July (2006)

       

   July is light...it’s a wholly illuminated glorious world, the days lazily going by under an unusually refreshing sun. July is an immaculate child...the comical, yet rebellious son of a very abusive alcoholic of a father named winter. July’s a month that’s always managed to pour some sunshine into my soul, so often darkened by gloomy steel-gray winters. There’s always been such an innocent grandeur about it, the way it lies halfway in between hell and hell again.

   It’s beautiful.  Swimming pools, full of hundreds of screaming hyper stinky children, including myself, don the pages of memories. Rain falls from a lightning-scarred sky and warms the bones, because, hey, it’s already hot out. In winter, the rain merely stabs and freezes.

   In July, there are trips north to the Idaho motherland, where countless good smells abound, crazy relatives are plenty, and every sight, every sound, and every angle of the sunlight is awash with memory. Memories of the birthplace I call home, where I’d like to return to for good someday. July is the annual Idaho Falls 4^th of July Parade, where my brother and I once watched in amusement the news reporters who, off camera, would frown and scowl like they wanted to blow somebody up. But as soon as the on-the-air button clicked, their faces would light up and the hatred would be gone. July is going down that same street and around the corner to Scotty’s, home of the world’s best burgers and shakes, or heading out on the freeway to Roberts to visit a very ancient grandmother at her farm. That place is home. July is home.

   Several summers ago there, I spent a good July with the aunt and grandpa. It was a summer of change, of sorts. My birthday landed me a new stereo, I became a Led Zeppelin fan, Sheridan graduated, facial hair sprouted, the “I Want to Get Away” and “Graduation” songs were popular, and I developed feelings for a female named Suzie.

   One particular scorching day, I wandered off down the street, in search of answers. Answers to questions I didn’t know. Therefore, they were not answers. They weren’t anything. A Rottweiler barked from behind a gate. Across the street, a bearded woman mowed her lawn. It may have been a man. Who knows these days. I can always recall that luscious stench of freshly mowed grass, a particular recurring thread for many of my summers in life. In another yard, underneath the cool shade of a cypress, an old couple held hands. They also smoked, which took away any beauty the hand-holding might’ve given the impression of. It was that summer, that July, that day, that I reached the canal at the end of the street, peering down into the rushing cooling darkness of the great waters. As a face, seemingly from another dimension, peered back up at me, I came to a conclusion about that July, and was inspired with an eerie foreknowledge of Julys to come...that summer, I realized that I was not a woman.