“It’s clear, we could probably see from the back yard,” I said to my son, about tonight’s eclipse.

“Except for the trees,” he said.

“Okay, the front yard? We could use the telescope.”

“Really we need to go up to Estabrook where it’s open and dark,” he said, walking away from what he’s left me to do.

“Yeah sure great,” I said, not really wanting to do that, and wondering how we went from planning to stand on the porch together, to me having to lug a heavy thing a couple miles. Now he was in his room, where he’d stay for the duration if I didn’t remember to suggest that he come down and let me lug a heavy thing for him. He’s my son. I did the same to my Dad, with different things, in another house in a similar suburb where we heard the ocean, not the highway, like we do here.

“That sounds like a really pretty place,” said the nurse in a Pittsburgh hospital, where I was bleeding from a knife wound. I was neither victim nor suicide – just a freshman klutz cutting Styrofoam, in a dorm late at night. Gave a campus cop something to do, I guess, and let a tired nurse read “Cape Elizabeth, Maine,” from my paperwork.  I was in school to design mass-produced machines, the ones I’d drawn so many times growing up, when I could have been drawing lighthouses and sunrises and the many, many, so fucking many trees in Cape Elizabeth, Maine.

When my childhood friend and neighbor Munch heard that I’d gone to design school in Pittsburgh, he said, “That’s an Al place to be.” It was. I remember the first time I approached it, from the highway to the north, and saw the skyline and a train wrapped over multiple bridges and directions at once. I moved and it moved. As long as we were moving I only saw everything moving. When we stopped, I saw the great gungy buildings and the cliff wall of the South Side, the lighted signs and windows on permanent pause, making views at each other. We moved again, still in the family car, and now every angle disjointed and swung, the views determined to trick me and hide, splitting and fading into trees and a small room with a coarse piece of Styrofoam, with my blood on it.

I doubt that design students today spend so much time making little models, but I hope they still draw a lot. I’m no longer a designer, which is no big loss to the world of mass-produced machines, but I don’t see any of the time I spent drawing as wasted. I just drew my life lessons from the wrong parts of the picture. I saw cars and trains, coming from me onto paper on the spare room floor. Doesn’t this mean I should go where cars and trains come from?

***

“Bay Ridge ain’t even the worst part of Brooklyn,” Travolta said to what’s her name in Saturday Night Fever. I didn’t know the line, nor had I seen the movie or even heard the whole soundtrack, in 1993, when I started dating a girl from Bay Ridge, who was the best thing about Pittsburgh. She knew that line, and the park by The Bridge where he spoke it. It was where she’d gotten hit by a bike when she was five. We saw the movie together on campus, and I wore white polyester pants with my fake Travolta accent.

At that point I still thought I could be a designer in Manhattan. I’d have an office and a loft, and a computer and a place north of the city to park my old Chrysler. Just for weekends, you know, nobody drives in the city, everybody knows that. Eventually I did take my little portfolio to visit a design firm and Architectural Record magazine. I said something and they offered me nothing and moved on. But I did know what to say when I finally visited Bay Ridge, to see her family and the river and The Bridge, and had stuffed grape leaves, and shredded wheat with ricotta and rosewater on top.

***

“This is a really cool apartment,” I said, to one of the roommates as I arrived for the party. I was in Manhattan in 1994. He responded like my loser-osity was contagious and moved on.

The party was for my friend Ryan the director, who had made a movie from a story I wrote. One character was a loser with some toy trains in a pretty nothing town. The star was a precocious young woman, sick of her life and her toys, who heard her mother say, “One of these days you’re going to forget ALLL of this.” She ditches the loser (and his trains, which were mine) by jumping a real train, which turns out to be full of her toys (and Ryan’s penguin, Snowy.) The party was a month or so after the movie shoot, which had that real train in it. I stood by it as it steamed, and talked to the engine crew about how I liked trains growing up. They listened politely.

“Al,” Ryan said, “these are actors.” We all cracked up together.

***

I remember a Ray Bradbury story about an old sailor who’d been forced into a Midwestern retirement. I don’t remember anything about the people around him, except that when he died, somebody got him buried in a wheat field, unmarked. The burier feels sorry for the man, stuck spending forever so far from where he belonged, until, as he’s leaving, he feels the wind come up. It blows the wheat in great waves, and with him we say so long to the old sailor, returned to the sea after all.

And so I stand off to the side of my old intentions, seeing them sink into an easy familiar flow, with much less thrashing and salty sweat than it took to get them into this world. Chasing them pulled me from edges to centers, and then, as always, to yet another marginal homecoming. From seaside to roadside, from suburb of one city to bedroom community of another, from spare room to unmarked office, from possible profession to credible career to day job.

But watching my drawings stay notional has at least taught me not to ask too much from those parts of the picture. I stand off to the side and know motion I could never find in the drawing on the page. In the flow I lose my purpose, but in reaching into it, I take tremendously strong hold of the elusive and momentary.

I drew my best for a company that no longer exists, designing lamps that made it into Linens-n-Things for one season. My best essays recently went dead from a website three companies removed from the one I wrote for. And the closest I’ve felt to the center of the city came after I left a Cambridge club that’s since closed, where a stranger (from New York no less) saw us dancing and introduced himself by saying, “Where y’all from? ‘Cause I KNOW you ain’t from around here!” After leaving that night I walked for a bit, and then felt myself put my arms over my head, signaling a score before catching a cab. That signal doesn’t come from the player, but let the ref be a champ every once in a while.

***

“Look at these TV screens!” my oldest, Ezra, says to me as I write here. She’s barged into the spare room with her drawing of a black-box theater, where she wants to stage a rock opera. I note how the screens bulge out on the corners, like TVs don’t do anymore, though they did back when people made rock operas. I rest my eyes and see the eclipse again.

We did not miss it. I lugged the telescope all the way to the back porch, where we could see the moon just fine over the trees. The view through the eyepiece was exciting to him, though it made me no happier than I’d been watching him set it up so intently. The naked eye was just fine for watching the moon turn red, acquiring depths and borders that sky-things aren’t supposed to have. And it changed so quickly, behaving more like a peephole out onto a busy street than a heavenly opacity. We talked about how unnerving it must have been to ancient people, who lacked the misfortune of our knowhow and incessantly beating lights. We moved a little, and talked more, and I went to get a cookie. I brought him one not knowing (though I’d soon learn) that he’d been scarfing them all night. Looking up again, I saw the moon had changed again, without me, and I let it go but good.