Just look at Bob and Judy; they’re happy as can be,
Inventing situations, putting them on T.V.
_{—“Found a Job” (Talking Heads)}

It was hot out in the fields, but I got good close-ups of all our faces
that afternoon. Everyone was on board, wildflowers and weeds crackling
in the background, our smiles unforced, despite the cones of ash

and the silent white sky. Some beetles and stones left little
trails of smoke drifting in the humid air, but you’ve got to keep on…
It was me and Amy and Hawkins, just the three of us out in the world

like The Monkees! sticking our tongues out, laughing into the lens.
I was lucky to have such friends, as our childhood houses, miles down
the country road, were either falling apart—flapping with tarpaper—

or half-burned down. You think it’s hot outside it’s hot in a house
when you’ve got nowhere else you can go, a glass of milk glowing like
radiation on a table, and who knows what-all kinds of housemates anxious

beside the still-unpaid-for mildewed baseboards. I moved with the camera
as if on a Steadicam; the three of us were sprinting at the speed of sound…
Action, I commanded, and Amy made these dotted lines as she walked

in half-circles. Hawkins decorated a rattling, stunted little aspen with his
sky-blue windbreaker—it was all so perfect—and I kept coming back around
with the camera. What if we climbed nearby Martin’s Peak and nobody’s

wings melted? Ambition! Hawkins ballyhooed. I raise you, I said. The balloons
we’d brought were popping and high dew points can have a disfiguring effect
on the human face—we were sweltering but beautiful—but Amy kept traveling

past me like a planet in a solar system and Hawkins kept aiming his ray-gun,
I guess you’d call it, saying pew pew pew in his falsetto voice. We got tired
because we’re all in our sixties but no one really cared we were together again.

---

Image: “Red Filter” by Laura Knowlton