A 1959 Plymouth Fury leans heavily onto Market Street from 17^th – bumpers sagging, suspension shot, carburetor clogged, body bent and chrome peeling off like flesh after a July sunburn. The driver is too young to understand the angst attached to this garish horizontal impersonation of an idealized rocket. It is the late nineties now and a lot of years have melted away – pink plastic picnic spoons smoking on hot stovetops. Uncle Grinold waits cautiously at the corner as the years clatter past.

Trousers rolled, just like in the poem, and wary of every pitted fruit, women mostly go. Uncle Grinold’s spider-webbed wallet is no match for the expectations of the other sex. Gasping for air, stalking a sandy beach, his last surviving hormone attempts summer solstice calisthenics. No one notices. Uncle Grinold isn’t sure of those faint stirrings, either. He tries to remember what all of the parts are for. The sun goes north; the sun goes south; the seasons enclose like blister wrap. Uncle Grinold gets winded riding the up elevator.

Standing on the corner of 17^th and Market in Seattle 40 and more years later with a grenade in his bowels, praying for a favorable breeze and hoping no one gets hurt, the long escape of middle aged gas begins and goes on and on and on. Uncle Grinold looks to make sure no one is near while making it look like he is checking the weather; and he is, in a very local way. In an elevator there would have been casualties. There are no more telephone booths for Superman.

Uncle Grinold used to be as tough as Frau Beckman’s butt, ditch digger and dirt laborer that he was when youth was his to squander. In ’65 he bucked hay in the Rogue River valley. No city kid could have been farther from home than Uncle Grinold was in those dry summer fields. He lifted 90-pound bales from the field onto the back of a flatbed truck equipped with an internal guidance system. That old Ford would crawl between the rows of hay bales at one, two miles an hour with no driver. Four decades later, Uncle Grinold makes his way slowly over the uprooted sidewalk, his transmission jammed in granny gear. The bag he carries contains a 12-pack of toilet paper; he worries that he might not have enough. When he finally gets home, he will have to remember to put the Crest and Analpram in different drawers. He will have to remember to remember. He feels old – as worn and unlaced as Van Gogh’s shoes.