, not a life of ideas. He wasn’t bothered. Only, the radio this time was off, and Mrs. Wode turned to him after forty minutes and said, “Pumpkin? I just had a thought.”

“No.”

“Yeah, I did. Do you want to hear it now, or later?”