Pipe Wrench

I threw away half the house when my mother died. Baby shoes. Undeveloped film. Awards from third grade. All of it was important. None of it was important. Not in the face of death. I had no place to put all that shit, and I couldn’t be bothered. One childhood artifact bound for ejection was a set of nesting dolls. The rotund woman, her company of smaller but identically contoured women tucked neatly inside her, lived in the bottom of the china cabinet. I only ever saw her when we were preparing a formal dinner and I had to pull out an infrequently used platter or set of dishes sharing the same shelf. Each time, I would deconstruct the woman, enraptured by her magic. Each time, I would return her secrets to their places, and her to the shelf.

It was 1970 in South Central, Los Angeles, and 14 year old Charles Hatcher, who goes by Chuck, was in his backyard flying his pigeons. Chuck had a complexion the color of wildflower honey and an afro that looked as soft as cotton candy. He was slight in stature and withdrawn, but he connected with his birds. It had been a little over a year since he started raising them, and on this day he was particularly enamored by a black and white Birmingham Roller he’d scored from a neighbor for a few bucks. Birmingham Rollers are known for their in-air acrobatics, and this bird was the best Chuck had owned in his nascent pigeon-fancying career. The bird spun so fast, it looked like a machine.

On a cold day in the dead of winter, nine days before the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden, less than a week after Trump supporters led an insurgency at the U.S. Capitol, I received an unsolicited letter from my aunt. Written in a Word document and attached to an email, it explained that she had been following my Twitter feed and did not like it or the slew of suspensions that Twitter was handing out to insurrectionists. It accused Biden of being the devil, and defined Democrats — including me — as the army of Satan:

It’s any given weekend in the early 80s, and my mother is prepping. She pulls the air popper out of the woodgrain kitchen cabinets, puts it on the white tile counter, and measures out a quarter-cup of kernels. The machine whirs and popcorn jitters down the chute into a stainless-steel bowl, some spilling onto the counters and floor. She portions the popped corn into three standard-issue brown paper lunch bags — one for her, one for me, one for my younger sister — neatly folds their tops, and secures each one with a single central staple.