UNDONE

which turned into a story in "Getting Over Tom"

MY UNDOING

I am fond of imperfection. When I make people out of clay, I don't want to make smooth bodies and muscles that appear where muscles are, or precisely how everything fits together, settles, where the creases are. I wouldn’t make them perfect even if I could, which I can’t. I like catching whoever they are in a moment of becoming or coming undone. I like a rough draft. Perfection is sort of ho-hum.

But this afternoon I came across the photograph of a young man I knew for a week.He was a carpenter and I was a visitor at the house where he was working. The bumper sticker on his red pickup read TOO CUTE TO STAY HOME, a gross understatement, and after a brief conversation that took place on either side of an enormous snapping turtle in the path between us, he declared, “I’m taking you four wheeling.” We knew absolutely nothing about each other, but if it had been a movie one of us would have had to die, because it was a short but perfect love story.

“Stay,” he said, “I will build you a house.” In the photo he is sitting on a porch railing, half naked, perfect, crooking his finger and grinning at me. There was nothing ho-hum about him. He was turning twenty and I was forty-eight. I asked him once to tell me about his work. “Really?” he answered in disbelief. “Really,” I said. He hesitated. “Well, to begin with,” he said, “The plumb line is God.”

I am older now and presumably wiser, and I brag about my twelve grandchildren and my two great grandchildren, and grab all the gravitas I can about being in my eighties, but today I’m surrendering to the pleasure of this photograph, and the longing it awakens, grateful that I can still be undone.