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Man in a Parking Lot
Listen to Man in a Parking Lot, read by Garrison Keillor on The Writer’s Almanac for Wisconsin Public Radio (2007).
When you have a son you start seeing men backwards, intuiting their childhood selves beneath the years of accretions-- the bags and jowls, paunches, thickened, crumpled skin, the whole weight of the individual person/ality, its freight of filters, opinions, prejudices, habits, likes, congealed—as if you knew them before they even knew themselves. So when a man stumbles toward you, mumbling, across the Cubb’s Foods parking lot, unkempt and coatless in the snow, and your discriminating mind says “madman,” “danger,” though he never once looks up, locked in an altered world, fixed, unfixable, you lock your car door and then sit there wondering how it happened, when things started going wrong. Knowing he was once a toddler-- for pity’s sake—you find it strange, unreal, this mane of wild grey hair, grey beard. Somehow you know it doesn’t belong on him, all that hair, and you don’t know how he got to be so lost, so sick, so old. Read a review of Casting Off by Richard Swanson here. Order here to get your copy of Casting Off from Parallel Press. ISBN: 978-1-893311-90-9; paper $10.00 |
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