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somewhere over the rainbow (and other stories)

  Exactly two years ago I found myself flying through a corner of a rainbow, and landed in Oaxaca, Mexico. It was the last film festival I traveled to, a brutal and sweet experience in the harshest of realities, trying to wrap my arms around the slipperiest industry and failing magnificently. Surrounded by fresh faces and eager eyes I ran from the rooms and into the street time and again, wandering off with the camera in my bag as a companion. I took pictures of a blind man that sang on the same corner every day, of wedding parades, of an old woman waiting to see the dentist.  Literally somewhere over the rainbow, I met the ugliest answers to questions I had been dragging my feet towards for years. Cramming the most delicious food into my mouth, joking at the nightly rooftop cocktail parties, grinning like the Cheshire Cat it was all coming to an end. Actually, it had ended before it even started though - and on the plane back to New York and finally Moscow the bone-crunching undertow

eight (heart on a plate)

"I like the number nine more than the number eight." E announces in the dim morning walk to school. "So maybe I could be nine today."
"How come?" I ask.
"Because eight looks like my shoelaces and they always come untied." She explains.

Upstairs, I leave a bag with twenty-five juice boxes and forty-nine homemade chocolate chip cookies for her school birthday party. The room is empty. Two girls run in, sliding across the floor in their mary janes. E is chirping away, explaining what kind of cookies we made. The girls are smiling and staring at the dad who cooks. 

I kiss E on the forehead and head home.


The dry ingredients meet the wet ones, and then the blueberries. The cake cooks for forty minutes and the house smells like a giant muffin. The rooms get clean. A little bit of work gets done and then it is time to go back and get her, to trudge through the half-shoveled snow through tiny crooked paths, to put on a pot of pasta water and warm up those meatballs and sauce for a fast lunch. 

We hover over the bowls afterwards, smacking our lips.
"Pop, look." E says, pointing at her near-empty dish.
"Good job." I answer. "Almost the whole thing."
"No." She says, pointing. "It made a heart."
I look, a laugh jumping out of my mouth.
"We made a heart." I correct her.
She smiles with an odd sort of satisfaction.






After the guests have come and gone, after the waves of food are eaten and the plates are piled in a mess of paper and plastic, after the pinata we made is forced piece by piece into a garbage bag, we sit in the room without talking.
"It was a good party, Pop." E tells me after a while.
I can hear N in the kitchen starting to wash some dishes.
E reaches out, and hugs me for some time.
"I'm gonna go to sleep now." She whispers.
"After you brush your teeth." I whisper back.
She walks to the kitchen and I hear her saying something to N.
I close my eyes and let out a long breath. It is time to put leftovers in containers, to toss bags of trash down the chute in the hallway, to drink one cup of black tea and tuck E in, to lay down on my back and snore before my head touches the cool pillow.




Comments

liv said…
I hope you rest well, Marco, knowing that so much good comes of your hard work.

She is absolutely beautiful!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Eva and also to you, Marco - good poppa.

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