Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of me in the St. Gerard’s parking lot circa 1983. It is springtime on the east side of Buffalo, New York. There is not much to say about this photograph. I am wearing the hand-me-down sweater of my older brother, Michael. I cannot recall who the older boy is who has stolen our ball and poses triumphantly. Heather is little red riding hood. Monica is a wet-plastered smile. The excesses of summer are hinted at in the soaking rain that washes winter away. The scribblings of the darkness of youth are on the walls. There is nothing more than this square of pavement of the now with its lure of sweaty hands and smiles. In an instant this will disappear though we will have no inkling of the disappearance or even what has disappeared until it is too late. Instead, the moment is an interminable lull between now and the great future of hope and success and impossible dreams. Then minute succumbs to minute to month to years and you find yourself standing in an impossibly long line at the Department of Vital Statistics to get a certified copy of your birth certificate. It having been lost in some minor life destruction. The green-haired girl two up ahead checks her phone, then checks her phone again for a message that will never come. The young mother with sad eyes soothes her son who has grown impatient with the waiting. The government has been so kind as to spell out in big block letters the directives on the wall:

Form A for Birth.

Form B for Death.

Below these signs are the wire baskets with the photocopied sheets that we are all holding. Through the plate glass window, the unknowable sky can’t seem to decide between rain or more rain and that view brings you back to those disappeared moments in the parking lot of your youth as the line does not move. The woman with the walker drops her dull pencil for everyone’s interest until the man with the tear tattoo on his face bends in kindness for her, like a smile after rain. The man with the thinning hair towards the front with the cat-haired shirt is muttering because he thinks he has been here the longest. Shifting from foot to foot, each of us waiting in turn for the proof of our existence or the thin slip that says we once were here - in the sigh and sigh and sigh of lines. In the way we inch forward and wait with all of the grace the moment calls for.

June 16, 2016 David Gianadda

Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of the backyard of 7 Dorris Avenue on the east side of Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t look like much. This was the tiny patch that was my grandmother’s backyard. When I was little she would pull out a … — Hashtag Throwback Thursday. Here is a photograph of the backyard of 7 Dorris Avenue on the east side of Buffalo, New York. It doesn’t look like much. This was the tiny patch that was my grandmother’s backyard. When I was little she would pull out a wooden sandbox with a little colored canvas roof and set it there so I could climb in to play. She’d give me a bucket of water so that I could make rivers and lakes. She hung laundry on the line that blew in the breeze like ghosts. I have a photograph of my grandfather standing in that backyard. He is with my mother when she was a little girl. He died when she was five. In the photograph, I can see the laundry line pole and I can see the little wire fence. There is no sandbox. There is a little terrier I never knew. I look into the eyes of my mother as a child and see her as an adult. I look at the plants in the photograph. Scrutinize them. One summer I hacked away the overgrowth in her backyard and came to a cluster of hyacinth. They were planted from Easter gifts from the past and all at once, below the overgrowth from the scrub trees and shrubs, there they were again. Off-handedly, she told me the date she planted them, cut some flowers and brought them inside. The wood of the sandbox rotted away. My grandmother and mother are just photographs now. The house still stands, last one nearest the corner now after a fire took the neighboring one. I like to imagine the hyacinth she planted has taken over and blooms in purples and whites. It is the fragrance of the hyacinth that brings me back to her. There she is again with the scissors cutting the stems at an angle. The heavy flower heads bending the weak stalk. There is my mother again. There is the sandbox with its river of tap water. There is the colored canvas and the sheets blowing on the line. The photograph is the silent reminder. I want to be able to hear her Polish accent in it, I want to hear her swear when she drops a wooden clothesline and takes another from her pocket. I want to hear the sound of the shovel in the sand, hear the water carve away the river. I want to see the hyacinth in the glass on the kitchen table, the room a perfume. I go back there. To the glass on the table. I stand at the sink and look out the window to the backyard, to the wire fence, to that summer’s overgrowth and everything I carry within.

THROWBACK THURSDAY