Michigan
The city was a valley full of lights.
Another day: spring: a raging fall of red earth-colored
waters: Tahquamenon Falls at the top of the upper
peninsula : more beautiful than Niagara. My mother
and I shared it with strangers.
While we toured a reconstructed fort, someone stuck an
advertisement for it on the rear chrome bumper of our
Chevrolet, but we didn’t really mind.
I was lost once on that trip in a patch of Michigan woods.
I somehow found my way back to the road. that we had
been traveling on and then to my mother’s car, yet it was
a panicked experience for most of an hour. I must have
walked unknowingly in a semi-circle back through the woods
The Ontario countryside of rolling hills and green meadows
appeared very similar to Quebec’s. One difference was that
the Quebec back roads showed an occasional emaciated figure
of Jesus on a cross.
Some of the Ontario roads had been carved out of small blue-
gray shale mounds or knolls about ten feet or so high. I removed
a few pretty rocks for souvenirs.
Finally we returned to retrace our route back home. My mother
and I lived on a farm in southern Michigan at that time which was
flat country, but good for growing crops: wheat , oats and corn.
Southern Michigan never gave you the same lonely feeling as did
the upper peninsula Is it still as lonely up there or has it become
more populated after all these years?
Heading down that night, just after dusk, into the darkened valley
toward those small-city Petoskey lights could actually, in those days,
be called magical.
Unknown Friends
The second run
movie theater
can be found
behind the mall
and is waiting
patiently
to embrace you
within its
cavernous walls
of darkness for
one dollar and
ninety nine cents.
Cool darkness too.
Won’t you partake
of the lovely candy
and popcorn?
Liquid refreshment?
Forget your troubles for two hours
and twenty five minutes while the
surround sound system deafens you
and blasts you into submission as you
closely follow the story line until it’s
finally finished and you move away with
the sparse audience---your new temporary
unknown friends---into the light again.
Satisfied.
Town And Country
A broad nose and large soft blue eyes. Blond hair.
Overweight, but not obese. Wearing a cheap black cloth coat and a
funny looking matching hat. She nervously walked through the streets
of the small Michigan town. I was by her side, a little boy then. Or
back on the farm where we lived: fried potatoes and maybe a roast for
supper. She made lists of everything: what she was going to do next
or tomorrow, what she needed at the grocery store when we went to
town. We had home made sausage sometimes after her second husband
and his friends butchered a fat hog, starting early, before the sun came up.
Later, in Ohio, widowed, she lived close to her married daughter, Joyce.
I was a young man by then. When we returned home from shopping to
the small pink rented house, day time or night time, I would have to check
under the beds and in the closets and behind the shower curtain in the bath-
room for non-existent men. She could not live alone at night. After I married
Trish and was gone from the little pink house, her niece or nephew had to take
turns staying with her every evening.
She always chose domineering men to marry. She was drawn to them somehow.
They would tell her what to do, control her life. Then she would eventually leave
them. My sister and I were products of her first marriage. Her second husband,
the farmer, was reunited with her for a short time before he died of lung cancer
from smoking cigarettes all his life. That happened in Columbus, Ohio.
She moved in with her only daughter Joyce during the third and final marriage.
Then her health gradually deteriorated. Now she very occasionally occupies my
dreams where she is as real somehow as she was in life, even though the dreams,
of course, are not.
~Joseph Buehler
