Jenifer Street

Past the country club and stately embassies on Connecticut, go around the circle
and take the left onto Jenifer Street. Ease your way past Richard
the landlord’s house perched on the hill, overlooking
the old heap of bricks he rents out at the bottom of the street
before you reach the T, the third one up from the left.
My room was the one that smelled like cigar smoke
from the balcony and squeaked when you stepped on the floorboards.
I only lived there a summer, but that was the summer when my college girlfriend
dumped me for the Portuguese guy, and for some reason I felt freed.
I started teaching that August, barely older than the kids, and that was the summer when
Monica and Tim lived in the room across the hall and we walked up to the marts
for cold beer and fresh rockfish. We grilled outside on the crackling back patio slates,
and I sang “Hotel California” and we laughed because Richard came uninvited almost hourly
checking on the pipes and the doors and the roof and the walls, fighting futilely
to stave the inevitable decay of aging. Sometimes I think he lived there more than we did.
And at the end of that summer, everything I owned still fit neatly into my car
and Monica and Tim set off for Carolina with thoughts on getting married,
thus ending the beers and the songs and the laughs and the grill and the---
You know, on second thought, nobody lived there more than we did.
-2007