Danny is our son, Daniel Frederick Drollinger, who died of Melanoma in July 1998.
TYING MY SHOELACES IN THE BALD SPOT
For Danny Boy
One who died is only a little ahead of procession, all moving that way. When we round the corner we’ll see him again. We have only lost him for a moment because we fell behind, stopping to tie a shoe-lace. J. M. Barrie
I can’t imagine where you were;
lying seemingly unconscious; melanoma in your spine.
Maybe you were in those many photos we have:
Fishing, sun-burnt, beer in hand.
On Diamondhead where you jogged on summer days.
Jokingly putting your head on the beheading stone in Kole Kole pass
Mimicking ‘American Gothic’ beside your mother in your yard on Hilyard with a fishing pole instead of a pitchfork.
We wish we had photos of you:
Surfing/sliding down greased stairs on cardboard at college parties.
Walking on hot coals at a barbecue.
Twelve years old, at a barbershop showing how you wanted your hair like Tom Petty on an album cover.
Playing Bass Drum in the high school band at the Rose Parade and at a football halftime competition playing ‘The 1812 Overture.’
You might be still selling plastic tubes fastened to flashlights in the parking lot where Star wars was playing.
I’ll bet in a strange twist of cosmic time you were and are drumming in a band named “Liquid Chicken” for pizza and beer like you did in college.
Maybe forever at the many restaurants we ate at, savoring life, when we knew you were going to die within weeks. Two weeks before you died Ibrahim the owner of one bargained with you so that you got a better wine for the same price (a Hanzell Pinot Noir) and then he cooked medallions of beef at our table.
Your signature and you are in the medical software which you helped develop.
You chided another employee for gossiping.
The company had to request that you change the way you had constructed your ‘Dilbert’ cubicle.
I think and hope you are not still in the Iowa cornfields where you wandered all night after your sister, Buffy, died of an asthma attack, leaving four children whom you wanted to help raise.
I like to think you are in the grove at the end of Hilyard street near where you lived and died. I saw a young man there only yesterday from a distance who looked like you, waving.
You introduced me to ‘Tom Petty,’ (I won’t back down) ‘Blue Oyster Cult,’ (“[Don’t Fear] The Reaper” and “We Gotta Get Out of This Place”) ‘Tom Waites,’ (“A Soldier’s Medals”) ‘The Alan Parsons Project,’(somewhere in the mist of time when the wind will blow right through us tell them you were a friend of mine) ‘The Pogues,’ and ‘Beck.’
You invented a game; board and all, like Clue, Dungeons and Dragons, war games, and Lord of the Rings. Instead of rooms there were places in the forest. One was the Bald Spot where the extra terrestrials landed in the movie ET.
I can’t imagine where you were.
I can’t imagine where you were when I told you that although you were a stepson, you were my son and how well I thought you had done in life.
We weren’t sure you were conscious until tears streamed down your face a few minutes before you died.
Maybe you were at the bald spot, waiting. Maybe you still are at the bald spot in the grove at the south end of Hilyard with that machine which calls your loved ones back and causes your heart to show red, beating hard;
leaving.
Wait!
Wait a few of those cosmic ET seconds while I tie this poetry together.
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