“I can forgive, but if you ask me to forget, you ask me to give up experience.”
—Louis Brandeis
Flakes, snow saucers, amble down, like they have a mind and don't want to land. In the streetlight a hundred feet away they float like birds bobbing in small waves. But here, in the forty-watt garage light, they dither in dizzy scribbles, ten feet off the ground. Some hit the old dog's nose and some her filmed-over eyes, but she lies there and looks up as though she isn't missing a thing.
When I say her name, she raises her head and a few flakes coast onto her yellow brows.
Jesus, Seth could be in Iraq in a week.
Except, I'm going to give him a million-dollar wound. I don't want him to come back like I came back from Nam.
The refrigerator whines and the old-water smell of this place passes through the door I'm standing in. The snowfall is thinner. Mary's bathroom light stabs the darkness, a train whistles two miles away, a weak god blowing on a bottle. In Nam, when they asked me what I missed about home, I said a train whistle.
The sparkle of the TV turns nearby snowflakes purple and green for an instant, the dog turns her nose that way. How many times have Seth and I sat in the woods together, watching it snow? I lean against the doorjamb, watch, and rub the silver dollar in my pocket. The markings are all gone, it's thin. My dad was hoeing a potato field, seventy years ago, and got bit by a coral snake but didn't die, so the man told him he earned a whole dollar that day. He carried it forty year