I’ll see you again, when the show is over.
I’ll push through the glass doors to the sidewalk. You wait outside the glow of marquee lights, watching traffic. Hair tucked behind your ear, the softer illuminations of taillights and neon signs color your face. You glance at me. Your eyes talk, and there’s no way I could have held the memory of how beautiful you are. I knew you’d be here, but the warmth fizzing in my chest is strange and almost more than I can contain.
The night air feels good; soft and warm. I’m still breathing, because why wouldn’t I be breathing here?
I’m glad it’s summer. It’s what I hoped for. I smell city—perfume and exhaust, cigarettes and food—and the fragrances are just the same as always. I hear the whoosh of cars, the murmur of unseen crowds, and Blondie sings “Heart of Glass” from a rooftop.
The best things are eternal because there are no accidents and no coincidences. I want to kiss you, but not yet. We have time, now.
“How was your movie?” you ask. “Did you have fun?”
I nod and shrug, at the same time. “Mostly okay, I think. I’m not sure about fun.” I haven’t really had time to think about the show being over, and forever beginning.
“Tell me the truth.” Your laugh makes me laugh too, the way it always did. “You thought the movie was all there was, didn’t you? They told you nothing was real, and you believed it.”
It seems foolish now, with this never-ending city blooming around us, but maybe I doubted magic. Some dark mornings, I thought dreams were only synapses. I shrug again.
“We should go for pie,” you confide. “Find a diner and sit in a booth. It isn’t really a date, if we don’t.”
“I always wanted to get pie and coffee after a movie,” I say. “Hold hands under the table and talk about the show.”
“No sense, otherwise.” You nod. “Romance was always the point.”
I move to cross the street, and you touch my elbow. Look. A paper-girl glides past, jangling her bicycle bell. On the opposite corner, an old woman watches us. She holds a duck in the crook of one arm. There are Christmas lights in the trees, which is perfect in our July. We never believed in rules.
“Afterward, we can walk down to the lake,” you say. “It’s a nice walk, if you’re not too tired.”
I catch your hand. I’m walking with you as long as you’ll have me, and I tell you so. I’m not tired, anymore.
Your breath is warm against my ear. “They run the Ferris wheel all night here,” you murmur. “Let’s go.”
( -Dear Ghost)
Bob Bickford
When I was little the library was my favorite place.I was born in Lone Pine, California. My parents liked to move and so did I, for a while. I have roots throughout the United States, but I was mostly raised in Toronto, Canada.
My father was a psychiatric social worker who grew up in the slums of Boston. He was a tough guy who got an education on the GI bill and pulled himself out of his birthright. He married twice, the first time to a woman who left him a widower. Alone with a toddler, I suppose he was determined that it wouldn’t happen to him again, because the second time he married a woman much younger than he was.
She was the product of a Southern family; royalty that included the same Duke family that bought a university and named it after itself. Wilful and rebellious, she scorned Southern convention, rejected the closeted skeletons and wide streak of alcoholism that hid behind decorated formality. She disowned her family, converted to Catholicism, marched for civil rights, and married the older man from a poverty-stricken background. I am the oldest of the seven children she bore, one after the next.
We were brought up in curious contrasts. There were the economies that so many mouths to feed on a middle class income made necessary; (hand-me-down clothes, Tang and powdered milk, peanut butter for ten thousand consecutive school lunches), but my mother’s background dictated private schools, music and dance and art lessons.
I attended St. Michael’s Choir School and studied piano and organ at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. I hated studying anything at all; my mother was determined that I should be a doctor and despaired over my future. I only wanted to read fiction, and did so endlessly. The library was my favorite, enchanted place (it still is). I didn’t realize I was in fact studying for what I wanted to do most.
My father’s plan to not be widowed again fell through, and my mother was suddenly gone when I was 16. He had been ill equipped to raise one child the first time, and now there were eight of them; the youngest only three years old. In some sense we lost him, too.
Life changed, just like that. My behavior guaranteed me a quick expulsion from my exclusive school. I did manage a high school diploma (by the skin of my teeth) but I was mostly happy to leave school for good. I lost an early love, and wandered to Los Angeles. I learned about the streets, and about living in the places that cause most people to lock their car doors when they drive through. I was blessed with the same genes that took my father through life in the mean part of Boston, and survived.
Eventually, I grew up and moved again, first to Atlanta and then back to Canada. I made a living in the ‘fixing cars’ arena. I live in a very old house on a wooded lot that is infested by dogs and turtles and parrots, and perhaps the ghost of a young girl. My teen-aged son is a light in my life who wants to be an author and a professional football player. I never tell him that both are nearly impossible, because they aren’t.
The library has continued to haunt me. When age said the possibility of a university degree was long past, I decided to try my hand at a novel anyway. Somehow I finished it, and have produced one a year since. I’m working on my tenth.
You can visit Bob’s Blog HERE.
You can buy Bob’s many books HERE.
The humans put the money in the money basket -- so that all contributors may become plump with their labour.