LAST BLOOD

Woke up this morning to an email from Australia; a friend of mine sent me a video of his two-year-old asking me if I had feelings. Turns out? I do. My son’s former soccer coach—a black man from Georgia, who some parents complained about because he insisted that their eleven-year-old boys run Manchester United drills—came out yesterday as gay, and I asked him if, to celebrate, he’d FedEx me an Oreo cookie pie, which is a dessert he made and delivered to our house last year when my wife was recuperating from major surgery, back when she’d been sent so many flower bouquets the sight of them made her sick. I forgot—and will likely forget again—to look up the name of the blue flower I keep seeing along the back roads of rural southwestern Virginia. I should know this flower, probably. It’s everywhere, along with purple clover buds and the ivory spray of Queen Anne’s Lace. Once, for an elementary school project, I gathered flowers and pressed them between paper towels inside volumes of World Book encyclopedias stacked on top of each other and then drew a grid and taped each dried, smashed, dead flower inside one of the squares, wrote the name of the flower beside it, laminated the whole thing, and submitted it for evaluation. Whatever grade I got I owe partly to the chemist William Farish, who, during the Industrial Revolution, developed our current system of grading—a method that allowed him to process more students and thereby increase his salary. How do you grade 200 drum-beating students? That’s a question a cellist I know will have to answer next spring, when he teaches a new experiential art class. On my way to meet him for coffee yesterday, I passed a man on the street who was talking to himself. Another guy who noticed him shot me a glance. I pretended I wasn’t concerned. A massage therapist I know has a patient who requests that the therapist not play Native American flute music, because it causes said patient to imagine that a peeping Tom is at the window. I wanted to think that this particular patient was stupid or paranoid, but I too am guilty of tricking myself into thinking things might happen that don’t, like strangers yanking pistols from the waistbands of their pants and shooting me in the head. I don’t own a gun, but when I was a kid, I found a stick shaped vaguely like a semiautomatic, and carried it around for weeks. I also held a Fisher-Price tape recorder to a television set so that I could record a movie review of Rambo: First Blood Part II—which featured a scene where a gunman fired round upon round of bullets into the river pool where Sylvester Stallone was hiding, submerged—because at that age there was little I loved more than the sound of a machine gun. Now I’m the kind of father who gleefully runs over pedestrians while playing Grand Theft Auto V and shames his son for being a failure at cleaning up spilled Legos; the snow shovel he used to scoop up 95% of them is still on the floor, along with the dinky spaceship he built. I think he could be a little more ambitious. For instance, there’s a replica of Noah’s Ark, engineered to the Bible’s exact specifications, which just opened for business in Kentucky. I’d like to see it. I imagine standing in a line of granpaws and meemaws with concealed carry permits, telling their grandkids that without that long-ago Ark they wouldn’t be here. That we humans now can’t imagine how wicked the world used to be. I don’t know what to think about that; it’s hard to imagine one worse than we have. I do know that I’d like to continue living as I have, without getting shot in the head. But part of me can’t help thinking: it’s only a matter of time.