service marks

“Watch,” I whispered to her, “This will get his attention.”

It was unkind to use the honorific, a shared joke (like the perfect breasts of the actress veiled behind double pockets of the diaphanous peach dress, couples at a party).He was immensely likeable in this getup, the overalls and the red sneakers, the sadness of his Pagliacci eyes, the wise smiles, the wish to be liked, the name of the rose.

“Scusi maestro, ” I said, “Do you know Oshkosh by gosh?”

Even so the title turned his head. A delighted shrug: spiga, spiga, the gesture seemed to say.

“It is what you say when you wear them, ” I said. It wasn’t witty. I was a boor at a party. Even so it was a delight to hear him pronounce the phrase: owwwsh kohsh bye gooosh

He had said he was an “honorary Hoosier” and thus had been gifted with this getup. It seemed foolish to explain about Wisconsin and Indiana, especially for someone who couldn't tell whether we were in Tuscany or Emilia Romagna. The world was not cinema to us but service marks, surface marks, little by little selling our language away. When Emily and Obie were little they used to talk to them about their Oshkosh, their Doctor Dentons and their Nuks. By the time children grow, they know Coke is the real thing^©.

Coming around a hairpin turn in the center of the small town of Marathon, West Virginia in the hills of the American paesaggio there was a white-sided funeral parlour with folding chairs and a Coke machine on its long porch. No one was there on the porch. His wife and children were laughing in the car at some joke and they didn't see. The porch was shaded and the Coke machine was polished, an older machine with rounded red shoulders.

Scuzzi maestro, do you know, “la morte, che `e il tempo, il tempo della individuazione, della separazione, l’astratto tempo che rotola verso la sua fine.”

Death is a real thing.