A Memory

We are fighting in the backseat as usual my brother and I are fiesty, territorial children arguing over the invisible middle line across the backseat of a brown Ford Pinto (that would at one point carry us all the way to a family vacation in Maine without spontaneously combusting) on the way to a maybe-once-a-month family dinner at the Mountain View Diner

We battle over backseat territory

while my dad whistles along to

Ronnie Milsap's Smoky Mountain Rain

(my dad could have won a whistling championship, if such a thing

had existed among poor folk in

rural Pennsylvania in the '70s)

while my parents

chat casually about

how it feels like it's going to rain

The diner has a dining room

attached to the diner part

it's carpeted and advertises a

"smorgasboard"

(I don't know what that is)

and an organ player

who will sometimes

if I ask nicely

play a song

for the little red-haired girl

I order spaghetti and meatballs

every time

and eat it like an animal

lifting heaping forkfulls of

dangling spaghetti into the air

and lowering them into my mouth

like a tiny

tomato-painted savage

my family is embarrassed

every time

and I am unbothered by that

On the way home

it does start to rain

and I'm not sure which parent

was right about the rain

but my dad is now

whistling along to

Looking for Love

in All the Wrong Places

and I wonder how they found it

and how many wrong places

they had to look for it

and if they ever really found it at all

and if I ever really would

~VoodooRue, February 2024