"AUTUMN LEAVES LIKE HOBOS HANKIES" is a gosh-darn special fast fiction based on this little burst of brilliance by the very talented Vancouver musician, artist, gentleman Lee Hutzulak
So grab your laptop and crawl into that mound of red-orange leaves you've just raked up , read these words like a child reading a tale under the sheets past bedtime and enjoy...
After my parents divorce, they landed upon the arrangement of weekend visitations as being the most efficacious use of everyone's time. My parents were lawyers and while they had representation during the divorce proceedings, they were the ones calling the shots. They retorted over torts.
Visitations. I hated the word for it sounded alien and ghostly at the same time. And visitation rights sounded even worse. Aliens had bartered with ghosts over when they could possess or abduct me.
The typical fatherly trick of holding out gifts as a lure to inspire love and excitement was cold comfort for me as my father had no sense of what an appropriate gift was. I was far too old for the inflatable blue elephant that he brought on his first visit and I was too young for the soddering iron kit he brought the second weekend.
What I remember most about those first weekends of the new arrangement were the crunching sounds of leaves beneath our feet as we walked through the trails in the local park. And of course I'll never forget that first weekend walking with that large blue elephant under my father's arm.
"Your mother is a wonderful woman. A saint. Yet she's also a bitch. I have to be honest with you," he said, putting his smallish hand on my shoulder.
The leaves crunched beneath our feet like the discarded and dried hankies of hobos. The only evidence of peripatetic moments that would never find a home in my heart.
"You know I'm doing all this because we love you," he said.
In my heart of hearts, I wanted to grow up to become whatever the opposite of a lawyer was.
So grab your laptop and crawl into that mound of red-orange leaves you've just raked up , read these words like a child reading a tale under the sheets past bedtime and enjoy...
AUTUMN LEAVES LIKE HOBOS HANKIES
After my parents divorce, they landed upon the arrangement of weekend visitations as being the most efficacious use of everyone's time. My parents were lawyers and while they had representation during the divorce proceedings, they were the ones calling the shots. They retorted over torts.
Visitations. I hated the word for it sounded alien and ghostly at the same time. And visitation rights sounded even worse. Aliens had bartered with ghosts over when they could possess or abduct me.
The typical fatherly trick of holding out gifts as a lure to inspire love and excitement was cold comfort for me as my father had no sense of what an appropriate gift was. I was far too old for the inflatable blue elephant that he brought on his first visit and I was too young for the soddering iron kit he brought the second weekend.
What I remember most about those first weekends of the new arrangement were the crunching sounds of leaves beneath our feet as we walked through the trails in the local park. And of course I'll never forget that first weekend walking with that large blue elephant under my father's arm.
"Your mother is a wonderful woman. A saint. Yet she's also a bitch. I have to be honest with you," he said, putting his smallish hand on my shoulder.
The leaves crunched beneath our feet like the discarded and dried hankies of hobos. The only evidence of peripatetic moments that would never find a home in my heart.
"You know I'm doing all this because we love you," he said.
In my heart of hearts, I wanted to grow up to become whatever the opposite of a lawyer was.
posted by kevin spenst at 10:46 PM
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