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.
credits
from Dakota Arms,
track released April 13, 1991
Jim Clifford - piano
Dave Herr - drums
Tom Schroeder - bass, voice
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