in response to DC asking the question:
"What are/were your father's and mother's professions?"

My father:
My father crawled into paintings while asleep. He would come back home, back to his sleep, after having repaired someone that was always waiting. Sometimes, despite the attempted repair, someone would die. These experiences caused sediment to build up around his bed, to the point at which he felt stuck. During his years of doing this work, my father was asked to teach the art of crawling. There was a profound recognition within him of the limitations of his ability to do so.

He couldn’t leave his bed. He had accumulated too much sediment, so much so that he had become an island. There was a red and black book on the nightstand beside a small reading lamp--a small atoll within reach of his island. One night he slept deeper than usual and, while crawling off into the painting above the teak headboard, he became stuck between the planes; stuck within the oil and canvas and the sandy mattress. He died with his body dangling from the wall. Some part of him was never found.

Not that this has anything to do with who my father was, but it’s connected with my memories of him, so I’ll tell you about it. The red and black book was rescued from the nightstand and tucked into a new bed in another room. This bed did not have a headboard. Nor was it encased and enshrouded in sandy moments. Another painting—one created by the same artist as the one in which my father had died—was hung above the book and headboardless mattress. It was hoped that this would facilitate—or more properly “awaken”—the abilities that some speculated lay dormant in the book. But the book never moved. It did not crawl, could not crawl, and perhaps would not crawl. This point has always been unclear. I always thought it was because they used the wrong painting.

In retrospect, it seems that no one really cared much about the book. The bed sat in an area where the afternoon sun beat through the window. I remember that it was sad to even look in that room. The red and black ink eventually became oxidized to a faded pink and grey by the sun. In the end the painting was removed and sold along with the others. The room was emptied. My father was eventually forgotten. As to the book, it was thrown into the trash years later after having been watched very very closely for any signs of talent.

My mother:
My mother was a linoleum tile. It was hard work as near as I can tell. She never said much about it. But I knew. She would come home with scuffmarks on her face sometimes. But she was beautiful. They don’t make patterns like hers anymore. It was sad when she got older really. She stopped even trying to wash and strip the wax off of herself.

I remember when I learned that she was actually cracked—this wasn’t long after my father died. She hid that fact very well to everyone but me. So well in fact, that no one believes me when I talk about the times that she took a linoleum knife to herself. It was hard on me. One afternoon, when I was a teenager, I came home stoned—I wore a silk bag rubbed with sandlewood oil to cover the smell--and found her in a small bathroom wedging the door closed. I thought she was broken forever and called a maid service to rush out and buff her up. I guess she was trying to fix the crack. It was weird and kind of horrible in its violence. That experience peaked my interest for a while—I read everything I could find on linoleum repair for a year straight. Of course, repairs were what my father did for a living. I never had that gift. But, hey, I was a kid. I think that’s what she was really doing with that knife, trying to invoke my father to return from the dead and fix her.

So in the end I just accepted my mom as she was, used and broken, but capable of incredible shininess when she put her mop to it. She died when someone didn’t recognize that the waxy build-up was smothering her. I wasn’t there to recognize the signs. If I had been there perhaps she could have been stripped, cleaned, and waxed again. I have to live with that. Some part of me believes that her’s was an unnecessary death. Yeah, that’s the truth as far as I am concerned.

One last thing about my mom:
My mother always told me how she wished that her and my father had gone through with having me laminated. She would say that would have been best. There would be no need for me to be repaired or cleaned. I would be immune to wear. Plus she speculated that if I ever found myself stuck between planes that it would be much harder to become cut in half like my father. She always wished that I could crawl like dad. But she realized that despite my having been born a tarot card—a pip of the minor arcana no less-- I was far more like her. I too get scuffmarks.

There is an important difference between my parents and myself though. I am afraid of knives and I don’t sleep well at night despite living on an island of moments. No one reads me consistently anymore. I have more in common with dad’s book than anything I guess. Despite being frayed and having a small tear in my left-hand corner—or being able to allow someone to pretend to crawl into my image-- I am not like my parents. No I am more like the book. I am oxidized and fading. I am talentless unless someone reads me and even then they are usually wrong. I elicit no repairs of any substance. I cannot respond to chemical cleaning agents. That’s where they went wrong while watching those moments in that sunny room—no one bothered to read the book. I wish they had had me laminated.