Occident II—-a family history

Elongated tars loomed above us. Sherryl, Slim and me played in the sandbox directly under the movie screen. Dad had piled the family into the station wagon to see Moby Dick in 1956. Spars and blocks creaked with the ground swell. Ahab’s wooden leg thumped up the companionway before  he turned to glower over the taffrail, compass in hand as though he’d forgotten it was there. He’s the very image of Saturn, that lugubrious old coot who circumscribes the weary world.

    It was then I first heard the call, a faint echo in the Lydian mode.

And I hear it still, an aging live aboard long in memories and short on time; adrift in a tide race when I could be chilling before the latest remake of the same old sea story, grog in hand. But my mind must ever hie with the kelp’s sinuous curves into deeper soundings West.

Twenty years later I was an ex-con and Laguna Beach body surfer, turning and turning in the barreling beach break, arms outstretched as if in prayer.

 My father turned mystical after Slim slipped LSD into his coffee in 1970 because he could no longer watch Dad physically abuse  Mom when he raged at his lot; on swing shift at an LA chemical plant. After that dose, Dad really softened and began to heed Edgar Cayce’s prophesies about the darkening of the sun and the shifting of the poles–which I imagine are connected somehow.

That’s when I first read the Aeneid. 

Twenty years on, Dad from his wheelchair on the Laguna cliffs, held lookout for whale-spouts on the sun burnished horizon; vexed by demons in his frontal lobe. It was as though we’d switched roles.  I took charge and held a garage sale to clear the place for sale. Like an archaeologist, I dusted off old family relics with a wisk broom that came from our earliest years. Then, in a dream, I found a a copy of the Aeneid under a laurel-shaded altar of plywood at my own yard sale.

I see Aeneas carry his father on his shoulders from burning Troy as his father carries the household gods. I see him descend to Hades to ask his father’s shade the way.

 Sherryl has since passed away. Slim still digs Miles Davis’s Lydian groove and I am left to tell the tale. I was but a boy who saw the hollow face of Saturn on a drive-in movie screen. Just as now, he’s rough-hewn in the rocky cliff as my boat bears away from the foreshore. He limps his sluggish round while, back home, the laurel tree’s shadow circles over the household gods, ever counter to the golden sun.