Exchange Rate

I stare at the beard on the tire salesman hoping it’s hiding

something from me inside because on most days I am decent

at reading people, but he is burly in his navy blue uniform and I

would pay almost anything to get back on the road. I lean

against the counter, and look back at the shop through the window

tinting the cars in the rear of the building and the men underneath

and the tires holding on to one another in these perfectly

tilted towers. This elevator goes only to the top, and once there,

my friends, there’s just the one way down. Pit stops on these

the otherwise dramatic versions of life as a highway. And that

cliché wore me out sick in its pseudo radio rock and roll version

back in the nineties but that was an entire other decade, another

century, another time in my life and now when the song comes playing

on the speakers, covered by some country artist trying to make it big

for every one of his moms and pops and aunts and cousins sitting

on the back porch eating corn on the cob and drinking cheap beer,

I think to myself that maybe the song is not so bad after all, and even now

preferred in the original version once un-preferred. These are a people

I know all over the place. America look at your wonderful guts.

And I am wearing khaki pants I am not to be trusted I am looking

at a man who is looking at me and we are both wondering what it is

the other one really wants. And the door opens and the wind comes

in and now it is the weather that brings us together as he and you

and I and we go on standing in semi-circles and wondering what

in the world sends the rain. Because anyone who understands motors

even in the slightest sense understands a chain of command

if you push the why and how far enough you’re always eventually left

without an answer. So I sip on the coffee which is really just water

pushed slowly through a bean, a bean which once pushed slowly

through water, and soil, and air, and this very moment I hope

is a microcosm of larger things that are also not to be understood.

I have loved many women. I have married only one. I have lost

a brother and given up on people. I have no idea how to live

the honest life, the good life, the pure life, the righteous life but I

am working on living the best I can which these days I can sometimes

be proud of. And I have grown to be a better gardener and a better

neighbor and a better listener—all these things in spite of myself.

The whole world in spite of myself. We go on and you go on and in

the background the air ratchet goes on in perpetual motion, removing

the same lug nuts it will later put back on and tighten. Even the machines

take on a life of habit. You can drive a car back and forth to work

the same route every day and then one day head for the ocean only to find

the car would rather stay home. This may imply I was going somewhere.

This may imply an escape. I know freedom is just a word and America

is not itself freedom but they are a concept I continue to love. Like in

the movies about prison escape, of one sort or another, where the caged

man is let out to shake a leg. This happens in one of two ways: on his own

or with the help from friends. And if a history of film has taught me

anything it is that it is beautiful to be alone, and beautiful to rely on friends.

The key is the right camera angle. These are little lessons of life I offer

with a growing respect for little lessons of life. Outside it’s getting

darker and the trees are bending to the will of the wind because

the tree that stands upright is a proud tree but a fool because

as established earlier we have yet to identify the temperament

of the source. And I have yet to identify the source of the automobile

malfunction, which is I am sure something technical but just seems

to have something to do with the heart. Here’s a confession. Sometimes

at the shop I look at the local car papers, at all the fabulous array

of cars, trucks, minivans, campers, and each car stands in as an alternate

lifestyle, another me set to motion by the glimpse of a photograph.

And then at some point (and it happens every time) I feel guilty,

like I have cheated on my own car, like I’ve let it down and this is

the reason he has let me down, because I was the first to break his heart.

Silly notion but it never leaves. Silly is what the life’s all about.

In the front of the tire shop there is a flower bed, surrounded

by concrete and new tires and chrome rims and trash various people

have unloaded while at the stop light. And I wonder who

in their right mind puts a flower bed at an auto-mechanic’s, and which

of the workers comes out, early in the morning, to water the flowers

which go on in spite, in good weather and bad weather, in testament

that inside these doors is a man or woman that cares this much.

Pride in work. There is only the autumn to return the favor.

But I say this as someone in summer simply waiting for rain.

The television is set to the news announcing another bad day

at the stock exchange, though gold has appeared to hold its value.

This gives me hope, if for no other reason than we the people have

set out trying to mean something heavy, and because gold is something

I have none of except for the wedding ring I wear on my finger,

the ring a young Jamaican girl held before my wedding, weighing it

in her hand, asking, Gold? And when I nodded, she answered, Nice,

and I felt like for once I had done something terribly right. Error

and redemption. I’m trying to make up for a thousand things. The door bell

rings and the man up front tells me my car is ready. I pay him with a credit card

because it’s the only option I have. And we shake hands, and I look at the clock

and then back again. And we nod as if knowing the debt owed each other,

and the larger debt owed somewhere else. He hands me my keys and says

You’re all ready to go. As if once gone out the door he already knows where.