Temple Archives

“What day is this event?” My mother asks, on the phone, from 500 miles away physically and far further in terms of understanding. It’s the first time we’ve spoken in two months. She can’t bring herself to say wedding. It is an event, much like scheduled visitation before a funeral, or going to court to pay a parking ticket. It is not a celebration, it is something that is simply happening, something she is helpless to comprehend or halt. My wedding, my legal marriage at last to the woman I’ve been with for the past decade, is yet another milepost on the road of my life. It is a road she cannot take, a road that curves off into the distance while she stands, immobile, at the last turning, the place years in the past where she felt she last understood her daughter.

“Thursday,” I say. I keep my tone upbeat, cheerful. “We’re meeting Joy’s parents at the courthouse and then going to Jenn’s for food. She and Tima are hiring a Georgian caterer for the party as our present.”

“What kind of food is Georgian?” she asks.

“Lots of almond and pomegranate flavors,” I say. “Jenn and Tima say it’s wonderful.”

There is a pause, of approximately fifteen years. I’m thinking of that day when I was in college, and I was telling my mother about two gay friends of mine in the theatre department, how happy they were together. I was not seeking any sort of opinion from her, I was merely talking about my life and my friends. “I just don’t want you to think it’s normal,” my mother said then. I’m thinking of that. I’m also thinking of my father, watching something about gay rights on the news and saying, “I don’t understand it, but then I don’t understand people who murder their kids, either.” I’m thinking of my sister, on the phone from college, saying that bisexual people are worse than gay people because they’re just sluts who will sleep with anybody. I’m thinking this present silence is much like the one around the dining table in 2003, when I at last stated the obvious, that I loved Joy, that I wanted to have a holy union ceremony in a church to say so. (Joy’s mother drove 500 miles alone to give us the family silver, as due the eldest daughter on her wedding day. My parents, five miles away, did not come.) I’m thinking about the silence that night after I came out to my mother, when I lay awake in the dark and for the first time in my life really thought about cutting myself, feeling so much pain and frustration that I wanted some external proof of my struggle. I’m thinking the silence is a lot like the one when my sister called me because she’d gone looking through my livejournal uninvited, confronted me about being gay (among other, more hurtful and untrue accusations). She forcibly expelled me from the closet; it was either that or let her continue to think I was a pedophile, based on the incredibly solid evidence that I liked BL manga—a term she failed to grasp—and had recently been to San Fransisco, as I guess pedophiles do? I wouldn’t know. After that, she insisted I tell our parents immediately because she was uncomfortable with her knowledge. She always did tell our parents everything. I always told them as little as possible, because the lack of comprehension on their faces when I occasionally dared to unload my dreams on them grew gradually harder and harder to bear as I aged. I was the Difficult Child. In this current silence, crowded with the echoes of all those other silences, that has never been more apparent. I am still the Difficult Child.

“Well,” my mother says at last, “You know I love you.” It is the very best she can do, the most she can offer. She no longer says the other half of the statement, the one bracketed to that phrase for years. “I don’t understand.” It is said, all the same. It’s as understood and scripted as a silent rest in a measure of music. Her inability to comprehend me is a wall between us, an iron curtain in miniature.

“I love you too,” I say, still cheerful, still upbeat. Always cheerful, always upbeat. We veer off onto superficially sturdier ground, my father’s travel, my mother’s knee issues, my sister’s wonderful children. Before signing off, we repeat the little exchange, my mother’s grieving, uncomprehending statement of love. I know she feels she has lost me, somehow. That somehow, through the incidental fact that the person I’m marrying has the same chromosome arrangement as me, I am some changeling switched at age twenty-three, everything that I was before in form, but molded of strange stuff.

She does not understand, and I cannot understand why she does not understand. The difference yawns wide and unfathomably deep before her. From my side, I feel it could be breached with only a hand outstretched to mine. It taints everything to do with me, every conversation and mention and memory of me she has, she cannot escape it and it shames her that her daughter is gay. She wears it like sackcloth, and hopes that no one sees, that no one knows.

My parents will be absent for my second marriage ceremony. I do not expect that I will have another one.

When I’m chewing on a new idea, I can’t sit still. It doesn’t matter that I have both a cold and impractical shoes, I still take multiple trips to the bathroom or the break room to let the things I’m learning sink in, to let the rivulets of my thoughts cut new little paths as they diverge along routes of their own choosing. If I wasn’t at work, I would go for a long walk with a notebook, but I haven’t the liberty of a noble patron to support my artistic endeavors. I am not the boy in my head.

My new idea is an old idea. It’s an idea that’s been there since my Japanese theatre class in 1999, which was held in the basement of the art building, with its ghastly orange upholstery and implications of banishment. (I had an acting class there, too. The orange basement was a place for classes there was nowhere else to put; it was the miscellaneous liberal arts purgatory, and none of the desks ever matched.) I met him first there, that boy, with his intriguing footnote delicately overlooked by my professor. I should write that story, I thought, and dismissed it as soon as I thought it. The overwhelming amount of research, of work, the language barrier alone, all of it was an immense obstacle for a footnote. Not to mention I was more interested in producing scads of video game fanfiction instead, with all its lazy brevity and quick returns, and the thought of seriously writing books of my own for a living was years off.

For reasons unknown today it reared up again, cast assembled, scripts ready, swords drawn, banners stirring in the faint breeze. It’s waited all this time, rolled over now and again as “that book I should totally write someday” but nothing else. Today it had me googling voraciously on my lunchbreak, and cringing at the steep price of university press English editions of musty old literature most modern Japanese people don’t give a damn about.

Why does a story suddenly heave itself together out of the ether and say, ‘now’? How can such things lie dormant, dusty and undisturbed, for a decade, before bursting across my morning with all the messy immediacy of an overturned inkpot? I am elbows-deep in another story, one I hope to have squared away into a solid draft by the end of the year. I always have a running list of alternatives, of course, a folder full of ideas, neatly sorted, but I try not to switch focus for too long. It knows that, this story. It knows I won’t set loose one tamed bird to sprint after a wild one. But it knows as well that it will need research and patience, things to seek out and steep in before any of the words can begin at all. It knows I will need something to fill the hole once the present story is a coherent draft.

Right now it is a page of messy notes and copies of emails I sent to Joy. It is full of ludicrous notions about magic and intrigue and love, notions that I really ought to cross-check with a few good biographies before they become too firmly stuck onto people with actual historical lives. It is a flurry of possibility and creativity desperate to get out before the cold bars of fact slam all around it and lock it down. It is a boy with a mask, half-sketched on the back of a bit of recycling paper.

It is that book I ought to write someday, and somehow it has elbowed its way to the front of the queue.

This thing makes me want an ipad, which is remarkable when really I think ipads are completely otherwise frigging useless. Of course, the thing in question isn’t a real product. It’s an April Fool’s gag, which is just as well. Though it probably says something about me that I think that’s a crying shame. Also, I want to know who made it, so they can build me a miniature Joust cabinet for my dolls. Or maybe Galaga. So many choices.

What’s sad is of all the ThinkGeek gag items (including the canned unicorn meat, which I suspected was just, you know, spam with sparkles) I found the Tribbles and Bits cereal to be the most unlikely. Because it comes with a free Captain Pike action figure and dude. DUDE. Nobody gets free figures IN their boxes anymore. You’ve got to mail off 37 UPCs and wait four to six months for that shit these days.

Free prizes just aren’t what they used to be. I got a box of Cracker Jacks at work this week and my fun surprise inside was a piece of paper with two slits in it. It’s to be used, purportedly, as a pencil topper. I realize CJ prizes haven’t been three-dimensional since 1973, but you know, I do recall getting stickers. Or temporary tattoos! Something that vaguely resembled an object with a function. Not a Talisman of Unspeakable Lameness +2.

At least the Cracker Jacks themselves are still tasty. So it’s not a total loss.

December 2, 2009

Dear Santa:

In spite of many claims to the contrary, I would still like to think you exist, somewhere under the burden of consumerism and marketing and the crushing grip of bottom-lines and budgets. I like to think that requests of you are no less sacred than the whispered prayer in the darkest corner of the world: a plea for benevolence out of chaos, to a mighty and kindly benefactor from beyond the edge of the known. In saintly awe and heavenly charge are your roots laid, and though we often forget that, I doubt that you ever do.

My list is crammed with material representations of the things I truly crave, a masquerade perpetuated, I expect, over most of the surface of the earth. Electronic gizmos and tiny wonders I can ill-afford to procure for myself or for anyone, so the burden is divested on others, to intercede and labor on your behalf. They are the ones capable of bestowing such goods, and they always have done so, in your name.

But the wishes behind those wishes cannot be fulfilled by mere mortals, only by a convergence of fate and fortune which can be stirred into patterns only by the hands of the immortals. The true objects of my desire are the stuff of dreams made real, a wish for better things for me and those around me, and at Christmastime we can hope, at least, that such wishes might be heard by a being capable of bringing them to fruition. To you children send their hopes of dolls and dump-trucks, electronic pets incapable of true affection, action figures and building blocks and game systems tiny enough to balance on the head of a pin and powerful enough to send a man to the moon. The diamond rings and sophisticated cell phones desired by adults are no less toys, and in reality no more deserving to be conjured on a whim than are the largely forgettable trinkets of childhood.

My true Christmas list is for joy and contentment without feeling the draining pang of material lack, for validation and affection, for encouragement and support, for love unashamed and understanding, for recognition of the wealth I already possess. Those things take on different symbolic shapes, be they a perfect job for Joy or an agent’s interest in my manuscript. But even those are not quite the real deal: the welling-up of peace and goodwill that comes from some source inside of us, unstoppered only when we take our faith out of the hands of the shop assistant, and put it in the only hands capable of giving it back: those of God, and of each other, and of you.

Merry Christmas, Santa Claus. And thank you. Give my best to the missus, and to Blitzen, he was always my favorite.

Love,

Leah

PS: It might be noted, however, just in case your workshop has outlets in Korean doll shops and Nintendo headquarters, that I have been extraordinarily good this year.

Amazon has this new thing where you make up some crazy phrase to use as a payment shortcut in case you shop so damn much you can’t be bothered to repeatedly type your own address, so you can type some doofball text-generated spew instead. I expect it’s for people who live in places that are tricky to spell. It’s constantly prompting me with suggestions for ones I might decide to use. Today’s is: Leah’s Temporal Diadem.*

Others include Leah’s Steadfast Throne* and Leah’s Eternal Art*.

…erm.

I’m only about 200 words short of my NaNo word count for today—It really helps not being a million and two words behind. But if I still was, I could just use my temporal diadem to slow down the motion of space and time and take as long typing as I want. I might even be able to use it to take over the world, and then I could rule from my steadfast throne, while creating eternal art in my free time.

That’s a plot for a novel right there. Or at least a cool item for your next AD&D campaign.

* Of course, I am not actually using any of these phrases. My address is easier to type and less surreal than any of them.

I have acquired a gentleman. Joy found him first, in point of fact, while I was looking at the mismatched light and dark eyes of a Spanish woman in a too-small bodice. There were two duplicates of the picture, actually, one was inexplicably $3 and one was $5. (I got the $3, of course. I’m not adverse to bargain-basement gentlemen.)

I like his cassock, of course. I also like the precise angle of his haircut and the drape of fabric from his knee, the slight blur of his hand indicative of a restless shiver or an intake of breath. But mostly I like how he is not really looking at the camera, though he appears to be at first glance. He’s looking very slightly to the side, as though the contraption makes him uncomfortable. I expect that the desk and book and chair are not his, rather, they belong to the photography studio. Why was he having his picture taken? To commemorate some occasion? To send home to his mother, his sister? A woman he did not marry? A friend from school?

The back of the photo paper is labeled with the name of the photographer (as I have googled his name and found other photos by him). It reads EDMUND FREDE and in a ribboned motif beneath:

Hof-Photograph Sr.Kgl. Hoh. des Prinzen Friederich Carl
MÜNSTER
Neubrückenstr. No. 147.
Die Original. Platte ist zumm Nachbestellen aufbewahst.

I don’t know who he is to me. I’ve been rolling around an idea about a fraudulent spirit photographer and his sad underestimation of his own skill. I wonder if this fellow has something to do with that. But even more than who he will be in my hands, I wonder who he really was in his own. I’m only able to answer one of those questions.

He’s not able to tell me the rest. He can only sit, mute and sightly impatient, for the moment in my past and his future when he will get up and move, beyond my sight or my ken, out of the frame and into a life that is already over.

On any given school day in 1988, if you had entered the modest library of Foley Middle School through the right hand door you would have happened upon certain immutable landmarks.

Directly behind the door was a small gray machine which, for the modest sum of twenty-five cents, would spit out a fresh pencil for you. Very often the pencil would be stamped with a holographic, seasonal pattern. Pumpkins for Halloween and red shiny bells on a white backdrop for Christmas, green and gold for St. Patrick’s day. There was no window in the device, and you never knew what you were going to get. In all my years since I have yet to happen upon a more delightful means of getting pencils.

Straight ahead past the machine was a row of shelves which contained fiction books. Somewhere in the middle you would find a copy of my brother Sam is dead, which I never read. It was not at all my sort of book (at the time I was not much on any history after about 1700), and I boggled at the title. Surely the people who made books were aware of proper capital letters, and punctuation. If I could not get away with such nonsense down the hall in my English class, then how was this bold-faced aberration allowed in the school library? I notice now that current editions of the work have all capitals in the title, unlike the version that would be, as I said, in the shelf to your right. Just beyond that was the circulation desk. That’s all on the right-hand side.

However, if you were to come in the door and look directly to your left, you would see a row of interior windows. These faced across the hall, to the office, where I was rarely sent in all those miserable years, and only when the daily torment from Candace or Angie or some other girl-child-monster reached such extremes that I lashed out at them in retaliation. Once in the office I sobbed for clemency, got it, and then was turned out to face more abuse from my peers, who never got anything more than a lecture to Be Nice. Middle school is rarely a good time for anyone and it’s even worse for the bookish fat ones.

Below the library windows were the non-fiction shelves and right hard up against the door was one very small shelf containing the whole collection of the only books whose Dewey decimal numbers I ever remembered, the 130s. Paranormal and the Occult. This, I learned early on, is where all the decent ghost stories were. (Much like I didn’t care about any history not involving queens and armored knights, I also didn’t care much for made-up ghost stories. There were few exceptions, but among them were Wait Till Helen Comes (I have a signed copy now, a gift from my mother-in-law), Can I Get There by Candlelight?,and The Ghost in the Swing.)

In front of this shelf of spooky folklore, you very likely would have found me, probably in the turquoise and white striped shirt and matching solid knit jumper, with a book in my lap. While it’s possible that book might have been Thirteen Tennessee Ghosts and Jeffrey, more than likely it would be instead a big hardback tome, gray, I think, or blue. I don’t recall the title; it was nondescript. Ghosts of the British Isles, or something suggestive of that. It was one of those vast compendiums of lore, full of things my mother wouldn’t have wanted me reading. The one about the jealous Scotsman still gives me nightmares. It was in this book that I first encountered stories of wild country lords who foolishly challenged the Devil to a hand of cards, and whose fates were the worse for it. (It happened so often that either Satan was a busy cardsharp, or it was an effective cautionary tale about the ills of gambling.) Lord Evern Reichwyn, of Chancelion in Easting, owes much to this crowd, and Devil’s Luck would be a different story without them.

I was thinking today of one such tale in particular, about a midwife summoned in the night to come to the aid of a masked lady in her hour of need, and of a newborn baby thrown upon the fire by his father. Not knowing where she was, and witness to the father’s horrible infanticide, the midwife cut a square of cloth from the bedcurtain. Although she notified the authorities, and though the fabric swatch matched the cut hole in the manor bedcurtains, no one was brought to justice for the crime. I remembered the details of the story, I suspected that the troublemaking rake was one of those devil-gambling noblemen, I resurrected the whole library and my childhood self into the bargain, but I could not remember the man’s name. Or the name of the manor. Or the book the story was in. I googled variations on midwife pregnant woman mask lace curtains and got returns for varieties of pornography you really don’t even want to think about.

I bewailed this fact to Joy, and she within three minutes presented me with the name Wild William Darrell, and Littlecote House in Wiltshire. This woman should be working for the FBI. The wiki doesn’t detail the bit about the lace curtain, and if our Wild Willy D played a hand of cards with the Devil, it doesn’t mention that, either. It’s possible that’s another story entirely, and I’ll have to figure out the name of that ghost stories book to sort it out.

But I don’t really want to spend any more time in this phantom library of my past. I’d rather not read that story of the murderous Scotsman again, and how “what he discovered in the bureau was more horrible than he could bear” and he dumped his wife’s decomposed upper half in the floorboards instead of burying it in the garden with her legs. Some stories you only need to read once.

Still, you gotta admit, the pencil machine was pretty awesome.

On a recent morning I woke up and realized that it was, without question, fall. The signs were already there. The preceding week I had rescued one ruby-throated hummingbird that collided into our monstrous, glass-walled office building. I carried it on the open flap of my journal to the safety of the bushes and it flew away a moment later. The second hummingbird hit the window by my desk, struggled on the sidewalk, and died; two sojourners headed south for winter and facing all the perils of migration.

On Saturday morning the draft from the open window was chilly and the cat, demonstrating his desire for breakfast by sitting on my head, was not shoved away with the usual vigor. I let him wait, and snuggled under the rustly down comforter to steal an hour or so more next to Joy. But only one hour, because it was soon time to get up for breakfast soufflés and tea and notebooks at Panera, followed by the grocery shopping.

And because of the change of season in my window, I picked up stew beef and cans of diced tomatoes, in order to prepare a dish known to our household as Rood of An soup. It’s namesake is from Patricia McKillip’s Riddlemaster series, and it was first made years ago, when I was sick and wanting comfort, from everything left-over I could find in the kitchen. Now it requires some vegetables and some beef and some beer (one of two remaining bottles in the back of the fridge, the peace-offering to our last house-sitter. Joy is allergic, to her abiding grief, and I’m indifferent to beer, preferring an occasional soco and coke). It is one of those recipes that doesn’t do well in static form. It resists being written down and it never comes out exactly the same. Every batch is the best one yet.

Sunday morning, while the kitchen welled up with the smells of seared beef and garlic and beer, I opened up the windows to let in the breeze, retrieved my vast, blue-glazed pottery bowl from the Churchill Weavers seconds sale (procured at the time with an additional employee discount), and proceeded to make bread.

No bread-maker or dough-hook attachment on the Kitchen-Aid is involved with this. It is a bowl and a spoon and some flour and butter and molasses, and yeast dissolving in a warm cloud in the handled, spouted bowl Joy bought for me from the Berea College Pottery. (Also a seconds sale. I am not opposed to small chips or uneven glazes. It was a Christmas present, one of those spare first Christmases together. Now it proofs yeast and holds pancake batter and gravy overflow.)

The soup requires at least four hours of simmering to be perfect, and the scent of rising bread joins up with the soup-smell. In between dough punching and rising and resting, I play some Suikoden. (The first game, the one we bought for $5 in the used game bin at Hastings in Richmond.) Tir McDohl struggles to recruit all 108 Stars, Viktor proclaims himself to be Schtolteheim Reinbach III, and people passing on the sidewalk by our door comment to one another that someone is making something delicious.

When dinner time arrives it is bowls of glorious cheese-sprinkled soup in crockery bowls with still-hot brown bread and butter, and lemonade made from the lemons we brought back from the mountains. Dessert is tea and more bread and a jar of Catoctin Orchard’s apple butter and the tragic death of Odessa Silverberg. The cat is asleep on his blanket on the chair, and Nick and Miles are having the 5th important gerbil-grooming party of the day, buried deep in fluff to ward off the evening chill. Outside the streets are welling up with twilight. It’s time to close the windows, and to fold up the old wooden shutters.

Fall is here, and I am glad to see it.

Long ago, in the dim mists of time, by which I mean 1994 or so, I was a tree-hugging hippie-weirdo college student. I’m still something of a hippie weirdo, though I keep it on the down-low under my pinstripes and respectable heels, and it’s just too dangerous these days to be seen hugging any tree under 18, that shit can get you arrested.

Anyway.

In this mythic time, I realized for the first time I had my own life and my own money to spend and isn’t that cool. I still lived at home, but my college PO box became my lifeline to a world outside, and I ordered catalogs by the truckload to shop for exciting things. (This was, of course, before the internet was anything more than a clever tool for ubergeeks, good for MUDs and little else. It would be years later before even I had any kind of electronic mail.) The best of these things was a supply catalog called MoonScents and Magickal Blends, which at its prime was something like the Pyramid Collection and BPAL smushed together with a side of awesome. Getting those catalogs was like Christmas. It was basically run by one chick, Rhiannon, and I’m afraid I once talked her ear off on the communal phone in the Alumni Building student center. (Communal phone. Mail-order catalogs. It’s like talking about the dark ages.) While much of what MS&MB sold can still be found at various places online (Gypsy Moon clothing, wrought-iron beds that look like they sprouted up from the floor, all that) The one thing I can’t find are Rhiannon’s special formula perfume oils. These were special little things, in vials with silver labels. Inside, along with the oil, would be a chunk of resin or a gemstone or a crystal. Classy business. The scents were diluted to what you hear called “ritual strength” rather than “perfume strength” so they were never too strong. My favorite of these, and the one that smells like that whole time period in my life, was Dragon’s Blood.

Dragon’s Blood is an iffy prospect, because unlike, say, rose, it doesn’t just come from one plant. Several different things can produce a resin called dragon’s blood, and it can be blended in a number of formulas. Not to mention, it has no real smell unless it’s burned, and pretty much anything touting to be Dragon’s Blood scent is synthetic. No two “dragon’s blood” oils have ever smelled the same to me, and none smell like the cinnamon raspberry smoky something Moonscents sort. I bought three vials of that kind. The first I used up completely. The second I lost, still mostly full, somewhere in the woods around Indian Fort Mountain during Earth Roots Jamboree (when it was less of an indie music fest and more of a giant pothead party and drum circle, where I sold jewelry and painted faces and told fortunes for $5 a pop). The bottle was $8 I think, and it was a terrible loss for someone who only made $40 a week at a campus job. The second bottle I bought when MS&MB was already declining, only existed online and only sold oils, having shed the rest of the business. It is half-full. It sits in my drawer with my makeup. The bottle is over ten years old, and the scent has not changed. Opening it is a time warp. Wearing it makes me feel stronger, sharper, courageous, optimistic–whether through mojo, aromatherapy, or my own memory routes. I love the way it smells, more than any other perfume, and it doesn’t even bother Joy’s sensitive nose. Yet I hardly ever wear it. I keep it locked up more tightly than Lucy’s curative draught in the diamond bottle, because there’s so little of it and I don’t know how to get more.

I put some on this morning for a splurge of fearlessness, and wondered if there was any way to find a similar creature these days. The Moonscents website is a dead end (blocked from work for PROXY AVOIDANCE of all things), long since abandoned, and most new-age supply stores only stock cheap cough-syrup junk for dunking candles in. I suppose I could buy some dragon’s blood fragrance concentrate and make my own damn oil, but I’m not sure about that amount of work or how good the outcome would be. Not to mention, perfume-making in our tiny place is a recipe for trouble. I could stink us out of the house. o_o

BPAL has a whole page of dragon’s blood based scents, but most of them involve sandalwood (a giant no-no for Joy) or florals (a giant ugh for both of us). A lot of the BPAL forum for dragon’s blood talks about floral overtones, which I don’t get at all with the MS&MB version. It smells like– I don’t know. I breathe it in and I don’t get scents. I get that burgundy silk skirt of mine and the way light slanted through Sqecial Media’s windows into the jewelry case. I get ankle-deep leaves on the college campus, blue sky to break your heart on, the library steps, graphite and just-cut willow wood, the papery lining of my locked antique trunk. I get ankle bells and clove cigarettes and the queen of clubs and icy streets. Crushed cherries and doeskin and the woods beyond the softball field. I get self-discovery and the fear and power that came with it. This morning over my open word file I got the smell of the Temple’s corridors, and crimson velvet robes, and a wine glass on the windowsill and an open book and rain beyond.

That’s a tall order to fill with any two-dram vial, and mine is half gone.

When I was a kid, my elementary school had a tiny supply store in a spare closet next to the gymnasium. It was stocked with pop-point pencils and shaped erasers and those little plastic fruits full of flavored sugar, and it was open for a little bit in the morning and afternoon. There would be an afternoon run made by one lucky member of the classroom, to purchase delights from the fantastic smorgasbord.

Once, in third grade, when I was allowed to go up by myself, I spent fifty cents (an outrageous sum) for a simple file folder with a handsome rock star on it. It was a daring thing to do, really, because he was black. I grew up in a tiny town in the mountains of Kentucky. There were no black kids in my class. There were, in fact, only four or five black kids in the whole of my school. Even then, there was music they listened to and music we listened to, that line had not blurred yet. But it was about to, and the man who did it was the one smiling coyly out from my file folder, dancing in the videos that showed on our brand-new cablebox MTV. Michael Jackson. I think the folder cover had an image from thriller, but on the inside he had on a white suit. He looked so cool, lording over my spelling worksheets and math quizzes. At school talent shows there was lip synching to “we are the world” and “beat it.” Every boy in my class wanted a studded red leather asymmetrical zip jacket. None of us could manage to moonwalk even a little bit, though we tried every recess on the parking-lot asphalt.

But I grew older, and his life grew sadder. By the time I got to Epcot to see Captain EO it was already a relic of the Michael that had been, the simple storyline a candy-coated version of the same things he had done in the music industry. He summoned dark, sad creatures out of their husks, he dressed them in rainbows, he taught them to dance.

And he could dance. He could always dance.

People might think that his crazy life will be his legacy, and will overtake that fact. But I know where his legacy is, and it is right here.

These kids are all too young to remember Michael Jackson the way I do, and the same goes for most of their fans. By the time they noticed him, he was already an eccentric star, neck-deep in scandal and tabloid covers. But watch them dance, and listen to them sing. They know Michael Jackson just like I did. And in them, and those after them, that is where he will endure. In motion, in music, in memory.