LETTERS TO THE DEAD: FIFTEEN
6/15/2018
For Pat Lally Sr. (1917 – 1983)
prose poem: (in letter form):
The Grovers Corner of the Upper-South.
Dad,
I’m sure you already know,
but I wanted to tell you I’ve maintained
contact with our hometown, Paducah.
The last few years mom was alive
I was there for a week every month,
now I visit a few days once a season.
Allen Rhoades Jr., whose dad had the Ford
dealership, is now a city commissioner (like
you were) and owns the coolest coffee house
between the mountains and the Mississippi.
Artists and hipsters hang at the place, and
I’ve met old-timers there whose parents
were your “best friends.” (They’re mostly
children of pharacists & doctors because
of the job you were in – Wholesale Drugist!)
I’ll make a list sometime and share them
with you, I’m sure you’ll remember them.
Dad, I think of Paducah as the Grovers
Corner of the Upper-South within the time
frame of mid 50s to 1968, where, if you listen,
you can hear a Thornton Wilder voiceover:
“Now right here at 2727 Broadway,
with the hospital two blocks one way
and the school three blocks the other,
at the busiest intersection in town,
lived the Lallys who, for fear of traffic,
wouldn’t let poor Jimmy learn to ride
a bike until his 4th grade at St. Thomas.”
I’m sure T.W.. would have it in his play
that at the end of this idylic age, 1968,
would come irony and heartbreak.
For the father’s namesake would die
in a crash partly because the Fords
thought seat belts too expensive.
I’m sure Mr. Wilder would write that the
Lallys were like many other white, middle-
class families of Paducah who endured
good times and bad. I can imagine Hal
Holbrook, with a slight tweak of accent
as the stage manager in a folksy, familiar
voice, saying that the oldest son proved
to be bipolar and was known at times
as “the full grown man who rode his bike
around in his underwear; before any-
one in Paducah knew about lithium.”
And I can hear Hal’s slick way with
words, “child number four manifested
himself as the town’s flaming queer,
(the then popular term) who left town
to find his own kind in San Fran,
and arrived there just in time for
the outbreak of the Great Epidemic.”
The stage manager would now pause,
hold his breath a minute, look through
the prop flood wall to the prop river
and intone that famous oration:
“These kinds of things happened,
and the people of Paducah
didn’t dwell on them very much,
including the Lallys.”
Dad, I remember us both looking
at the T.V. Hallmark version of Our Town,
with you sitting up in bed, glasses
proped on top of your head. At the
end we were misty eyed. Old Hal
surely caught us on T.W.’s hook.
Your son,
Jim
