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Show Blue Run/72 Brother Dell's straight-banged wife ran, always laughing out loud, saying beans after every sentence Then I'd take 89 out into the country, a nice drive with sun raining down on the bitterweed and does crossing the road with yearling fawns-the ripe world all heartbreak-fresh and sweet. I'd park beside the Furlow Methodist Church and wait for the white van to roll up and die. Joey was sixteen then and had this yellow Pinto he'd bought himself with summer construction money So I'd be sitting there in my oldest son's Pinto, rolling the day over in my head and listening to whatever band of long-haired hippies in his eight track-Z.Z. Top this one day, feisty Texas blues, music with some zing to it. This would be late fall, a payday Friday, maybe How I latch on to that time, when I was thirty-six, about to be thirty-seven, and O.W.'s off dead-heading across Georgia with my picture taped up in the cab of his sleeper. Late fall, hoarfrost on the ground and sugar maple leaves are floating down in tight little zigzags from the tree where newlyweds were photographed And I'm thinking of the times I said yes, how outright weird it was to get married~to plight one's troth. And the sugar maple leaves are zigzagging down when the car pool van rolls up, dies, waits for the rest of us to show up, get in, and have ourselves driven to Maybelline to stuff lipsticks all day long with a fifteen minute cigarette break and a baloney sandwich \ Only this day I always picture, I'm listening to this long-beard blues band sing about tush, and it's the sort Arkansas-crisp morning at the tail end of October and I'm thirty-six, no-way over the hill, and the systemic lupus is still just a little firecracker with its fuse on fire in my veins. Over the Pinto's cackly speakers the music thrums, makes me think of Memphis and the river bridge over to Mud Island where they do the Jesus out of the blues all day and all night. Dance to the genuine article, Howlin' Wolf and Carl Perkins' wild twin cousins, Conway Twitty before he died, Jerry |