1. |
Restaurant
04:05
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My brother, Seymour, the old cowboy. Still working in the stockyards at his age. I have to remember to ask for a table away from the window next time; he gets so distracted. Fidgety character, he is, shy, I guess. He doesn't get up to Dallas much. Still, he could be nicer to Mom on her birthday. I'm paying for it, after all. He's a good guy at heart. Read the books I gave him last Christmas. And he's not fighting anymore, getting himself arrested. Seems like a woman could love him. Despite everything, Mom loves him. She is his mother. She loves him and worries for him because he is big and awkward and shy, but she'd rather spend an evening like this alone with me. He glances up at a waitress for a second, not to be caught. Says he doesn't like the city. Maybe he'll end up an old farmer like Grandpa. Actually, now that I think about it, those two have a lot in common. Seymour takes that long bus trip up to see him all the time.
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2. |
Best Day of my Life
04:07
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Well there are only fifty-three things I remember
One of them is a scratch and sniff of rain
It made me close my eyes and kiss the ground
Thank the Lord for coming round
And I knew
That was the best day of my life
Seymour waits on a hard bench in the Fort Worth Greyhound station. Polished sunday-go-to-meeting boots, sharp toes and riding heels. He's got new jeans, a flannel jacket and a clean white shirt for traveling. One big hand holds the other in his lap. Now at first glance you might take Seymour for a rough old Texan. He's a big boned fellow with arms capable of carrying around hundred pound feed bags all day. But you look again and you see a lot of the child in Seymour.
Well in my pocket I've got a hologram of mother
She had it made for me just before she died
And when I tip it's silvery surface
I can watch her blow a kiss and wink and eye
And I knew
That was the best day of my life
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3. |
Where the West Begins
02:53
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A makeshift church, a grocery store
Organ music for the poor
A cola sign above the door
Where the West begins
Cowboy joints and neon lights
The edge of town where commerce fights
With sagebrush and the Texas night
Where the West Begins
Fort Worth, Texas to Fargo, North Dakota
Trip he's made a dozen times before
Seymour let his seat fall back
Face against the window glass
He watched the broken pavement pass
Where the West begins
Seymour closed his heavy eyes
Saw his path, one long straight line
And endless cornfield, harvest time
Where the West begins
Fort Worth, Texas to Fargo, North Dakota
Trip he's made a dozen times before
The day is done for country folk
In Texas, Kansas, Oklahoma
Iowa and South Dakota
Where the West begins
And there's another evening passed
From gray through ocean blues to black
You'll never get your childhood back
Where the West begins
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4. |
Goatherd
02:38
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Nib bee the ground with your shy and envied teeth
Look to the sky and blare out a meaningless song
Last afternoon panic
Tendless kids are you all
The August light comes high in the air and sees autumn
A cap in the wind and a horn in the sky where it falls
Recline in the valley of hazel
Burning the evening shawl
And I don't know where you're going
But you're all at my dispatch
From the tops of the hills and the hooves on the ground
You kick up the dust and battle my wish for a calm goatherd
Do you dream of the coming passion of winter
Do you shiver at the thought of the end of the fall
Across the sky shoots a soldier
Good luck, goodnight and goodbye
And I don't know where you're going
But you're all at my dispatch
From the tops of the hills and the hooves on the ground
You kick up the dust and battle my wish for a calm goatherd
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5. |
Vermillion, South Dakota
01:48
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When the bus arrived in Vermillion, South Dakota for a fifteen minute refueling stop, the sun was setting on the remnants of the corn harvest, shadows longing eastward. Seymour left the bus to walk and breath some fresh air. He passed a row of silent faces at the station front, migrant workers who had followed the harvest to its end, holding rough bundles of clothes and tools and holding children in their laps. Twenty steps through darkness at the end of the station lights brought Seymour to the face of a restaurant. The big front window was filled with pumpkins and ears of corn and held a sign in one corner that read "family dining." He paused and smiled when he noticed that none of the people eating inside were talking to, or even facing, one another. They all say, hunched over their food, turned to the front window as if they were in a movie theater.
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6. |
Musical Chairs
04:34
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Reeling round the ballroom with children on Halloween
Grandma leads the autumn dance in her widow's weeds
Oh, it's delirious fun, playing musical chairs
Scarecrows looking on through cornsilk hair
Music stops dead and the children scream like mad
A single brown monkey's left standing tail in hand
Grandma spreads her shawl like heavy blackbird wings
Swoops up the monkey and softly sings
A bird nest of buttons
And crabapple stems
Time is spun of such colorful thread
There's ice on the water
Apples on the ground
A left-handed woman
Counting her eggs
There's ice on the water
Apples on the ground
Dancing together and crying alone
It's all the same sound
A porcelain saucer
Of red wine and water
Faith is made of the simplest things
There's ice on the water
Apples on the ground
A hatbox of silverware
Left by the road
There's ice on the water
Apples on the ground
Dancing together and crying alone
It's all the same sound
There's ice on the water
Apples on the ground
Laughter and crying, the seasons are flying
Around and around
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7. |
Grandpa's Bed
06:46
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Grandpa's bed is sitting in the yard
Beside the rusted pick-up truck
It's wet with last night's rain
My mother milks the cows
Donkey drags the plough
And I am in the house
I'm counting eggs awhile
The old bed lies down under the sky
All the bird nests in our trees are made
With thread where Grandpa laid his head
Feather in the air
My mother milks the cow
Donkey drags the plough
And I am in the house
I'm counting eggs awhile
The old bed lies down under the sky
When it's quiet and evening falls
I sit on Grandpa's bed and call the dogs
I know they won't come near the thing at all
My mother milks the cow
Donkey drags the plough
And I am in the house
I'm counting eggs awhile
The old bed lies down under the sky
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8. |
Arrival
01:30
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What's the name of his apartment? Harms, Arms, Dakota Arms, yeah. Man man, missing your bus on account of a dream, Seymour, you've got yourself in a mess this time. Why there ain't never been no sister, there ain't no sister now, there ain't gonna be nothing if you don't get yourself to sleep man. There's Grandpa, still sitting in his car. Whoa, where's my bag? There. Get yourself together, you got to meet your old Grandpa.
"Mister, you got the time?" Forty-five minutes! Wonder if he called the Fort Worth station. He probably just sat there, old Grandpa.
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9. |
Long Straight Lines
01:50
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Long straight lines through the fields in North Dakota
Drawn out with miles of telephone wires
All along the highways and the county roads
Blackbirds in a row
They watch as the cars go by
An old man in a new car is sitting at the crossroad
Eats the sour plums that he picked outside a church
His grandson is arriving on a Greyhound bus
Blackbirds in the dirt
They wait as he drops the pits
It's more than time that makes an hour
It's more than space that separates the towns here
Traveling in the flatlands
Dreaming in the silence
Of long straight lines
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10. |
Sometimes
03:16
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Sometimes it takes a long time
For a grown man to learn
He's acting like a child
And you ask me if it's been worthwhile
And I say, did I ever have a choice
In all the times I needed strength
I weak-willed man, he needs a drink
And you ask me if it's been worthwhile
And I say, did I ever have a choice at all
Did I ever have a choice
Which way the wheel spun
Hope or prayer to be someone
Old man in the shadow of his son
And you ask me if it's been worthwhile
And I say, did I ever have a choice at all
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11. |
Conclusion
03:35
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The day is done at Dakota Arms. Sound has died in the courtyard where it fell in child’s play, and darkness breathes in the hallways, rattling a loose window, pulling a door shut, while creeping through the keyholes of twelve identical apartments, drowning the inhabitants in solitary dreams and dust and erasing all the details to which one might fix a name and say, “this is who I am,” or “I am here and am not there.” Porcelain saucers, a stack of books and newspapers, family photographs, teapots, a dozen eggs, a chain of keys.
Seymour’s Grandpa died less than a month after his last visit, because Dan Schroeder, the voice of Seymour’s Grandpa, died. The old man failed to show up for a doctor’s appointment and when the super-intendant later opened the door to his apartment, they found him inside, dead of cardiac arrest in his armchair. Seymour was not terribly shocked by the news, when his mother called him. The old man, after all, had hung a picture of his gravesite on his living room wall the way other people hang family portraits. In his ill-health and loneliness, he got strength from the expected simplicity of his death.
Nevertheless, Seymour and I sit down together in silence. We picture the old man now standing in the back doorway of the little apartment building. He’d hugged us in still strong arms and said he loved us and we could see fully how much it meant to him to have a visit. We drove away down one . . . two . . . three blocks of alley and at the end of the third block he was still faintly visible, straining to watch the car disappear. We both made the trip to hear the stories, hoping to learn something about where we’d come from. And we simply wanted to be out the in the open, where the frailty of a man stands out against the sky, dust rising on the constant wind.
“This is who I am and this is who I wish to be. I need love and give me strength and I need my family.“ It’s not the dead who need wishes for peace. Let the sunflowers stand penance for our sins and let the living find their peace.
Fort Worth, Texas to Fargo, North Dakota
I won’t be making that trip anymore.
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