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The magic raincoat		what's love like?
Millions who mowed

Note: (000, YYMMDD) = the approximate Yahoo Message Board entry number and date.
Spelling, punctuation, grammar, and line phrasing are as originally posted by the author.

I had a magic raincoat for my birthday with luminous lapels you can see in the dark electric buttons like Christmas lights blinking alternately red, green, purple and fire in the most drenching downpours epaullettes of crimson and gold neon that flash on and off through the night and a buckle as brightly lit as the Pepsi ad in Piccadilly Circus I’m almost sad to get home and hear it is now safe to switch off my Macintosh

Old Cusser © Copyright, 2000

what’s love like? my youngest daughter asks god knows, I’m not Freud or Shakespeare well tell me about your first time god - I was 19 - she walked through the door - I nearly fell off my chair - what did she do? she just froze in the doorway - what was her name? god knows - well, um, doreen what happened next? I’d just discovered certain writers hemingway and lawrence saroyan and ts eliot - and she was discovering them too - we exchanged these authors a minute after we met! cool! how did you feel? full of myself, full of the world, ripe, ready, awesome, bursting with hope and confidence and a funny kind of ... pride what happened to her? we went our separate ways a year later why was that? we were 20 and our careers pulled us in different directions couldn’t you have hung on to each other? yes - but we didn’t know that then careers seemed important so I went north and she went south and what about the next time you fell in love was it just the same? no - it’s never the same twice how could I meet a girl who was reading all those books at the same time as me? and have you been in touch since then? god - no! why not? it just isn’t done why not? it’s against the rules I don’t know why stupid rules! dad dad, why the silence? she’s grown old and so have I but she’s still 20 in my head if we met now we’d both be ancient dad, does all this make you sad? no, the picture keeps me warm on winter nights

Old Cusser © Copyright, 2000

Were you one of the millions who mowed this first Sunday morning in May? feeling useful for once feeling worthy and respectable feeling at one with the whole mowing universe

working up an appetite for the first new potatoes and feeling you’ve earned the glass of wine that goes with them and the mind churning like the engine of the mower throwing up tufts of verse and leaves of memory

beheading the dandelions and daisies so that they lie like white and yellow fluff on the green carpet of a dressmaker’s workshop and debating the morality of this questioning whether your zeal for neatness and conformity with the great battalions of mowers makes you a Nazi destroyer of flowers but content that otherwise you’d have a jungle

considering the many who came before you and cut this lawn and long ago went to lie beneath the daisies and the ones who will come after and curse you for this couch grass and how you will be but a dim memory or forgotten entirely by that new generation of mowers who will behead the great grandchildren of these dandelions and daisies and think the same thoughts you have been thinking this first Sunday morning in May

Old Cusser © Copyright, 2000

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