Oklahoma. The Weigh Station.



I'm not sure what kind of monster writes about his family. There's so many dynamics to it. You go into it thinking that you might be a monster or they will be moved, elated, flattered. You're never sure where to begin or how roughly you should trod. Whether it's not better to just carry the proverbial big stick. I do it now (I think) because I have admiration for my family. This is not a method to establish personal denouement. That's what therapy is for. Or Augusten Burroughs novels. No, this is to illuminate, glorify a family which was born best out of the threads which are woven into the flags of the American Dream. I begin with a photograph which sits on my desk. Easter it must have been. Somewhere around either 1982 or 1983. Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Outside of Tulsa. A brown clay brick house in which we lived. (Street name?) My other to the left, in a white business-style blouse with a blue tied ribbon next to my grandmother wearing her signature white coat and her pink-rimmed glasses, smiling wide for the camera. Proud to be with her grandchildren, her daughter-in-law. I was still Master Greg Schoonmaker, still shorter than my sister and still blaringly blonde. My sister, her hair cut short but a white barrett on the side, a navy blue dress. One purple ribbon in the middle and white tights to cover her legs, white shoes. Navy blue was the fare of the day. It must have been Easter, would have been my guess. My grandmother's favorite holiday, and usually right around the time when she would have been able to come see us all.



Oklahoma was always barren, the grass on the front lawn, a parched brown, leading me to belive it could have also been Christmas... a logical guess but in Oklahoma, one never knows. My mother remembered there being dust stroms off in the distance that you could see from the back of the house. Oklahoma is naturally, a mystic place, not often given much creedence as a place to tour or visit, because of its sometimes gaping holes of sky and wide scopes of land. If you're looking for some place which will help you meditate contemplatively on the nature of oblivion, then you've gone to the right place in Oklahoma. I don't remember much of it, except for a time when a tornado watch was threatening. Me & the Ritter kids from down the street were playing and the wind picked up and just as quicky died down. The sky turned yellow, then green. Green. No lie at all and thick rolls of cloud had formed in the sky. Fishermen, farmers and weathermen like to refer to them as mackerel scales and are approproraitely named. It's worse when the sky is green because it's reminsicent of The Emerald City in Oz, where you go when the tornadoes come and pick you up and throw you from this earth.