a spliced pair of mental hygiene films. My family knows

I saw one of these a week in the storybook schoolhouse—

cloak room, bootjacks, slate chalkboards, mid-morning 

half-pints of milk, sing-alongs after lunch & a cinder-block 

incinerator the teachers let a chosen third-grader light. 

To simulate the certainty of those halcyon days, I cut the lights

as the title fades & the narrator intones the set-up:

the seventeen-year-old bored with his family wants to stay home

from the lake, his puckered distaste somehow winning

parental agreement he’s a grown-up. “We’re your friends, too,” 

Mom says, so any idiot knows the lesson Jimmy will learn, 

but they leave, Dad in shirt & tie, a fishing hat festooned 

with lures jammed on his head, brother Billy despondent

as he punches the mitt Jimmy promised to help break in.

How many cans of beans can one teen eat? How come all

his friends are busy with chores, paper routes, baseball practice,

jobs at the hardware store, the soda fountain? The keen girls 

all have family fun lined up. “Life was better then,” my son says, 

nudging his boggled mother, by which time Jimmy’s planned

a welcome-home supper, walked two bags of groceries home

& tied his mother’s apron around his waist then whoosh—

a woman puts her sewing aside, sips tea & browses the paper,

the settee lurid red, the wallpaper flocked, her dress

radioactive yellow. The film jitters & she’s scowling, asleep, 

hair up in curlers, housecoat buttoned to the neck, 

head jerking back & forth as her daughter’s face drifts 

across a starless sky, then a superimposed montage—

she yells at a motorcycle cop, runs down a hospital hallway,

blurs into a vortex of hands-to-head, screaming terror 

then everything melts to white before zapping alive, the family 

passing bowls of carrots & potatoes, a huge roast 

anchoring the table, a close-up of the happy daughter 

behind the credits. My wife says, “No wonder 

you’re this way.” I did love killing the lights in that schoolhouse.

---

John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. His obsessively updated website (www.johnreppwriter.com) provides a great deal of information on Repp and his work.