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Today is Wednesday, 27-Aug-2008 22:04:13 PDT
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Ashes and Goodbyes
He smokes a pipe, my grandma's new husband, and doesn't need to ask to be called grandfather as my cousins and I gather around his jeans clad knee like children around Santa, and listen to his story about the cold of Spokane; the moral was a person shouldn't put his tongue on a railroad spike in January.
He smokes his pipe with the dark chocolate bowl the morning he picks me up from juvenile hall, my cold steel punishment for running away from my house in L.A.
He drives Old Blue, his name for the pickup truck. The carpenter cowboy stops at a raw wood housing site, and shows me his work, and hugs me, says I could live with him and grandma if I wanted, so I did, a short time, six months, one week, two days.
He taps his pipe empty in the metal ashtray some grey flakes float out and land in my lap on the way to the airport, the last place we touched.
A hollow telephone voice informs me grandpa has died and mother embraces my tears.
Grandma sprinkles the ashes slowly, some of the powder floats like dust on a sunbeam into the woods, some lands in our hair.
In the stone fire circle grandfather's grey dust mingles with the ashes of wood he once warmed his cold hands over.
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