Week Three: "What, you're afraid of homeless people?" "No, I just didn't want to disturb him"

Sadie and Anna returned from the bookstore with a story to tell. Sadie – his daughter – had discovered a homeless man sleeping in one of the store’s few stuffed chairs.

                “He just looked homeless,” she said, as if her father was an unclever child and her patience for him was wearing thin.

                “But you don’t know that, Sade,” he said. “It’s none of our business. Be nice.”

                “Oh my god. How was I not being nice?” she appealed upward, to her god or the food court’s skylight ceiling. “It’s Anna who was afraid of him.”

                Anna – a nice girl; nicer, maybe, than his daughter – turned a mottled scarlet on her slender neck and quietly insisted that she had not been afraid of him.

                “Then why wouldn’t you sit next to him? I dared you to do it and you wouldn’t.”

                “I just didn’t want to disturb him, okay?”

                “Plus he smelled, right?”

                “I don’t know,” Anna said.

                “Sadie,” he began, but she had already taken Anna’s hand and rushed off toward a table of boys from their school.

                Once, his first week or two of college in the city, an older black woman staggered into his arms and begged to go to the hospital.

                “I’m going to die. I’m going to die,” she cried, over and over. Her hand was so smooth and warm in his. He held her up as they tried to hail a cab – something he’d never done before.

                “I know you’re not going to let me die. Thank you,” she whispered, patting his arm. She was slender, with short hair, and swayed dangerously as cab after cab passed him. Other students – some of them his classmates, maybe – swirled by on their way elsewhere. No one else stopped.

                Finally, a taxi did pull up to them, but the driver wouldn’t take her. What else was there to do? With conviction, he got in the back seat and told the driver that he would pay. At the emergency room entrance, they helped her into a wheelchair and brought her in. And then she was gone.

               He stood outside, processing everything. What it meant. What now for him? He was eighteen years old, and when a man who had been standing nearby, watching, commented that it was a nice thing he had done for that lady, but they were just going to wheel her back out the other side when they found out she couldn’t pay, something small changed inside him. Afterwards, he kept clear of strange people who asked him for things. He averted his eyes, mumbled an apology, and sometimes, as he did now, wondered what happened to that young idealist who tried to save a life.

                He knew for certain that he would tell Sadie not to get in a cab with a drug addict. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you’re alone with someone who has nothing to lose, he’d say.

                But he also knew that he wouldn’t have to. Watching her now, laughing with those boys while Anna looked away, embarrassed, it was clear to him that his daughter would never do what he’d felt he had to that strange night.

                He was glad for that. He thought he should be, anyway.

Week Two: Poets 1300 years apart being compared.

We couldn’t possibly pick a favorite; they were both such good boys. Dante was our firstborn – so serious even from the start. He didn’t much laugh or cry. Came into this world with a full head of hair and a furrowed brow, he did.

Blake followed a couple years later – unplanned, truth be told, and once we knew we really hoped for a girl, but what can you do? Bake really was a strange child. “Touched,” they’d say. He was so contented just to look out the window at the setting sun, but other times he would scream and scream as if he didn’t know who we were.

Thank goodness for Dante’s quiet nature those early years. It must have been trying for him, so much attention on his younger brother, but he never complained or made a fuss. Soon as he learned to read we couldn’t tear him away from that Bible. He wanted to know all about which devil in what layer, what angel and when; we knew a bit of Book but nothing like that, so he started to figure it out for himself. Made all these lists and charts and diagrams. Really was quite ingenious, even if the neighbors’ kids found it a mite strange.

School of course was no challenge at all for our studious little Dante, but Blake really did struggle. We never did get the test, but his teachers thought maybe it was the dyslexia, the way he’d write his words not quite right – a “y” instead of “i” in “tiger,” little things like that. He always did march to a different beat, Blake did. His older brother tried to help, but Blake could be so willfully ignorant at times – didn’t want to learn things the way most folk do. Wouldn’t listen when Dante showed him how to write his letters, or how to memorize his multiplication. Blake wouldn’t so much as say a word – just made his little doodles and left Dante to do all his homework for him. Probably quicker that way anyway, and Blake’s grades really did improve. It’s doubtful he would have even graduated grammar school if Dante hadn’t helped his brother so. He was a prince, he really was.

Later on the boys weren’t so close. Siblings go through spells, Lord knows, but these two… They did all the hair pulling, the name calling, the toy stealing, but where Blake could be loud and bratty oftentimes, Dante was just plain mean. Telling his brother he was… how did he phrase it… some “infernal wretch” or somesuch, or that the family never so much as wanted him.

That is absolutely not true, but the way, and we never said anything of the kind to Dante. Like any parents, sometimes we’d gripe about our struggles with the youngest, how it were a shame that he couldn’t be more like his older brother – so clever and mindful of his elders – but we certainly did not show favor to one over the other, so who can say where he got such an awful idea?

The years passed all the quicker for each one that passed before, and soon they reached that age where boys grow like weeds – one day you have to force them to take a bath, and the next they’re taller than you, with baritone in their words. Their dispositions didn’t change overmuch – they just settled into themselves over the years. Blake found teachers – some stranger than he, honestly – who adored him and gave him passing marks just for being Blake, writing his stories and scribbling his doodles. He never was all that interested in the girls, so of course some of the stranger ones pursued him for a time. Nothing really stuck. Blake just never did have a mind for common everyday matters, like the simple give and take of conversation or even holding the door for a lady.

Dante tried, bless him, but those know-nothing girls thought him too serious. Too earnest. Well, what’s wrong with that? Youth is too ironical nowadays for their own good. Our Dante always treated a lady like a lady: minded his p’s and q’s, said “ma’am” or “miss,” never tried anything untoward. They laughed at him. They did! Called him a mama’s boy, even “queer.” And they didn’t mean “funny.” To think! Not our son. Not in a hundred thousand years.

He’s a lawyer now, settled down nearby with a nice girl from good stock. No children yet, but they’re trying. We ask about it every day. Blake, you may have supposed by now, still has not found his path. Has delusions of being a writer of some kind – living in sin, meanwhile, doing God knows what all day with these other “artists” off in the ghetto slums of New York City.

Really, though, it’s impossible to compare them. If both our boys were drowning, we’d drown ourselves to save them both. They were loved equally, always, and no one could ever say different.

But if we had to choose…?