On This Day

One year on this day my dog died. I didn’t call Larry to wish him a happy birthday because I didn’t want to tell him about Isaac.

When I met Larry, he was hanging with friends down the street. We were all outside all the time, especially in the summer. Rumor was he had marriage trouble. He’d met his second wife in the hospital where they sent him after the sledgehammer incident at the bank, when they wouldn’t cash the check that he thought would save his first marriage.

We sat on my porch steps and smoked and watched all the people. He came for dinner a lot. Larry talked and I listened. Unless I talked, then he listened.

His father taught him die making. He became a talented machinist; he loved making things fit perfectly.

He thought in poetry, read a lot of mythology, and liked punk music best. When it all got away from him, he would send long rambling emails full of Norse gods and seraphs, maritime history and Pogues lyrics. 

He made it to almost every show I played. His favorite song was one I’d written years before about a homeless dude at Christmas. Real uplifting stuff.

Some people found his silent lurking uncomfortable. He was tall, and stood in the corner with his hands in his pockets a lot. I don’t think I ever saw him in a trench coat, but it wouldn’t have seemed odd, as long as there was a black t-shirt underneath.

Sometimes he couldn’t make the stories in his head stop. He got employed, married, hospitalized, fired, divorced. Re-employed, remarried. He broke it again and again. He got broke, broker, broken.

One day in a tiny diner in the middle of a junkyard he showed up looking handsome as ever - in a sweet leather jacket - to grudgingly let me buy him breakfast after he’d slept on the street again.

That’s the day he said, “I didn’t mind being one of the sheep. It was when I realized I was wool that I got angry.” He said all the ways to get help required surrendering something, and he didn’t have much left.

He got in a couple of fights, got robbed, got arrested, got a knife because he was too scared. He gave it to some girl in a halfway house full of men because she needed it more.

Eventually he got connected with a roof and some doctors. He got a cat. A computer he could use to send pictures of the cat. We were more than a thousand miles apart by then. 

On April Fool’s Day, he posted “Don’t run, Hillary.”  

It had been a weird April 1 for me: I’d been called ‘sir’ at Home Depot, a common occurrence, but this time the perpetrator was a basic unpretty paunchy white middle-aged man inexplicably wearing lipstick, nail polish and dangly earrings with his flannel shirt, jeans, and high-heeled sandals. I declined assistance, but retained the image. 

It was six more weeks before I realized Larry hadn’t posted anything new.

I sent a message, something like “Sup?” Nothing, weeks. I sent another, threatening drastic measures like a phone call. The number I had was no good. 

And then it was his birthday. I texted his sister. She couldn’t reach him, then his son tried and…

That was five years ago. This morning I did not wake with the date on my mind. I’ve been struggling for a week to write something I can stand about my grandmother, finding too many layers, too much space between facts to separate memory from imagination. 

Plus, sometimes tragedy plus time is still not funny.  

Big Brother reminded me over coffee it was Lawrence’s birthday today. Walking past Isaac’s grave on my way to barn chores, I ran through it all in my head. No saving him now.

Over breakfast, I got a text from a friend who works at a bank. She’s never heard of Larry or his birthday. But today some guy had lost it over a closed account and screamed all kinds of threats at bank employees and a sheriff’s deputy before storming out and kicking in a nearby door.

Understandably, her first reaction to screamed threats of violence was not compassion. I’d never given a thought to the people in the bank the day Larry surrendered, first to his helpless rage, then to the police. 

If I were writing fiction, I’d discard that incident as too neat, too clever, to include. But I’m writing non-fiction, and that really happened today.

Real life can orbit like that sometimes. Maybe it’s coincidence; maybe it’s a spinning sphere.

Either way, here I was with my friend:

Me: “Sucks to have to witness someone’s life coming apart.”

Her: “It’s easy to dismiss people when there’s a threat of violence. Sometimes it’s hard to remember everyone has a story. This was one of those times.”

Everyone has a story. Every story can be reframed, so many ways. It’s a wonder anyone still writes.