The Pontificators

There she is. She sleeps. Reddish brown downy hair over wispy eyebrows. Her cheeks are round and pink. Angelina bee stung lips with two little points on the top part briefly to mime a tiny yawn. Her eyes are a little puffy but with a promise of being very large; they are long from side to side. Little popcorn nose.

Long slender fingers with long nails. Perhaps a pianist or flautist in bud stage. Little shell ears; reprieve from the famiy curse. Sweet little baby wrapped in flowered jammies and plush pink blankets.

She looks just like her mama.

Electric saw, drills, hammers. Conversation echoeing off stripped floors and unpainted walls. Sharp smell of fresh saw dust in the breeze. Late night bare light bulbs burning. Trash cans full of wood scraps and fast food wrappers. Red bull. Pepsi. Cold shrivelled dried fries.

Empty cans grouped in sticky clusters. Walkway with cleaned brushes drying in the morning sun. Paint roller the diameter of a half dollar on a wand six feet long. Taupe, deep red, lemon yellow, white and chrome.

Splintered wood, bent nails, mounds of dirt; new fence. Soiled rugs peeled and rolled; dumpster roiling.

“FOR RENT”

The small sprouts lean; curled, tinged with brown and sad. “Why?” they ask. “Why did you buy us? We were so promising… so full of life. You looked and looked so carefully to choose only us. It was important to you. How could you forsake us like that?”

“Well,” I respond, “I had a picture of what could be. It was vibrant, colorful, blooming and happy. I did not mean to let you sit in the heat wave until you became so forlorn. I feel bad but I cannot change what was. Besides, human life comes before plant life.”

Once I lived in a townhouse with noisey neighbors. Daily they stomped up each stair in heavy steel toed boots. We lived inside a triangle of railroad tracks, elevated electrical train tracks and a jam packed freeway. Our home was on a block with gang members, head bangers, hispanics and polka connoisseurs.

Forget opening the window if it was hot outside. Four kinds of music played all at once. I guess it beat the previous home next door to a very throaty rooster.

When we moved here we could not sleep. It was too quiet. We learned to cope.