something about going to Tulsa

Mr. Barnes,

I went to Tulsa once, more than 25 years ago, to visit my sister. She and her husband had just moved there so he could die near where he was born. He was diagnosed with cancer a few months into the marriage. The last time I saw him, he was in a hospital bed in Dallas, and his head was deformed and exploding with his disease. That visit was goodbye.

A few weeks later, I was pulled out of Spanish class so my family could join my widowed sister's side. I rode to Tulsa, Oklahoma in the back seat of my other sister's boyfriend's coupe—a Camaro. I felt the giddiness, nervousness, and melancholy one feels when one doesn't know what else to feel. But the mood in the Camaro was fine, with my other sister and her boyfriend magnetically alive and well. They seemed happy. Those two had great chemistry, like cocaine and alcohol.

In Tulsa, we found my parents, who had arrived from Dallas to console the inconsolable. My sister, 22, tragic, had been living with death in a strange city, and now death left her alone in that house. So she grieved, and we offered our presence as comfort. Little did I understand of sadness and grief.

about relative success

You're saved if your father takes no interest in you. You're ruined if you wish he had.

The path around the backyard

Watered, green escape; a little unkempt but altogether perfect. Garden beds along the path hugging in the grass. Clothesline, birdbath, roses and dogwood. The big pecan tree and shade freckled with sun. Even back then this was already a place protected in the warm trust of memory. Greened my hands with the broken skins of unripe pecans smashed against the tree trunk. Grandpa's Lava soap cleaned my hands, and his knowing it would was better than my hands returned unstained

 

How it was

I was never closer to him than during those few weeks, weeks that exploded like moments, when the language he had heard since birth promised to realize from his lips into our world as humidity will from stirred up air some dark April nights in North Texas. Those days he'd watch how my mouth formed words, inch his fat little hand to my lips, (so close right then), him believing it was just a matter of getting the mechanics right, making the jaw and teeth and tongue do their work. But communicating was more difficult than that, obviously, and he would learn that lesson most sincerely for having known me.