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The year I turned thirty-nine, my father told me to get life insurance and I moved out of state. I was in my first semester of online college for my bachelor’s degree and took an hourly chef job at a college in Denver, far from the salary position I had come from in Pennsylvania.

We are all storytellers.

Some of my most inspirational favorite musicians are singer/songwriters telling a story. I think of Bon Iver’s lyrics in Holocene:

‘All at once I knew, I was not magnificent.’

I’m also Midwestern at heart. Sometimes, I used to like to think of myself as just a kid, one that has chewed grass in his formative years, learned to play outside, blow dead dandelions into the wind and wipe off shoes and boots before going indoors. But truer to earth, I’m an Ohioan.

I wrote about all this in an old prose poem called “The Farmers of Shangri-La” that ran in the journal called Stirring once, reading it at my first organized reading in a bookstore on Cleveland’s near west-side a decade or more ago.

We are farmers grown from the blackest dirt to be found above the clay table there below the ground in Ohio. Black means rich. Black means vitality to us because we are farmers. We plant trees and grow them.

When years go by the old oak tree and the swing from its limb we used to climb, the dirt will still be here to whisper secrets only children and our hollow ghosts know. Summer passes us: the ball game, a worn leather mitt, the county fair and the dusk. The way it feels to skinny dip at night when everyone’s parents are asleep and though we are adults ourselves. The owl keeps one eye open and watches the summer and us and every creeping, crawling thing the night over knows it, knowing nakedness.

We’ve a barn to prove our stores, our progress and toil. We’ve a place behind it to smoke cigarettes or cigars or pipes after the family dinner. We’ve gravel driveways and blueberry homegrown stout or wine and rhubarb pie to eat while joking about the billy goat or how the dogs in the yard are just so stupid, just so dumb.

“What happened?”

“We were out by the dock out on the boat and it tipped, is all. That’s why I’m so wet,” said as one enters the house, too late to notice the sun setting behind dripping ears. And the person in the living room or dining room nods in approval, knowing the question need not be answered and that it was only half asked to begin with, offering the last slice of pie.

“What happened to the rest of the world?”

They are failing at something and running from us. It is well affixed in them to repeatedly escape this way, to take the fastest car, the fastest plane to do this, never to be seen the same way again and always lost in one or two or more ways. They leave behind the black, vital dirt of here and Shangri-La behind shaking heads, not shaking water, but disbelief at what is left behind in the past in the country in Ohio. They are on toward the city and clean futures like good barbershop haircuts to return someday like to the lagoon where a father or uncle or grandfather spits into the wind at mosquitoes and mumbles at the lack of predators in the area, natural predators to hunt and kill.

This is God’s country.

There is incoming wind to an open window of a pickup truck, the bed filled with wood to last the winter. Bugs scramble at the weight of the statement, but no one hears this. Not the bugs, not above the crack and shoot of gravel beneath rugged tires, not below the whistle of wind shaped for the ear and aimed from across a field of corn or alfalfa.
No deity hears this, let alone the passenger. Jackson Browne plays on the stereo, “Running On Empty,” and the car is in gear. And we will wait for you here, we will wait many years.

Now, I think of coming home just to be with my parents and watch them pass. I only have so much time, a few years, a handful of moments. My nieces grow. My half-siblings, they grow. Like a dandelion, a flower, they bloom.