Excelsior

MEMOIR (and) GRAND PRIZE FOR MEMOIR IN POETRY OR PROSE

 

PERRY GLASSER

 

The paper in my father’s lockbox may once have been white, but it had faded to a dull, aged yellow, and the blue-black ink long ago had oxidized to rusty brown. The fountain-pen script had great looping whorls on the Fs and Ls. Folded and refolded, the paper had grown soft and parted at a crease. My father carefully patted the two fragile pieces smooth on the kitchen table, fitting them together as if they were intricately patterned wallpaper, a task at which he had a lifetime’s experience. He would use no cellophane tape. “That crap dries up and curls,” he explained. “Ruins everything.”

The date at the page’s bottom read 1930, so he’d been eighteen when he wrote the poem about Anna, a girl in Staten Island. That was far from his haunts in the Bronx. With his two palms flat on the paper, he pivoted it toward me. At a kitchen table, my hands at my sides, I read my father’s poetry.

It was awful.

 

My parents had retired to Florida. I visited now and again. My mother, Muriel, took a daily stroll among the hydrangea-lined paths of their condo development. My father did not walk with my mother because he’d lost four toes to diabetes and so he was unsteady on his feet. While she was out, my father withdrew his lockbox from the bottom of a drawer bureau where it rested beneath several heavy sweaters schlepped from New York City, bulky knits my mother had stitched but no one would ever wear again. Like pharaohs in their burial chambers, in God’s Waiting Room, Florida, retirees surround themselves with the props they’ll require for eternity.

 

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