Michael fumbled around in the pockets of his hound's tooth wool trousers in search of his front door key. The frigid wind blew south at his back, sneaking underneath his scarf, and the grip of his wingtips on the frozen sidewalk was precarious.

    So was everything about his life, he thought. Tuition was going up, thanks to a re-structuring at the university, but the student loans were already starving him; he still had three more semesters left, at minimum, before he qualified for graduation. But with a liberal arts degree, even from an Ivy League school, Michael was already looking down the barrel of the new American Dream: hitting the streets fresh out of college with a long road of indebtedness stretching into the foreseeable future.

    He leaned against the stoop and lit a cigarette. His father was a smoker too, and he recalled adolescent nights sitting on the front porch, his father gesturing in the twilight air with the glowing Kent fag, lecturing him on the virtues of finishing high school. Michael did not finish high-school. Disinterest and defeatist teachers planted even less inspiration in him than his fathers' monotonous manifestos about steady income, IRAs, and how he had worked so hard to put himself through college. Alas, his father's liberal arts degree had NOT been enough to put Michael through school. Having earned a high school equivalency degree after a three-year hiatus from lectures, textbooks, and the drudgery of non-popularity, he enrolled in a general studies program at an Ivy League school, with high ambitions, a love for literature and languages, and a Fannie-May student loan.

    As a teen, Michael endured many smoky front porch lectures under his dad's heavy arm. If anything from those nights stuck with Michael, it was his father's steady insistence that one day he would be thankful he had spent many tedious hours practicing the piano. The music lessons, his father guaranteed, would eventually pay off, as long as Michael stuck with them. That promise swirled into Michael's head as he took the last dirty puff from the cashed Marlboro and rose to his feet at the base of the stoop. He was glad his father wasn't with him on that porch. With a loud and inpatient exhale, he snuffed the butt on the sidewalk, pulled the front door key from his pocket and entered the small apartment building on East Lovett Street.

    Heat from the radiator drew tiny rivulets of sweat to Michael's forehead as he unlocked the mailbox in the hallway. He withdrew the stack of Fannie May envelopes and junk mail and walked toward the stairs. He started to flip through the stack, then gave up. It had been a long week, and Michael didn't feel like letting the bills get in the way of  unwinding. He felt as though relaxation was an impossibility these days, as his completion of school was becoming more and more of an uncertainty. If he could only bear to break this news to his dad, who was still slaving in a high school classroom as a Latin teacher, he would feel better.

    What Michael didn't know, though, was that a single postcard in the uninspected stack of mail he carried would soon manifest his father's decade-old promise. Later, Michael would wonder if the sincerity in his father's words hadn't actually helped bring about that manifestation, though his dad never would have accepted that sort of credit. Michael also didn't know that in just a few months his father would be dead, having died a very happy man.

    Jose was hurrying south on Strawberry Street. He had just enjoyed a long walk through the park. The sun was setting over row houses that lined the streets of the affluent Jersey neighborhood, and the temperature was dropping rapidly, in contrast to the sky which was taking on the firey pink and orange hues of the sunset.

    As he neared his stoop, Jose came upon an SUV parked on the side or the road. A child's car seat sat on the sidewalk, as a man and woman pulled assorted day-bags and a stroller from the opened hatchback.  A young boy tugged at his mother's sleeve as she worked. "Next weekend can we go to another batting cage Mom?" the boy inquired wistfully. Jose's gaze fell upon a small girl who looked about four years old. She stood with her back to her family, leaned against a sycamore that grew out of an opening in the pavement. Shoulder length, strawberry blond hair framed her blank face, which was pink from the cold. Her nose ran. Jose detected a small bruise below her right eye, sign of a playground fall or a toustle with her big brother. She wore a pink wool dresscoat that came past her knees.  As she gazed at the sidewalk, a frown grew upon her face. The frown gave way to a trembling lower lip, then came tears. The girl wept silently, out of sight of the others. As Jose walked past, the child looked up and their eyes met. A lump rose in his throat as he watched her struggle with a new sort of pain, one that had been dormant in him for many years. It was that feeling of disappointment, the lonliness that comes to children of parents who fall out of love.

...and though it would be months before the colors would return to their normal muted, yet organic hues; before the natural order of things was  restored  on Strawberry Street; and before Ted would once again be able to look Jose in the eye and say with conviction 'I am certain that the price will go down again before the quarter ends', Heather had to give pause as she turned left off of Daliance Way into her wind-swept driveway. At that moment, it suddenly occurred to her that no amount of love or yearning would ever carry her back into the arms or her former love. She opened the mailbox, and as she flipped through the usual stack of junk mail and bills, a small postcard scribbled in a familiar script changed her life again, forever.

The vanilla bouganvillea now keeps watch over the 3 aloe veras that hold down the left-hand window pane. The giant venus flytrap breathes out pure white steam while it sleeps, and the jade-ivy lowers pearls of sweet juice at sundown. I lie on my back on the floor as the drops fall onto my chest and face. The singing sanseveria croons lullabyes and show tunes, sounding at dawn like Josephine Baker, at noon like a whacked-out Robert Goulet, and at dusk like Sinatra. By midnight, we are singing duets of Moon River and  Every Day is Like Sunday. Come 2 a.m., I take a bath among the lavendar lilypads and towel off with a mat of coral crabgrass. I decided to call the shop girl.

An old friend Andy Garber and I ran into eachother at a gig I played at Shakori Hills this spring. He interviewed me for his website, Live Audio Mag.