Sheryl St. Germain

I am watching the movie Twelve Angry Men because there is a character in it who reminds me of him. He is the one who wants to go to the baseball game instead of decide on a man’s life, he is the weak one, the one afraid to reveal what he really feels, the one for whom everything is a joke. He is not Henry Fonda, the tight-lipped moral one. The man is despicable, his weaknesses obvious to all, as obvious as Henry Fonda’s goodness. I watch the movie again and again, loving the black and white of it, soothed by the sound of my father’s voice, the careless pronunciation, the easy shrugging of the shoulders at every crucial question. I sink lower into the dark arms of the sofa. Strange how comfortable the familiar is, how we can even prefer it, however terrifying.

for my grandmother, Theresa Frank Some slow evenings when the light hangs late and stubborn in the sky, gives itself up to darkness slowly and deliberately, slow cloud after slow cloud, slowness enters me like something familiar, and it feels like going home. It’s all there in the disappearing light: all the evenings of slow sky and slow loving, slow boats on sluggish bayous; the thick-middled trees with the slow-sounding names—oak, mimosa, pecan, magnolia; the slow tree sap that sticks in your hair when you lie with the trees; and the maple syrup and pancakes and grits, the butter melting slowly into and down the sides like sweat between breasts of sloe-eyed strippers; and the slow-throated blues that floats over the city like fog; and the weeping, the willows, the cut onions, the cayenne, the slow-cooking beans with marrow-thick gravy; and all the mint juleps drunk so slowly on all the slow southern porches, the bourbon and sugar and mint going down warm and brown, syrup and slow; and all the ice cubes melting in all the iced teas, all the slow-faced people sitting in all the slowly rocking rockers; and the crabs and the shrimp and crawfish, the hard shells slowly and deliberately and lovingly removed, the delicate flesh slowly sucked out of heads and legs and tails; and the slow lips that eat and drink and love and speak that slow luxurious language, savoring each word like a long-missed lover; and the slow-moving nuns, the black habits dragging the swollen ground; and the slow river that cradles it all, and the chicory coffee that cuts through it all, slow-boiled and black as dirt; and the slow dreams and the slow-healing wounds and the slow smoke of it all slipping out, ballooning into the sky—slow, deliberate, and magnificent.