This is an excerpt from two short stories I wrote about parents and their aging… Published and Available on Amazon here

Dandelions

It always seems to go by so quickly. Even if the clean up is a real pain in the you-know-what. The crystal glasses clink loudly against each other as I pluck them off the dirty dining room table. Crumbs and crust and the ruins of a great meal, if I do say so myself, lay strewn across the silk tablecloth. Or knock-off silk. I’ve never quite been too certain. But it is silky to the touch. I figure that’s all that really matters.

The wine residue leaves a pool of dried red nectar at the bottom of the crystal glasses. I take them carefully, as I do every Christmas and New Years, from the dining room table and walk them into the kitchen. My fingers are numb. The cold of the outdoor December has wriggled its way into my bone marrow. It stings with a numb throb. The glasses feel as heavy as tombs.

“Huh!” I gasp as I watch one of these ancient relics slip from my wrinkled, purple fingers. A loud brevato of shattering and scattering glass thrashes into the air from the tile floor. I end the short symphony with a staccato, shameful encore of, “Oh no.”

My sore, cold, blue fingertips tremble. The glass glides in a sacrificial silence across the flooring. A pool of sharded, beautiful glass spills out over my black shoes and slides, unchallenged, across the white tile kitchen flooring.

“What is it, hon?” My man lumbers in. He’s already changed out of his old khakis and his polo shirt, and into fart-soaked, food-stained, plaid pajamas.

“It’s the crystal, Frank.”

“Oh no,” he pushes his concern, I know he cares more about how I care than the glasses themselves. It’s why I love him. But, he would have traded these glasses in years ago. 

I curse the floor for not catching my crystal, this goblet of Christmas delight, this chalice of golden days, this grail of holly-hearts. I curse the tile that I had chosen with Frank eight years prior for not being soft― for not cradling the glass and catching it skillfully. 

We’ve had these glasses since our wedding. They’ve stood stoic and perfectly still for over two decades, eleven months out of every year. They’re guardians of the China Cabinet―the mirrored chest of drawers that our kids knew was for looking only, no touching allowed. They couldn’t have cared less anyhow. 

But I have the eye of a crow. Shiny, shiny, shiny. Crows are the smartest bird, you know? And now I have shiny, shiny all across the kitchen floor. The crystal glass shards now shimmer in the dim yellow light of the LED bulbs. The idea of vacuuming right now almost hurts more than to watch the sparkle of this glass illuminate from every dark corner of the room. It hurts more than my icicle-blue fingertips.

The kids, they start to come down now too, having heard my gasp and Frank’s lumbering footsteps. Rose and Joey come down concerned, and ready to poke fun. Usually I like the attention. But not now. I couldn’t take it right now. This crystal would have been an heirloom, their heirloom. It would have held me, as a living memory in their future homes, like a genie in a wine glass. 

Rose, careful not to come too close, her pale, bare feet always careful to avoid injury, pokes her head around the corner and looks into the kitchen from the den. She watches me and pushes her glasses to her nose and wrinkles her lips. 

“Ma!” she shouts, her voice is always a yell― something she learned from Frank. My loud, lovely little lady. “Ma, what’s the matter?” Her neck is crooning with concern and her pale skin shows the glimmer of her blue eyeballs. She sees my blue fingers. Raynaud’s they call it. Numb, blue fingers from the cold―it’s from bad circulation, especially in the winter. It’s why we bought a house in Florida. 

Rose sees past my blue fingers and into my red eyes fighting back, trying to keep Christmas about the joy in our hearts, not my love of these stupid, now broken glasses.

What if too often I see my face― pretty fit for a woman in her sixties― staring from the China Cabinet, my own hazel eyes trapped like a genie in these crystal wine glasses, waiting to be passed down and remembered? The heirloom. An heirloom. God and material things all wrapped up together like pretzel dough, or the white and red on a candy cane? I think I wrote a poem about this once…years ago… Something about age and a growing garden[…]

The Right Notes

The boundless is unconquerable for many. Often, people lie down in the middle of their lives and let the tides pull them under. But he floated, certain that destiny and the pointing needle of his True North had been followed step by step, even though the seas had been all but tamed. 

Franklin Rossini sat back in his recliner, his body raised above the red stone work of the patio beneath him while the red, Florida sun started to set. His curly, Italian hair poofed outward into the eternal humidity as sweat speckled his face like a Jackson Pollock painting. He took a sip from a giant plastic cup of water, letting the chunks of ice frolic in his white chest hairs. The cold meltwater was vivacious in the swelter.

He sat balanced in the now and in the past, all things that had come, a test to his stoic formidability, and his passionate belligerence. All things ahead of him, a perfect promise of release and exhalation, all things behind him, a whirling sea that only the fortitudinous could surpass. 

Retirement had been the hardest goal ahead of him, an island in the ocean of life, a perfectly lit, perfectly weathered place of intimate tranquility, but such tranquility is never forged in the meekest of manners. Tranquility is forged with the bombastic pining of the human soul, the horrendous hurricanes of tropical thunders, and the rolling up and tearing of sleeves. Tranquility is the endless symphony of silence that comes after mountainous winds of sound, and tantalizing whispers over the quiet.

Symphonies were something he had known well. Symphonies had been bound to the very soul of Franklin Rossini ’s life. He hummed one now in his head as he sucked on the last remnants of ice in his cup. His heated body sweated between the red brick of the stone below him and the red sun retiring behind the white picket fence in front of him. 

The song he was humming, Beethoven’s Third Symphony, galloped and danced, it tickled and swooned, it bashed and it brooded, and the serene notes brought him to the rough waters of his youth, when his love of music first began in the neighborhoods of Long Island.

It was at twelve years old when Franklin knew that music was to capture not only his heart, but the very purpose of his life. He was in his room, practicing as silently as one can with a baritone saxophone, as the mid-September afternoon danced outside his small window. 

For the whole of America, the sixties was a time of great change: in music, in hair, in sexuality; but for a boy of twelve years in 1969, living under the begruzzled, yet watchful eye of an Italian father of four, the world was very small, and very frightening.

Meals were eaten quickly to avoid conflict, chores were done promptly, completely, and efficiently, and then redone when that wasn’t good enough. Yard work was done the hard way, with small, heavy tools that broke backs. The term, “Sir” was an economic exchange in which the giver had an infinite supply, and the taker was always willing for more, especially if the word “yes” accompanied it. 

Every home is a man’s kingdom, and Giuseppe Rossini, Franklin’s father, was a swift, dominating tyrant, soft and caressing only to his wife, Maggie, for whom he would pluck diamonds from the night sky if he only could.

Giuseppe Rossini had sculpted his children with calloused, burnt, electrician’s hands. Hands that were heavy with doubt and impatience at the world, a world that could never quite be molded the way that Giuseppe thought it could be. Yet, he sought it to be that way regardless, and his empty wanting left him impatient, tyrannical, and uncompromising. 

Giuseppe held his children like one holds an old catcher’s mitt―knowing it would last forever, even with beatings and scoldings, and layers of dust. He taught the boys, Franklin and Giuseppe Jr. how to box in the backyard, how to scar one’s face, how to bare your teeth in the way that could take a hit. His wife, Maggie, taught the women how to cook and clean with impatience and stout skill, but also how to listen, how to love, and that Jesus Christ himself would always be there for those of the Sicilian ilk.

And so, on that mid-September afternoon in 1969, Franklin Rossini sat upstairs in his room and played his baritone saxophone. He practiced the boxy, blasting melodies of John Philip Sousa in a weak pianissimo so as to not upset his father, who was sipping whiskey on the front porch outside. He struggled to push the air over a fat lip he had received from Giuseppe the evening before in one of their ‘boxing lessons.’

The music warmed his soul, though it made his lip numb, and canker sores sweltered in, around, and under his lip, the melody, as simple as it was, warmed his skin, emboldened his soul, and made the fears of the downstairs tyrant more mute with every note[…]