Namesake

Now isn’t the time to tell Dylan that his fingernails are digging into my back.
While the moisture from his cathartic sobs warms my awkwardly craned neck, I glance over at his father, Shane, comfortably reclined in a corduroy lazy-boy. Painted onto his swollen feet are a pair of powder-blue slippers. A neatly-folded flannel blanket obscures his pale, disproportionately slender legs. I silently accept the stabbing pain as Dylan and I intensify our embrace.
Now isn’t the time to make an existential remark about the redundancy of the nasal cannula continuing to pipe oxygen into his father’s inanimate husk. I should not make an analogy between this image and pumping gas into a tank that’s engine is inert. I will not attempt to ameliorate the misty-eyed emotions of this moment by quoting a passage from The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. I will not fuck up this memory by trying to make it better.
After the initial wave of grief has ebbed into an accepted depression, I will delicately suggest to Dylan that he leave the half-eaten bologna sandwich on his father’s TV tray until the bread is moldy and the meat has spoiled, and to refrain from discarding the innumerable pill bottles and inhalers into the trash, even after their chemicals are inactive and past expiration.
I’m almost positive my back is bleeding. I can feel the trickle of something thicker than sweat creeping over the knotted kinks of my spine. I will not compare the slithering of raindrops down a windowpane to the trail of briny beads escaping Dylan’s emerald, vaguely feline eyes.
The sliding glass door beside Shane’s chair should be ashamed of itself for acting as the perfect frame for the portrait of Redbirds and Cerulean Warblers convening on each of the half-dozen birdfeeders strung across the porch. Fuck that irreverent pane of glass for allowing a wave of sunlight to flood across the living room and encapsulate Shane’s twelve-string guitar in a gold-toned shrine, as if to remind Dylan and I that our days of cautiously coaxing him to sing us a song are over, that the precarious spire of harmonicas on the hearth are destined to deteriorate without another bluesy sixteen-bar being delivered from his pursed, perpetually chapped lips.
Shame on the record player for refusing to ease its needle across the ever-present Blonde on Blonde vinyl, failing to skate over the worn grooves until cueing up “Visions of Johanna.” Why isn’t his son’s namesake singing about trying to play tricks on the night while you’re trying to be so quiet? Why, when the three of us saw Bob Dylan in concert at a minor-league baseball stadium last summer, did he not point out to Shane from the stage and say, “This one’s for you,” before performing a revelatory rendition of “Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat)?” Why had Shane been deprived of the chance to take Bobby out for a hotdog and a beer?
I won’t peel back Shane’s sealed lids to reveal how he and his idol are members of the same crystal blue-eyed cabal. I can’t encourage Dylan to pick up that old sun-shrined guitar, purse his lips around the doss scales of a dusty harmonica, and sing for his father the secret song he had written.
I should not, and will not, assure Dylan that everything is going to be alright.
