#steveholloway

[budaallmusic]

Fred Hess / Boulder Creative Music Ensemble ‎– Between The Lines #TemenosRecords 1988 🇺🇸 US Bass – #MarkSimon Clarinet, Soprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone, Baritone Saxophone – #MarkHarris Composed By, Flute, Tenor Saxophone – #FredHess Drums – #SteveHolloway Engineer – Dick Jenkins Pedal Steel Guitar – #GlennTaylor Soprano Saxophone, Alto Saxophone – #GlennNitta Trombone – #WadeSander Trumpet – #RonMiles https://www.instagram.com/p/CE-FSr5pHt5/?igshid=hscyfyrdb64u

[met0nymy-blog]

Promise

(Grounds for Sculpture – Hamilton, NJ)

It stands alone, tucked back within the garden’s verdant solitude. There’s no sense of meticulous placement, no overwhelming beauty of cast-bronze titans or Monet reincarnations; just the silhouette of an old wooden chair leaning against the gray October sky. Its messy structure of wooden planks and cold steel bolts doesn’t plea for my attention, not like the others do, and I nearly stroll past it when I overhear a women tell a young couple in the distance,

Oh, that’s the one – the one with the chair.

I stop and look. Its rugged concrete base plants itself unnaturally in the grass, sprouting limbs of dark wooden beams some twenty or thirty feet into the air. My eyes trace the beams into the sky, examining the blemishes of random nuts and bolts in the wood along the way. Atop these beams sits a highchair, its wooden legs beginning at the seat and narrowing disproportionally to a point, as if the chair itself is on its tippy toes, reaching for the heavens.

The plaque at my feet calls the sculpture “Promise”. A seat meant to be taken, yet far too high for me to climb, far beyond anyone’s reach.

Promise.

The word lingers in the air with the seat, taunting me below, forcing me to remember. To see myself in that highchair again, back when she’d spoon-feed me promises that the world was good; back when she was as tall as the sculpture itself.  But this was before we’d play hide-and-go-seek with Ambien and kitchen knives, before she’d threaten to leave forever.

Promise.

I study the old chair in the sky, and maybe it’s a desk. A wad of bubblegum glued to the back, a daydream’s doodle etched into the wood, I’d sit and listen to the lies my teacher promised. Each of us with our weapons of choice: Me with my thoughts. Her with her words.

You can be anything you want, Follow your dreams.

Then, I see my father, who left this desk in his junior year of high school, and never returned; who was forced to work because his mother didn’t know how to put down the bottle, because someone had to put food on the table – even if it was a dinner of crackers and canned soup. I cannot help but wonder if his promises were fulfilled.

And if mine will ever be.