Track 28: Trailers for Sale or Rent: “King of the Road” by Jim Daniels
TRAILERS FOR SALE OR RENT: “KING OF THE ROAD”
while dementia causes progressive memory loss and impairment, memory for music remains…music helps people in all stages of dementia connect with fond memories.
On the bus to Jerusalem, I kept saying Bethlehem
instead—where did Jesus die? Where he was born?
Where were we going and why? My wife, daughter,
and I, trinity of unbelievers. Three young soldiers
slouched in seats across from us, machine guns poking
into the aisle. Old Catholic hymns returned, blowing
off their dust. They’ll be drifting in even when
I’m drifting out. The driver’s music scratched through
extended lulls in what anyone had to say on that long ride
through the dark. The women sat together, and I behind,
beside an old man snoring through untrimmed nose hair.
I felt close proximity to everything under the magnified
X of life and war and faith in that difficult country.
Roger Miller’s “King of the Road” on a record my mother
bought at the supermarket on a whim that earned my father’s
frown. Five kids swarmed over him at the door after work.
We had few records, and wore that one out on my grandmother’s
suitcase turntable, dropping the needle into scratched proximity.
I leaned forward, rasping the words into my wife’s ear
along with Roger’s bouncy bass. Father of eight kids himself,
his words that translated all the way to where we sat.
Almost too perfect to hear it on that dark road through desert.
My mother, never went down any distant road, yet knew
all the words, and her own unspoken desire to leave.
She hit the rhymes hard: rent/cents pets/cigarettes
broom/room shoes/dues, sliding the record out of its sleeve
on sunny days in Detroit, or cloudy or rainy or snowy days.
Days she made bread, it’d still be warm after school.
In Jerusalem, I bought her a rosary, At 92, blind, she lived
with just a sliver of mind. I could not get her hands
to grip the beads. We found four others beneath her bed
when we took it to the curb. My father gave it to his great
granddaughter for her communion, and choked up
telling me. My daughter picked out the beaded case
for its long journey.
Me, I traveled a long way to get here myself, playing
an mp3 of “King of the Road” bedside after a visit
by hospice, all of us briefly riding together again,
through memory, singing along, bold cords
of her thin neck stretched taut. My mother smiled,
even when I forgot the words. Even when
I could only hum, forgetting where we were.
The hissing bus jolted to a stop
and she stepped out into the darkness
that always waits.
Jim Daniels’ latest fiction book, The Luck of the Fall, was published by Michigan State University Press. Recent poetry collections include The Human Engine at Dawn, Wolfson Press, Gun/Shy, Wayne State University Press, and Comment Card, Carnegie Mellon University Press. His first book of nonfiction, Ignorance of Trees, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press. A native of Detroit, he currently lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the Alma College low-residency MFA program.
