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Noon on a Friday. I am drinking coffee, enjoying, for the flavor and the buzz, a single mug of 100% Columbian, strong, with a little sugar and a precisely measured dose of half-and-half. It’s my first coffee in six days. Carol, though, drinks one cup every morning, a brew stronger yet than mine, generously half-and-halfed, and more than a little sugared. I am writing this description as I sit in a large, leather-upholstered La-Z-Boy office chair that my father left me in his will.
This morning, in a daily ritual, Carol and I took turns reading aloud the entries of today’s The Writer’s Almanac, viewing them on the big computer screen in our living room and then listening to Garrison Keillor’s five-minute, abridged version. When he finished, I realized my mind had drifted during the day’s poem, “Watching my Parents Sleeping Beside an Open Window Near the Sea,” by Rebecca McClanahan. I asked Carol if she would mind if I read the poem aloud, and she said, “No, go ahead.” I liked it a lot.
What caused my mind to drift was the rhyme within the name McClanahan and the clattering alliteration of double c’s in the poet’s first name and her last. A girl in my class in third grade was a McClanahan, I think.
The girl had, her family had, an above-ground swimming pool, and they invited me to their home once, on a sunny day in June. The girl had a younger brother, as I recall, and a sister probably going into sixth grade or seventh in the fall. The dad was at work, I’m sure, but the mom was somewhere around, I’m sure of that, as well.
Before going into the pool, we kids changed into swimsuits in an upstairs bedroom. I remember that the older girl scoffed at my modesty when she caught a glimpse of more of me than I wanted her to see. “It’s only skin,” she said with a shrug and a little smile.
It’s only skin. Those three words, and that little Irish smile, stayed with me and warmed me for a good long while.
♦
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