A Collaborative Poem with Mom

By Aidan

“Where time, space, and history mingle
And where my roots grow
I am the land of this deteriorating scrapyard ”

Mom: Junkyard Jew.

When I say our family had a scrap yard, you cue theme music to Sanford and Son, its rambling melody punctuated with French horns. That’s not a bad place to start, but here, we open with a Klezmer nigun because instead of Fred, this yard features Yiddish-speaking Morris with his American-born son Jerry standing in for Lamont. Imagine Jerry and Lamont the same age, because they are—Lamont’s TV birthday and my father’s real life one a single day apart in September of 1940, a fact revealed in season three’s episode “Libra rising all over Lamont.”

With me so far? Perhaps a junkyard is a junkyard regardless of address, but you should probably know that while Fred and Lamont are in Watts, we are in Mississippi, where no one understands words like "boychik" or "schmuck." I’ll add a glossary to the final credits, because terms of endearment are often juxtaposed with terms of derision. Because despite the Yiddish, Fred and Morris are more alike than you’d think. One last change before we move on: Lamont does not have children, but Jerry has me, a tomboy who grows tall alongside the piles of scrap. I’m too young to know that being called a junkyard Jew is not a compliment, because I love it here in this landscape of wonder and destruction, love it so much that I carry its catalogue of smells inside my body: the oil-soaked soil, the sharp scent of copper wire, the last drops of stale beer inside the cans now compressed into a tower of perfect bricks. In the glossary, I will be sure to include the word "motherwit," because that is the magic central to the plot where all the clichés still apply: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, rags to riches and all that. I don’t mind if you laugh when I say your trash paid for my college degree, because sometimes it is the truth hidden inside punchlines that pipes the audience’s canned laughter into our scenes, punctuating Fred and Morris’s predictable antics. Motherwit is like street smarts in a shtetl kind of way—it’s bartering nothing for something, building a house out of ash, milking money from the wind. Being told that you don’t get your hands dirty might make you a gentleman elsewhere, but here, it makes you lazy, because when things are reduced to their scraps, they are never clean. So if you think you can get out of here without dirt under your nails, you have not been paying attention. When people ask where I am from, they mean what city, or state. But more than anywhere else I am from here—from rag and bone, copper and iron, car battery and hubcap. I am not the sum of my parts, but the parts of my sum. Not the story itself, but the words that hold it together.

Aidan: An elegy for a scrapyard.

My family’s old scrapyard resembles nothing close to a scrapyard now.
It has been overtaken by nature;
Vines spread along the brick walls and reach out from shattered window panes, trees clutter around each other for warmth, moss boasts its presence in hues of orange, brown and green.

It once was filled of towering piles of iron, copper wire, batteries, and pipes.
Filled with movement of local workers.
Clanging of metal tools.
Rumbling of tumbling scrap metal.
Booming of combustible gases.
Crumbling of asphalt under rubber tires.
But now what is left of the land is quiet.

The town of Natchez is a time capsule, and is slowly dying.

Everything must decay.
I know that’s cliché, but it's partly true.
The previous life of the yard has been pacified by time and nature.
A beautiful erasure of humanity’s creation
where time, space, and history mingle
and where my roots grow.
I am the land of this deteriorating scrapyard.
My essence dances among the trees, vines, and moss.
I am from an old scrapyard.
I am from rags, bones, metal, pecans.
I am from copper wire and sheet metal,
From shtetl and city, Russia and Poland.
I am the journey from one continent to another,
from the bayou to the golden state.
I am all those that came before me,
all the hands that carried me home.

The golden state and the bayou.