Gratitude - GC

He stops and bends into the jasmine, I really missed that, he says. I put my arm around his shoulders and we walk to visit Amber, a friend who got him his first job at a place they call The Piss Factory. She pours drinks, cooks his favourite eggs - he talks about where he’d been and she kind of smiles, says, yes, it was the same for me. They trade stories, we play some poker, before we know it, it’s morning with the birds on the balcony screeching and flapping at her feeder. My boy and I walk back home, his eyes lit up with golden sparks, the sound of the freeway a whirring hum. Workmen run out a hose for concrete to pour into an empty block, nod as we walk past. That’s new, he says as we turn through the empty shopping mall. It feels grey and lonely with the drizzle starting so I talk about how, at his age, I would shelter in broken barns on mornings like this, when the rain was so hard it drove into your skin. At Papa’s place? he asks as two young girls accelerate away from the intersection, waving and grinning and he says I know her, that’s Ruby. 

Ruby with the purple lipstick, I ask? He just grins as we open the gate to our yard, and a family of squirrels run to safety under the trees. He gives me a hug and says Goodnight Dad, and we laugh. I wake in the afternoon and hear him talking with his mother in the upstairs bedroom saying I saw your dress and I think it looks really beautiful. I go quietly into the yard, grateful for the heat drying our suburbs, pull some weeds from the path, then, knees aching, walk to the shaded side of the house. I lean over the plastic bottles he had collected for some charity, let the water run cold from the tap, bend and slurp in great mouthfuls, stretch, tilt my face to the sun, become aware of the smell of the jasmine we planted last summer, and think, I’m not anyone and I know the universe doesn’t work like this, but thank you, God, that he’s back and he really seems to be ok.

Quote:

when I am gone, let others say 
they lost a happy man, 
though no one can tell how happy I was

Ha Jin

-Geoff