Gev Sweeney: Stories & Stuff

Now the canal was gone, the Old Overflow was no more, and Mommy’s father and the skunky dog were mummified tales preserved by Mommy and Daddy and uncles, aunts, and cousins who would stop on the slog through their personal deserts and expose the memories to derision, mourning the dead and enjoying the loss as they relived in words growing up in the Great Depression, bereft of childhood, forsaking school for jobs as low in status as they were in pay: ironing linens in a laundry, swilling counters for a butcher, sweeping homemade whiskey from the oil-blotched floor of a body shop. They were raised in a part of the city where American-Irish and American-German and American-Italian and American-Syrian and American Lebanese kids played basketball together and went to school and dated and it didn’t matter that their parents were still learning English, and you were as likely to hear cliffhangers about the famo...

  L A T E R she would remember t he woman in the muskrat coat: how she smiled on the snowy street shining gold in the late-day sun , a sleepy puppy in her arms. And later she would remember the hot-powder scent of the movie projector, and the raspy whir of machinery spinning images she couldn’t remember seeing for herself but were captured when they got the dog for Christmas. (See? There’s the tree, in the parlor, a Daddy-tall evergreen dripping silvery strips around obese raindrops in pine-needle grottos glowing blue or red or yellow.) But that would be later. In the beginning she didn’t know where she was or when she was or what she was or who she was or that she was or that there was anything like a beginning. Her life was one thing after the other. Not in the meaning of a parade of trials and troubles and travesties. In the meaning of whatever was in front of her, or beside her or in the room with her. ...