ILLUMINATION: 2005 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Hayden Saunier

and fired anyway, the flaws will be there

forever.

Depression is one such defect.

If you were to skim a written summary of my father ’ s life thus far, you might read, near the bottom, in the second to last paragraph or so, that he was diagnosed with clinical depression. But I would argue that the seed of an adult’ s unhappiness is planted early on; it is a spore that lies dormant in the head. Whether in an instant or over a long period of time, the spore eventually blooms and a dark mold spreads over the soul, weighing it down, down, down. Rotting it through.

My grandmother – a mixed-race, fair-skinned, upper-middle class woman with coarse Indian hair, and hard black eyes – gave my father all the necessary tools for developing a healthy case of depression. She made little James Archibald Amar Pabarue feel as though he, in his natural state, was worth nothing. She anglicized him, sending him to Groton boarding school in Massachusetts where he was one of two black students in his class. (He wished he were one of the white kids; doesn ’t identify with black Americans and never will.) She scolded him for his untidy hair. (He brushes it now obsessively.) She beat him with a worn leather belt because he was overweight. (Tough love, tough love.)

No one cried much on that sunny day when my grandmother was burned to cinders, sealed in a black box, and buried.

So little Jimmy went through his years with that devilish, black seed of depression festering in his mind. Selfconscious, self-doubting. (But his hair was always well-combed!)

And I know when the turning point came.

My father was a “freak” in high school—a cross between a “ straight” and a

“hippy ” . His true passion was and still is rock and roll music. My mother first met him as the long-haired, blue-eyeshadowed, gown-wearing, pot-smoking lead singer of a band called Dingo. (What a ladies man, and so happy singing his tunes in a silky-smooth tenor).

After college, he started playing with a new group, Duck Soup, and with them tried to break into the music industry. They wrote and wrote and practiced and practiced and played and played and toured and toured. They were poor— macaroni for most meals, you know— but they were happy and fiery and young.

Two years of mild success and countless empty boxes of macaroni later, it became clear that the world was not ready for Duck Soup. My father had to write off his dream. (“Sorry, Dream, I can ’t chase you anymore. Maybe we can meet up later?”). He traded his lyrics sheet for a law degree, his gown for a tailored suit, his eye shadow for aftershave, his band practice for board meetings. His pot for Prozac. His microphone for a fountain

ILLUMINATION: 2005

Hayden Saunier

They took away our windows for two weeks, ripped them from kitchen walls with wonder bars, then nailed up sheets of chipboard, while we waited for new windows to be manufactured in a long steel building somewhere east of Trenton. It was never really cold or hot inside, just dark, just really dark; the place stayed dry and we had fun one night shooting insulating foam into the cracks before a massive cold front blew across the Appalachians, but even then the dark was working on us. We had one trouble light, a single bulb that sat inside an orange cage, suspended from a hook above the pantry door. That, and the TV’ s nervous blue light, flashing its parade of hooded men in orange jumpsuits, bound and kneeling down on both sides of the ocean: that was our illumination. The windows came in, insulated, thermopaned, their sashes riding oiled blue sliders like a guillotine. Light came through them, made our canary hearts swing wide inside their cages, but after so much dark, we could not shake our boxed-in bitterness: our view was not the same.

Hayden Saunier ’ s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Drunken Boat, 5 A.M., Rattle, and Philadelphia Stories, among others. A 2008 Pushcart Prize nominee, her first book of poetry, Tips for Domestic Travel, is due out from Black Lawrence Press in 2009.