John Langfeld "The Last Laugh"
Trudy was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease one year and was dead a year and a half later. It was the quickest progression any of her doctors had ever seen. It was oddly comforting to know that the medical profession wasn’t deaf to her immediate disappearance or our need to shout what the hell. We learned early on, however, that you just had to deal with some pretty simple things, like expunging the word “remember” from your vocabulary, getting over your anger that her immediate family (except for two of her four children) couldn’t deal with her disappearing and were largely absent from the experience poor babies and, of course, holding her hand and repeating some inane things a gazillion times over and over and over and over.
When Trudy lay dead on her couch in the home she had come to know and feel safe in, her two children and I were in the adjacent kitchen nook, tears streaming. It had been a long haul. Julia looked at me and said, “John, will you do me a favor?” I said, “Anything Julia, you know that.” She said, “Drop dead, will ya?” We howled. The tree was gone, but not the apple.
You know what Trudy would have said in that moment -- even the week before? The last word she had left:
“Score!”
When Trudy lay dead on her couch in the home she had come to know and feel safe in, her two children and I were in the adjacent kitchen nook, tears streaming. It had been a long haul. Julia looked at me and said, “John, will you do me a favor?” I said, “Anything Julia, you know that.” She said, “Drop dead, will ya?” We howled. The tree was gone, but not the apple.
You know what Trudy would have said in that moment -- even the week before? The last word she had left:
“Score!”
John Langfeld wrote in the closet from 1980 until 2009 when he showed his work (for the first time!) to total strangers at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. It was a good thing. He found his voice had a name. They called it “epigrammatic,” a term joined at the hip with “aphoristic” and “apothegmatic.” Langfeld prefers the moniker “brevitist.” It is easier on the tongue.
Langfeld’s favorite dictum is this: “The shorter the poem, the longer the sit.” It all began when he realized that… God rested two days and never told anybody. (1982) |