Mark Fullmer

the-divine-reality.mp3

Imagine! an unplanned dinner with your entire five-headed nuclear family, a conversation that ranges from Smothers Brothers comedy to Chichi-jima POWs to Pol Pot to the meaning of "a rolling stone gathers no moss" -- your::::::family! Your mother has lost 15 pounds and is putting mayonnaise, sparingly, on her dinner salad, offering the same to you, while her daughter sits idly in the adjoining room, contemplating five beatific things to say to each one of y'all, and her other son strums an out of tune guitar (all of you imagining him plucking 'Sweet Home Alabama' in memory of poor, poor Lynyrd), the kind with the mother-of-pearl pick board. Your father would be leaving for Brazil in four months, while you're far sooner off to pillage the American countryside, and then to invade China armed only with schoolmarm bedside manner-- parallels drawn with premotorcyclediary Che (did you know the Japs killed 30 million Chinese in the war?). You might leave that night with a warming, sad sense of your father...and two of his analog cassette tapes. They might be ol' time church music--the stuff of your musical geneaology, dated 1980, the year of your birth.