Mutiny on the Open Heart: Cole

What a wonderful juggle: I've started to see the response and reality of 'The Light Stays On' making itself into the world, and I've got these new characters clanging to come out!

.

I can't tell you much about the new novel. It's now twenty-five pages and sometimes it seems like it's already written and I'm just trying to keep up with the transcription. I know these chapters may well be too long and too disjointed to take the time to read. Please don't feel obligated . I'm mostly posting this because some part of myself wants to make it public, wants to introduce another character: in this case, Cole:

.

Chapter ?

.
My name is Cole. I graduated from NYU eight years ago, majored in Journalism with an eye toward sports reporting. My first job was for the Providence Journal mostly covering high school basketball and every now and then the Pawtucket Red Sox. I’m six foot two and skinny as a pencil, fast enough that I won the state division for track and one night I scored 63 points in college basketball. I never thought of myself as a jock because my mother insisted I would be a novelist if not a poet. Even when I was five, even before kindergarten, she would read poems at the dinner table every night, and when we were all old enough, she would award whoever came to the table able to recite a poem—any poem—from memory. Even today I listen to Joyce Kilmer’s “I think that I shall never see” poem about trees, or Alfred Noyes 'The Highway Man' and I can see my mother’s widening grin, nodding there holding her fork over our favorite macaroni and cheese, giggling when we finished our recitations, never mentioning our common omissions and periodic embellishments.

.
“When you understand poetry, kids, you understand life,” she would say so often that years later my brother and I came to greet one another in airports and end our Sunday night phone calls with that quote.

.
“Recite the Highwayman for me, Cole,” he sometimes pleaded.

.
“Ryan, cut it out. We’re grown men. That is ridiculous.”

.
“It wasn’t ridiculous at Mom’s funeral, Cole. It makes me feel better. Just the first verse. I won’t ask you again for two months."

.
I’ve never told anyone about this. What dorks we both are, even now.

.
The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding—

Riding—riding—

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

.
After I finish this stanza, Ryan and I don't say another word for what seems like minutes. That’s how it used to be at the dinner table too, until my mother started either laughing or clapping. She would throw her head back in sheer delight.

.
“Kids,” She’d say to the four of us, “never let too much time pass without reading a poem outloud. It will keep you grounded. If somebody says your ugly, read a poem. If somebody steals your money, read a poem. And for god sakes, when you get your heart broken, read a poem. You’ll be surprised.”

.
I didn’t stay in journalism. My mother died the night Providence won the State Championships and twenty minutes after the game ended, after I emailed I the story to my editor, I was on my way to the TF Greene Airport, praying I’d make it back home so she could see me, so I could hold her hand, so I could maybe read her her favorite poem of all, The Country by Billy Collins, about a mouse running too fast with a wooden matchstick in his mouth who burns down this guys’ girlfriend’s house. My mother folded over whenever she heard that poem. Even when my younger brother totaled her car, the night before her road trip to see my Aunt Louise, she buckled with laughter when he told her he was so repentant he would recite The Country for her every night for six months.

.
“You’re on, son,” she said, “but you still have to pay the deductible.”

I didn’t make it home before my mother died. Ryan said her last words were “Poets in heaven.” Can you believe that? My mother was nothing if not consistent.

.
So anyway, it’s probably because of her that I didn’t stay in journalism. I phoned in my notice the day of her funeral, returning to Providence to finish up until my replacement was hired, I cleared out my apartment, boxed up my clothes and books, and broke up with my girlfriend all in the span of three hours. I closed my bank account and pocketed three thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills. That, and my volume of John Yeats poetry, would take me somewhere I did not know.