Windblown

Windblown Jim Daniels (bio) He made us each a flag. We kept them there, rolled up and leaned up into a corner, and when our grandfather unlocked the door, my brothers and I each grabbed ours and charged outside, unfurling our cramped voices from the long drive in the backseat of whatever fixer-upper he’d recently fixed up. The dark, musty cottage was no bigger than the floor of the garage my grandfather had repaired cars in all his life. He’d never finished that cottage, and the silver insulation between the studs flashed at us day and night, shrinking us down, distorting us like funhouse mirrors. Someone got the black-and-yellow checkered flag, someone got the green canvas flag, and someone got the off-white thick starchy piece of burlap. He nailed them each to poles—a random piece of floorboard molding for the checkered flag, a dowl rod for the green, and for the white one, which we never associated with weakness or surrender, a piece of bamboo. The cottage wasn’t on Lake Huron. A quarter mile inland from Lake Huron down a dirt road they oiled in the summer to keep the dust down, past the nicer cottages close to the water. But we were close enough to feel the breeze up from the small, rocky beach we grew to call Ankle Beach behind his back as he lost his hearing and we lost interest. Ankle Beach, because he could not swim and thus could not let us swim. Even though by then we could swim. We were only allowed to stick our toes in and numb them. We could skip stones till our arms were sore. We could sit and study the horizon for Great Lakes freighters passing silently and dignified in the distance. I believe the freighters were mirages for the kind of life my grandfather once imagined. We didn’t know then. We loved him. He had made us flags. He had wanted to see the world, or at least beyond Canada. [End Page 3] ________ I have begun to hate the American flag. A lot of people will hate me for saying that. I don’t like saying I hate anything, so it pains me to say this. The American flag has now become a symbol for fascism. Oh, don’t go overboard, somebody might say. Or, throw him overboard, someone else might say. In either case, I might end up in the water, though, despite not being able to wade out from Ankle Beach, I still learned to swim. The wet lifejackets of losses hang useless on shore. ________ Since nobody changes anybody else’s minds these days—these stripes don’t bleed, right?—I won’t delve into the shark-infested political waters except to stick my toe in and say I believed in American democracy so much that I took it for granted. You can’t have too many/fly too many American flags anymore. You never know when you’ll have to stuff one in somebody’s mouth to silence them. ________ My grandfather lost two children before they were out of school, leaving my lonely father to carry the family flag. I can’t carbon-date the non-finishing of the cottage, but given the family silence, I’ve been forced to become fairly proficient with my guess-ometer. We, his only grandchildren, woke him up out of his decades-long stupor into restless sleepwalking. He never had much, and what he loved the most had been taken away from him. When he was a boy, his brother choked on a chicken bone one Sunday morning while his father was cleaning out his bar after a typical Saturday night in Belgian Detroit. I never learned where my grandfather was when this happened because I never learned this happened at all until after he was dead—my grandfather. And I never learned about my phantom aunt and uncle from him either. My father finally broke the silence when I was in college and had run into someone who’d been a friend of my dead uncle. Jack was his name. Katherine was my aunt’s name...

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