~guest post by Roger Bainbridge~

Michael Nyman - "Franklyn"

I also remember the day I found dad in the backyard with a rifle. One of the houseboys was using a skeet launcher to fling the heads of some of the mannequins into the air for dad to shoot. Dad was crying, but that wasn't uncommon.

Dad had met mom at design school. She was beginning a study of ergonomics, he, dallying in ceramics. He told me that the first night they made love he had a dream that he was visiting his parents, my grandparents, and that their house was filled with snakes to which they seemed oblivious. They also refused to acknowledge his birthday, which it was in the dream and, oddly, is today. Though he had no serious quarrel with them in his waking life, the next day, the first thing he did was renounce them. Mom never asked him to do this.

And there he was, in his musty housecoat, his shot rate an admirable 7 for 9 considering how the tears blurred his vision. I was back at the estate because my sister Suze has told me the divorce was going poorly. Well, that and things on my end seemed as though they could benefit by some time away. And sure enough, the five days I had spent with him at that point were filled with silent walks and meals punctuated with heavy sighs. I tried to remember some advice he had given me in the past that might find repurposing here, but nothing came to me, which was frustrating because I always cherished the lessons he gave me.

I once asked mom why she dropped out of school and she mumbled something about how chairs just design themselves in the end. In any case, dad ended up following her to the west coast. On their first night in Pasadena, Dad dreamt he and mom were locked in a mall overnight and they entertained each other by putting on a fashion show, trying on all the clothes they'd never be able to afford, her looking gorgeous in the impossible dresses of his subconscious. When he woke, he told mom he was quitting ceramics. She never asked him to do this. Instead, he told her, he was going to design a mannequin based on her so that even if they spent their life in squalor, she'd be dressed in the highest fashions somewhere. The romance wasn't lost on her, but I think she felt the symbolism of the thing meant something else.

And so I finished my coffee and went inside to call Suze. The day's tally was 11 hits for 16 pulls.

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