The Brushstrokes of My Soul

Who I am, in free verse

By Mike Pezzullo

I am movies on our back porch, film noir and rented DVDs projected on canvas against the star-spangled night sky.

I am the crickets and the toads and the creatures that animate my backyard, their vocal cacophony the sound of summer and melody of home.

I am the leaves of the suburban forest, blanketing our autumn world in their peppered myriad of orange and red and yellow that beckon rakes and tarps and exhaustion.

I am the purveyor of tools to my father underneath the car, tattooed by the inky grime of the mechanical underbelly, an endless quest for the ten millimetre wrench amidst the storm of rust flakes and oil spills.

I am my mother’s chicken and dumplings and steak san marco, her George Foreman grill and her endless quest to keeping us full.

I am campground poker around a flimsy collapsible table, No-Peeky Baseball and Five Card Stud with bets from the loose change of the Toyota’s center console.

I am my father’s hard work and resulting summer trips to Cape Cod, the Adirondaks, Myrtle Beach, the entire eastern seaboard, I am winter trips to Lake Placid and Vermont and the Berkshires.

I am ghost stories and the recollections of my father’s youth, suspense building like the glowing pile of embers in the rusted fire pit, sparks ascending into the night sky like fiery angels as we feed it’s burning hunger with yet another log.

I am meals off the portable grill of our RV on camping trips, I am corned beef hash and eggs, I am New York Strip, I am A1 and Lea & Perrin’s, I am shrimp skewers and pasta salad and foil-wrapped zucchini packets.

I am the call of ‘sample’ from my dad through the house, the two syllables that had my brother and I recklessly running to the back porch for a pre-dinner slice of the grill’s bounty.

I am my hometown drive-in’s double features on summer nights, lawn chairs and blankets and packed coolers of sodas and snow caps, FM tuners and intermission snack bar pizza.

I am my dad’s fire red ‘88 Chevy Z24 convertible, my reason for being and saviour of my suddenly asphyxiated six-week old self, the first vehicle I sat behind the wheel of, its digital dash and throaty multi-port engine like a terrestrial spacecraft in my thirteen year old hands.

I am The Tornadoes and Fine Young Cannibals and Billy Joel and Frank Sinatra and The Beatles.

I am my mother’s love of reading, I am the Yankee’s game blaring on my father’s radio.

I am early morning Dunkin’ Donuts bagel runs and old-fashioned cake donuts dipped in silky hot chocolate by the Hudson River’s train tracks.

I am the glowing storm light of our RV on Christmas night, its illumination and my dad’s convincing feigned giddiness indicating Santa’s extra presents hidden outside the house, despite my mother’s frowning disdain for excess yet smiling appreciation of our inexplicable joy.

I am It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34th Street and Jingle All the Way, I am a lifetime of Christmases in New York in all their snowy, string-light glory.

I am creamy Libby’s pumpkin pie, I am my mom’s cookie dough rolled out on the dining room table surrounded by Toll House chocolate chips, red and blue and green sugars and rainbow sprinkles, the black Sony Boombox serenading us with holiday tunes from Delilah on 92.1 Lite FM.

I am early mornings and late nights and middays at the local diner, I am chocolate egg creams in 1950s glasses, short stacks of pancakes, and two eggs scrambled with home fries, rye toast and strawberry jam.

I am the corner deli’s bacon-egg-and-cheese-salt-pepper-ketchups, the genetic makeup and fuel of New Yorkers on their daily missions.

Now, I am Australia and the southern hemisphere and humidity and flat whites and everyone’s mate and a work in progress.

But I am America and my family and my hometown and they are me and one is inseparable from the other like molten lava compressed into stone, forever identified by its unchanged core for millennia despite the accumulating layers of time and miles and experience.

I am the strength of my upbringing and the goodwill of my mother and the undying grind of my father, the human embodiment of a ’77 F-150 with seven digits on the odometer.

I am her soothing lullabies and his overnight shifts and their compounded sacrifice, together they are the blacksmiths of my empowered momentum.

I am all of these things because they are the blood in my veins and the brushstrokes of my soul and they are me regardless of latitude or longitude.

I am fourteen thousand miles away yet I am zero.

I am there while I am here, and I am eternally grateful.

Related posts:

With so many choices for home security systems out there, it can be hard to know who is best for you. Nest cam can make your home safer by allowing you to check in on what’s happening from…

Almost everyone intends to save more money than they spend. But in reality, spending is just a lot easier than saving. This fact is unsurprising as we live in a world of instant gratification, where…

Decentralized finance, better known as “DeFi”, has become a buzzword in the cryptocurrency industry in recent weeks. According to Defi Pulse, the total value locked in the DeFi sector hit an all-time…