Joe Kapitan ~ Four Occasions

Birthday

I was going to have Michelangelo’s bake you a huge cas­sa­ta birth­day cake with mul­ti­ple tiers, and hol­lowed out in the mid­dle so I could jump out and sur­prise you, but then I asked myself—am I what you would choose to have pop out of a cake? Might you pre­fer a cud­dly pup­py, a younger man, a woman for a change, a pile of mon­ey? Or per­haps you’d pre­fer to have noth­ing com­ing out of the cake at all, but rather, a small step lad­der to climb inside the hol­low and dis­ap­pear with a wave and a wink— through a win­dow, through a worm­hole. Is there some­where else you’d rather be? Is there some­one else you’d rather be? This is why birth­days have always been so hard for us—we shop for presents, we fail, then we end up going out to din­ner at L’Albatros where dozens of tables sup­port uneasy cou­ples default­ing to their devices, a place where it’s per­fect­ly accept­able to look like you are still get­ting to know your part­ner of two weeks or two years or two decades.

~

President’s Day

Is it strange that President’s Day makes me think of Martha Washington and Mary Todd Lincoln, instead of George and Abraham? Martha was pre­vi­ous­ly mar­ried; this I did not know. Before she was Martha Washington, Martha Dandridge became Martha Custis, then Widow Custis at age twen­ty-six, moth­er of four chil­dren (two below the ground, two above), and own­er of the hun­dreds of slaves who worked her late husband’s tobac­co plan­ta­tion. By the time George Washington came court­ing, she’d already sur­vived a life­time. It’s said that their attrac­tion was imme­di­ate. I like to think war­riors rec­og­nize oth­er war­riors. Mary Todd was not mar­ried before she became Mary Todd Lincoln, but she also had four chil­dren (final tal­ly: three below ground, one above) and she was seat­ed next to dear Abraham at the the­ater when he was shot. She buried him, too. The remain­der of her life was a cortège of mad­ness and ghosts. I like to think that a war­rior can read the beau­ty in anoth­er warrior’s scars. I like to think of scars as vic­to­ry tal­lies etched in skin or else notched into bone and maybe the best use of this gov­ern­ment day of rest is for us, us war­riors, to sit down and count our own scars and then each other’s and won­der at how we’ve even made it this far.

~

Fourth of July

All that which we hate will be beat­en with base­ball bats, drowned in the kid­die pool, grilled with pep­pers and onions, blown to bits after sun­down. Only then will we feel free, spilling col­ors against the night sky.

~

Anniversary

I didn’t get you flow­ers, because of the glad­i­a­tors, and I didn’t buy you jew­el­ry because of the emper­or. You more than any oth­er will under­stand this, because you are a stu­dent of his­to­ry and it was you who told me about Caligula and how he plant­ed spies among the colosseum’s keep­ers, to find out which glad­i­a­tors had devel­oped bonds between them­selves, and how the emper­or paid twice the usu­al amount of gold for duels arranged between close friends. In those days, and these days, love looked like the delib­er­ate­ly-slowed arc of a blade, just enough to aid the oth­er. And those who refused to fight their dear friends were show­ered with ros­es, the worst out­come, for it meant that the crowd nev­er wished to seem them in the are­na again, and those mis­er­able souls became slaves for life, labor­ing in chains with­in earshot of the colos­se­um; every roar of the crowd a fresh insult. Their names were for­got­ten, even to them­selves. No, we are not those peo­ple. We pre­fer to bleed.

Happy anniver­sary.

P.S. Do you remem­ber how it rained on our wed­ding day? All the guests felt sor­ry for us but you laughed because you nev­er want­ed to take out­door pho­tographs any­way, you just want­ed to dance, and you whirled around and around in the down­pour with your face to the sky and my heart spilled over and the report to the emper­or stat­ed that your mas­cara ran and streaked your face like war paint.

~

Joe Kapitan writes fic­tion and cre­ative non-fic­tion from a glacial ridge­line south of Cleveland. Recent work has appeared or will appear in Booth, Passages North, Pithead Chapel and DIAGRAM. He is the author of a short sto­ry col­lec­tion, Caves of the Rust Belt (Tortoise Books).