Penned By Taylor: Twelve Years of Silence: Part I

I always thought it would be raining when I attended the funeral of someone I loved, but it’s not. The day is clear, and filled with the vibrancy of life that has now left my Johnny forever. But, somehow, this atmosphere seems appropriate. Johnny always had his way in life. I’m not sure if it was his smile, charm personified in a crooked upturn at the corner of his lips, or his laugh, which was bewitching in its wild tones, but he had a way of persuading the very ground beneath his feet to lay flat and allow him unhindered passage. Being the dramatic soul he was, he would have wanted more theatrical conditions as he was lowered beneath the earth. Today, however, it appears the world rejected his last request and I take a kind of pleasure in knowing that. One might say I’m somewhat bitter. 

I grew up in a small town in Indiana by the name of Boone Grove. It was the heart of blue-collar America and I was one of its offspring. Bearing the full experience of the Second World War, my parents were greatly affected by a strong vein of patriotism that once stretched across the nation. As a result, I grew up in American tradition. So when I turned my back on marriage I was little more than a disappointment. Though, if you asked my mother, I’d always been a disappointment as a daughter that preferred the world of poetry over the reality of womanhood. My father had worked in a factory his entire life, but I never thought much of the place and its sign, a rust-speckled badge of unmet expectation, that read, “Thorgen Tool & Die Molding” The factory went up with the war. It represented the country’s efforts on the home front and the diligence of women working to the benefit of their men. Whatever its history, by the time I turned nineteen and began my years of internment there, it was producing the molds that were necessary for other factories to create something of actual use to society. Anyone with a true poet’s soul can recognize poetry in even the most mundane tasks, but this was the exception. My passion lay dormant. 

After six years of stamping and filing, self-preservation told me that leaving was my only option. I’d seen pictures of San Francisco and its eclectic collection of people in magazines. It was the epicenter of change and the antithesis of Boone Grove. For a young, ambitious poet, it was where I knew I belonged. In September of 1963, I boarded a train to San Francisco and never came back. I’d planned to visit, but Johnny isn’t one of those fellows that runs according to plan. 

I’d never really thought much about how I would feel if I lost someone to death. I guess it’s because I’d always been too busy fitting my own visions of, what I supposed the experience to be like, in rhyme schemes. Johnny’s death wasn’t real to me until he was six feet under, or that’s how the expression goes anyway. His departure should have been obvious when I saw him lying motionless on the steering wheel, when I attended his wake and his body was in such perfect condition I had to hold back the urge to shake him from sleep or during his funeral when they spoke of his life in past tense. No, it was not until the dirt was packed firmly over his head that the mixed emotions set in.