J. Michael Dew

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.