J. Michael Dew

"I am so lonely, but I know there is a plan.  There must be.  I can muscle through my life until the next move is clear.  I miss you all so much.  I am alone for most of the time.  It's just me and the cats and dogs.  Nobody comes up.  Nobody stops by.  It's not like it used to be -- so full of life.  Perhaps I'll move down there with you.  But not now.  There is a plan, and I must follow it.  I must follow it even though it's too quiet around here."

As I was walking my three daughters to school, we all looked up and noticed that the sky was pink.  My oldest said that this meant rain.  My middle child agreed.  My youngest had a different opinion: "Maybe it will rain pink lemonade."  "Yes," I said.  "Wouldn't that be grand."

In Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl, there is a scene that has stuck with me since I first came across it.   Frankl describes the horrid conditions of Auschwitz -- how the sky was gray, the tattered uniforms were gray, the snow was gray -- but off in the distance in a house on the side of a hill, someone turned on a light.  This one light broke through the grayness of his existence, and defying all that he was up against, gave him hope.

The world prompts us to get to know one another as members of a group, but I prefer to get to know someone on an individual basis.  We are so much more than whatever defines a group.  We are more nuanced than that, and it is in the nuance where true cordiality is found.

I am not a creative person.  I am, rather, an observant person with a good memory.  I remember the rocking motion as we pulled into our rutted driveway.  I remember the smell of my granny's perfume.  I remember the woodshed, the Scout, the buzz of my grampa's chainsaw.  This is what goes into storytelling.  I must.  It is what I know.

Two quarters.  That's what it costs to buy a pop from a machine in Pennsylvania when I was growing up.  We coveted those two quarters, squirreled them away for when we might go to Quality or walk by the laundry mat.  Two quarters meant something.  Two quarters could get you a pop and fizz. This morning, my middle child woke up and reported on the tooth fairy.  "What am I going to do with five dollars?  It's just so little."

Just after my father had passed away, I took a walk to the small factory down the street from where I grew up to inquire about a job.  The building made noise and produced wood chips and saw dust, but what else, I couldn't say.  I figured I could sweep up those chips, that saw dust.  The big bearded man said I was too young, only ten, which is why I probably cried all the way home. I have since learned something from that event.  My life since that point has consisted of me doing my best to earn money no matter how menial the chore.  This attitude, this "I'll do it no matter how much you will pay me so long as it is something" way about doing business has, I have discovered, put me into a box of my own making.  There are successful people out there who do not undersell their skills.  They have a confidence about them that I, coming from a place of great need, have never had.  I think it is time to reexamine how I rate my skills and how I value my time.  Working hard

Peachy King seemed to know all the answers but mostly those regarding girls.  He was a Boy Scout like the rest of us, though with some rank, and he was the only one of us with facial hair: a slim, barely perceptible line of hair above his upper lip.  Peach fuzz.  Peachy.  The name went with the mature look.  After we had crawled into our tents for the night, Dale hollered out, "Peachy!"  "Yes," came the tired reply, and then Dale launched into a series of questions about the so-called fairer sex.  Peachy King answered each question succinctly and with a measure of "one who knows."  Of course, we all benefitted from the Q/A session.  We were Boy Scouts all trying to make rank.

Aunt Nellie and Uncle Gerald lived in an old house on the back of the hill.  Aunt Nellie had a hard time getting water to boil, though, because every time she left the kitchen, the pot would somehow fall to the floor, creating quite a mess.  After a while, Uncle Gerald had to tear out the water-damaged floorboards.  When he did so, he found a small bundle beneath the floor.  Inside was the skeletal remains of a newborn.  Apparently, the previous owner of the house had a daughter who got pregnant out of wedlock.  Her solution?  Boil the baby alive. Now we knew why Aunt Nellie could never get the water to boil.

I think it was John Updike who said that a person lives his life for thirty years and spends the rest of it trying to understand what happened.  At forty-three, I wonder if I have already turned that corner.  Have most of my mountains been scaled?  Am I now in the valley of self-reflection?

I think of my brother who, as a boy, was branded "special needs," and as a result, was put on a path that led to him being ostracized by many.  It amazes me how one decision, one twist in the road can alter a person's life.  Had he not been labeled as such, he might have ended up somewhere else.  We must all be aware of how we treat the littlest among us.

Gramma and Grampa has a plum tree out behind the house that I used to climb in the summers.  The plums were great treasures, and I have fond memories of eating them, resting there in the crook.  How often do I reach for those plums now in my nearly forty-fourth year of living on this earth.  Sometimes I reach for the bad fruit, but it never satisfies the same.

I am only interested in what is true and that we should not build narratives on what is false or what we want to be true.  I think this happens too often and that this is a cause for a lot of divisiveness.  In fact, I have to wonder if the purveyors of these untruths and conjectures have a vested interested in riling up the public.  I think so.  I think this is true.

I cut the holes myself, bought the rope, rigged the swing up good to the tree in front of the house.  The branch muscles the swing, and the girls gleefully swing to and fro beneath the Georgia sky.  Tomorrow, the tree will be cut down.  Where will my girls swing?  It saddens me that I do not have an answer.

Is the road sometimes long because it takes time to develop persistence, fortitude, and courage?

I woke up at 4:30 am unable to sleep, so I went for a jog under a moonlit sky.  Strange how the world seems so different that early in the morning.  Human beings and the earth, for the most part, simultaneously enjoyed a break from each other.

It wasn't tall fescue at all; it was Bermuda.  I had sown thousands upon thousands of tall fescue seeds in a small patch of my yard, but time and time again, the Southern sun would burn them off and turn the soil into dust.  So I tried another type of seed.  The analogy presented itself. The ground can be fertile, but at the end of the day, it is the type of seed we plant that matters.

I remember the exhilaration of riding in the backs of trucks.  Do people still do that today?  Is it considered to be too dangerous?  The order came so casually out of the mouths of our parents: "Hop in the back of the truck.  We're going to the DQ."

It is true.  I hitchhiked in Australia with only a pack on my back and a worn out map.  I spoke my plans out loud so the driver at the petrol station could hear.  He took me to as far as the next town two hours away.  And then I stuck my thumb out and got lucky.  That driver took me to the beach, my destination, and from there, I was all by myself again.

I was a part of the beef team, a four-man cohort whose mission it was to pull the rope bridge taut.  After it was locked in, we'd check our Swiss seats, jump up, and clip in, our rubber ducks hanging from slings on our backs.  Rangers lead the way.  Low crawl, high crawl, PT studs the lot of us.  I still wonder why I put it on safety after only a year.

"Love your child by learning the song of her heart and singing it back to her when she forgets."                                                                                                                       Anonymous

Why do some feel compelled to make others feel small?  My family was invited by my wife's work to go out on a boat and eat dinner with other employees.  Everyone was invited: the president of the company, the administrative assistants, the office managers, the custodians.  We all had a very nice time. I heard another story where, after an appreciation lunch, the custodians were told that they could eat the leftovers.  It would take a moment to process the feeling those hardworking men had.

A small bird attacked me while I was jogging the other day.  I had apparently jogged too close to the bird's nest.  The flutter by my head was small-sized ferocious.  What pains a parent will undergo in order to protect the young!

Clark Griswold and Bob Seger.  A man has to reach a certain age to understand either one of them.  I believe I have hit that age.  The jokes get keener, and the melancholic songs more so.

Chainsaw Charlie chain-smoked cigarettes the entire time he gave us high and tights.  My Ranger Challenge team when to his shop to get spruced up.  He had the foulest mouth of anyone I knew then and had a hand-written sign above the barber's chair that said, "No free Kojaks." Today, I pay too much for haircuts, and the talk is reduced to the cursory.  The work is fine, but the whole affair is tepid.

We must've plowed through a hundred of them each night -- kangaroos in the Australian outback.  I was on lookout, charged with telling the driver when to swerve, when to look out.  There would be nothing until the lights of the bus would come upon hundreds upon hundreds of big reds hunched and poised to hop.  They came on too fast.  We always struck some. When it was my turn to sleep, I drifted off to the occasional loud thump and tumble.

I remember riding in the backs of trucks, wind swirling my dirty-blond hair, dust from the road trailing behind us.  We'd bump around, yell with excitement; the biggest among us would sit on the wheel well. Now with kids of my own, I cannot fathom letting them ride in the back of a truck.  They must be fastened into their seats as if preparing to blast off into space.  I wonder if I am doing them a disservice by being so protective.  I sometimes dream about climbing into the back of my uncle's old beater before trekking up York Hill to my grandparents' house.  Do my children deserve the same kind of dream?

The human heartbeat can be heard two weeks after conception.  It occurred to me, then, that this is how a person enters the world: as heartbeat.  Perhaps this should help to frame the meaning of life.  If we were once all heartbeats then so many other human characteristics take on a new kind of superficiality.  If we can relate to one another, heartbeat to heartbeat, then maybe we wouldn't have all of this strife we see in our world today.

In the winter, my grandparents' house smelled like cooked food, coffee, and wood smoke.  Is this why I sometimes light a wooden match, blow it out, and sniff the rising wood smoke?  I think so.  I do this sometimes before I write, before I try to make sense of a memory.  It takes me back to a simpler existence when I could afford to listen to my grandparents' stories while we drank coffee and ate cookies.

Every small town has a gauntlet.  Ours was Pool Hill. The way up to the town pool was a precipitous climb over loose gravel.  From its height, we kids would scan the Allegheny foothills before bravely pushing off on our banana seat Huffies, hurtling ourselves downhill.  Once, I did not make it.  A bloody mess, I limped back home where Dad, a former Navy Corpsman, patched me up. How was I to know that this would be the first in a series of life long gauntlets?  How was I to know the privilege of having someone to bandage my wounds?

Molly was a good dog.  She had been my jogging companion back when I would sojourn home from college.  She would eagerly grab the leash and deposit it hopefully in front of my jogging shoes, and off we would go, bounding down North Main Street on our way to Highland Avenue and, beyond that, the cemetery where I would do push ups and she would sniff around the gravestones. Her leash sits in my office now. I have an office, and it is filled with books and memories I sometimes find it hard to believe I -- a graying man -- made.

Like the other kids, my girls ran after Easter eggs this past weekend, filling their bright baskets, triumphant in how many they found.  I took photos, took videos, and did my very best to etch these memories on my heart as if it took any effort at all.  It was my oldest daughter's smile that resonated with me, however.  We were sitting on the back patio.  She had said something funny and knew it.  Hers was an amused, proud smile -- a smile of a just turned 11-year-old coming into herself.  My gaze lingered on her beautiful face then I counted the years and sighed.

Judd and Jane owned two rectangular plots of land that were divided by a drainage ditch.  Because our property couldn't make up its mind about what shape it wanted to be, we kids played on Judd and Jane's land.  They didn't mind so long as we behaved, which we did most of the time. I look out my window now and see the neighborhood kids dashing here and there over my yard and other yards with zero thought about property lines.  An even stretch to throw a ball is an even stretch never mind who technically owns it.  I'm thankful that Judd and Jane knew this, too.

I have a memory of my grampa working out back in the woodshed, cutting kindling for the fire.  There was something about this activity, this moment that grips me in ways that are hard to describe.  So I wrote a poem. Requiem                                     An old man sits in a                                     dark shed on a winter’s eve, and                                     he is surrounded by                                     cord wood packed tight,                                     knots out and up against the aged frame.                                     He is doused in the pale yellow light of                                     a naked bulb, and he is thinking, not                                     about the fixed circular saw before him or                                     the kindling he is making with each                                     screaming pass, but of something else:                                      his alone.  

Once upon a time, I hired a boat captain to take me to an island in the South Pacific so that I could camp there over the weekend.  I was prepared or so I thought.  I had goggles and canned food.  I had my snorkel and disposable camera.  What I didn't have was a can opener that worked or bug spray: the lack of both the cause of my quick undoing.  Soon enough, I took my sunburnt body to the shore, wadded into the clear blue water, and began swimming to the nearest passing boat, thinking all the while that riptides and sharks don't exist. It was the second time I was almost deported from Australia.

The other day, I tried not to stare at the woman with long, scraggily hair streaked thickly with dull iron gray.  She was studying the meat, the chicken, the rows of sausages at the store.  I could see how she calculated the cost, how she looked at the prices and set them next to what was in her dollar store purse.  It was sad.  I finally looked away.  I imagined that she felt she didn't belong on the pretty aisle.

I needed a job, needed to help out my mom, a new widow, so I marched a mile over rough sidewalk to the company that droned from nine to five, making sawdust and wood chips -- what else, I couldn't say -- and I saw this dust, these chips upon entering the din and thought, I could sweep them up; I could do a good job.  But I was eleven, just a boy, the big bearded man said, which, I suppose, is why I cried all the way home.

A van passed by my house every now and then, and from it flies a newspaper I never read.  The beat up van is piloted by an older woman, and the thrower of the newspaper is, I have to believe, her son.  He is balding, scrawny, and wearing BCGs (birth control glasses in military parlance).  What do I witness when I see these two pass by?  A failure to launch?  Some kind of curious brokenness?  An inability or refusal to fall in step?  Perhaps it is only a mother who won't abandon her child come age, come failure, come what may.

Route 62 from Irvine to Tidioute was a head-shaker of a road: tight, curvy, dark in all the wrong spots -- a wicked stretch between the foothills and the river.  Peterson had this blue hatchback, and there we were, tooling down the road, speakers blaring Metallica or Nirvana or some such angst.  The doe, of course, appeared out of nowhere, and we clipped her good, dented the hood even, so Peterson braked hard and skidded to a stop.  We found her in the brush beyond the weeds, hunkered low, legs folded in, and breathing hard. "What the heck," one of us said then stared some more at the loss until Peterson said, "Tire iron." "What?" "She's hurt.  We need to be merciful."

A few years back, my uncle stood with my cousin and me on the banks of the Brokenstraw Creek that ran through Youngsville.  He advised us to fish for trout in the bend where it gets deep.  He had given us similar advice before, but what struck me was how he punctuated his advice.  "You boys oughta float some night crawlers where the riffles begin to even out."  Boys.  There I was a thirty-something man with three kids so appreciative to be called a boy.

When my girls rides their bikes, they get suited up pretty well: pants, long-sleeve shirts, and helmet.  They are prepared for what might befall them as they cruise and wind around our cul-de-sac.  I think about how the adults of my youth would sometimes holler, "Get into the back of the truck!" and how we kids would be thrilled at the prospect of a hot summer's wind blowing through our young hair.  Is it sad that my kids may never hear that call to adventure?  I wonder.  Perhaps so.

I remember my grampa cutting kindling in the woodshed out behind my grandparents' little red-trimmed house on York Hill.  He would be out there for hours, never mind the dark, the cold, the solitude. Perhaps it was because of these things that he lingered until the cooling embers of the hearth could quietly summon him back inside so that they could be stoked and fed another log or two.  He was a man who kept to himself -- one who never insinuated himself into the affairs of others.  I can sill hear the soft crunch of icy snow beneath his booted feet.