Over a Snack

of kosher pickles and diet root beer, Laura asked me how I would like to be remembered.  “I would like to be remembered as a golden retriever,” I said.  “That’s a nice dog,” replied Laura, who drank a glass of red wine when she was 14.  “I don’t mean the dog,” I said to Laura, whose hair was always naturally curly.  “Really,” I said. “ I mean it,” I continued, after watching a movie about Dracula when he was naked.  “I mean, I would like to be remembered as someone whose aspect generally, if it were a color, would be a distinctively golden hue, and that, by and large, I retrieved things,” I explained to Laura (and I liked Laura, who drank another glass of wine when she was 40.)  “I don’t know why,” Laura, who was Jewish, replied, “but that sounds like a good thing.”  “Thank you, Laura,” I said, and I meant it, because I knew that Laura sincerely thought it was a good thing, as the Russian author Daniil Kharms thought that writing about Pushkin throwing rocks was a good thing, and I said, “No, seriously,” because I wanted to be serious.  “I mean it,” I insisted, like Bill Withers, who once insisted that it is ‘hard to get funky on a ukulele,’ and it is, but still, that was long ago, and Laura, who drank a third glass of wine when she was 60, said, “Thank you,” which still puzzles me, Like the book Gödel, Escher, Bach puzzles me, although I didn’t say that out loud to Laura today—today of all days, the day that I retrieved a thought of Laura, the day Laura died long ago, the day that Ricardo Montalbán, listed simply as ‘Ricardo’ in the 1941 movie ‘Staten lsland,’ blew out so many candles on his birthday cake, coughed once, and then smiled at everyone he loved.

Bio: Ricky Garni is a graphic designer and musician who gave up his instruments a long time ago and then sadly decided to look at pictures of the sorts of instruments that he used to own on the Web and weep inside with longing.  Now he writes poetry for various publications and tries not to weep with longing so much.