back where i grew up


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...

I was in my childhood bedroom. There was a king size bed now, and I was on the left side of it and my hospital friend from 1990 was on the right. We were giggling at the snoring old coot in the driver seat of the school bus at the foot of the bed.

Next morning we woke him up and went in to the ridiculously hippie remodeled kitchen to do coffee. I'm always the one to do coffee because I'm the only one ever to have taken the synaptic activity to make good coffee. Trouble was that finding the necessary equipment for it was really entirely too much of a chore. Everything was so purposely offbeat about that room full of counters with bizarre kitchen crap on them that I was losing my patience.

I was sidetracked to go back to the bedroom, where the school bus was now a very large armoire painted yuppie stark white, and I couldn't tell where the geezer had fallen out and stumbled down the hall toward the living room. I went there and there were seemingly thousands of gorgeous handmade guitars hanging everywhere, like ceiling dominoes, and there was a kid about thirty in there to tell how much I liked the guitar action.

I returned to the fray in the kitchen. Now there were more women in there beside me and my hospital buddy, and I was still at sixes and sevens over this ordeal made of something I can do in my sleep. The manly nurse who'd made me feel so safe last month and also known the secret of coffee grabbed me and took me to the new room they'd made of our garage.

It was full of zoo animals. Big cats, mostly, but also polar bears. I was about to pick up one of the leopard kittens when someone reminded me that Mom might not see things my way if I did. So I didn't.

Back to my ordeal. I was making some progress. I'd identified what was covertly a hotplate, like it would be embarrassing if it were a readily identifiable appliance, but decided to look around the house for a headcount on how many people wanted coffee before committing myself further.

There was a sitting room with three or five men in it. Newspapers. Pipes. I'm standing in the doorway, realizing my childhood home has turned into a bachelor pad and thinking they can damn well look after themselves.


pipe up any time....