J. Michael Dew

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.