Ohio Men

Ohio men never wanted to be boys. They strutted right out of childhood, drove tractors when they were eight and cars when they were twelve, got their own at sixteen, best if it were a ‘55 Chevy, turquoise and white, with the fins of a shark. Jerry Green, who got his black Mercury on his seventeenth birthday, drove it into the side of a bridge that evening and went without wheels until he got a job at the creamery.

They lent their basketball jackets, number on the back, to girls in study hall who pretended to be cold. They left birthday parties after the hot dogs and before the games, went to Emil’s for strawberry pie. They aimed everything at graduation, when their lives would begin.

They went to work baling hay or digging trenches for new septic tanks, realizing that graduation wasn’t the beginning but the end of their dreams.

They walked ruts along the edges of their territory, the small worlds they’d made. The ruts, too deep to cross, became the boundaries of their vision.  They worked hard, married, had kids—everything a good man in Ohio was expected to do--and wondered if it was any use at all to tell their sons what they’d discovered about life. Probably not.

--from The Sound of a Thousand Leaves, Redwood Writers Vintage Voices anthology, 2011 (forthcoming)

Photograph by Luna Zeffer (panel of mural, Andy's produce market, Sebastopol, California)