Overheard, misheard, partially heard fragments. A garden of them for hazy, wild beauty; to filter runoff and redistribute grief. To puzzle, briefly, the atomies of certainty that cluster round our ears and over-organize our eyes.
Especially in the morning, in the slip of time and space between almost awake and starting to forget my dreams, I get little clips of phrases. Sometimes I’m not aware until I hear myself accidentally saying them out loud, and then it’s my own voice that wakes me up. If I have the presence of mind, I type ’em up real quick, if for no other reason than to leave my waking mind an easter egg for later.
Recent examples:
mighta been 2 reasons for why i left you
and i only really needed one
and
- put the feeders nearer to you so you can see them
- (something else, don’t remember)
- when you’re home, pay attention to the birds (so you have no excuse)
And that’s all today’s pigeon really is — a random, meaningless, misheard fragment. Why do I remember it? If I knew why, there wouldn’t really be pigeons in my personal narrative mythological aviary, now would there.
pigeon
Oh, that’s that brand, Donmoor, that brand is good
Don’t know how old I was, some indeterminate scrawny age young enough to be trailing along behind my mom at JC Penney in the sparklin’ still new West Park Mall, back when it actually did sit to the west of almost every other developed part of Cape Girardeau, as opposed to now, when it’s the half-forgotten, half-abandoned, crumbling core of a grossly hypertrophied business district crowded with every conceivable chain restaurant and big box, glinting hard in the relentless parking-lot sun.
She was gonna buy me some pajamas.
Not footie pajamas, I wasn’t that young. Rather the kind that’s like a slippery little suit, complete with floppy notch lapel, gratuitous breast pocket, and plastic buttons. Dapper!
We scraped hangers over hangrails until I found a set I liked. Mom inspected it, and somewhat distractedly expressed her confidence in the label:
“Oh, that’s that brand, Donmoor, that’s a good brand.”
I misheard this as “That’s that brand Don wore...” — so I assumed she knew it was a good brand because my stepfather had some too. Why she said “wore” in past tense, instead of “had” or “has” or “wears,” I dunno — I probably figured she was remembering some particularly worthy specimen of sleepwear that he’d had in the past. Must have been some fine quality clothing, then, to be remembered even now!
Apparently it was, actually — according to DuckDuckGo’s ✨ Search Assist, “Donmoor was a brand known for producing high-quality children’s clothing, particularly popular in the mid-20th century. They made items like shirts and pants, often recognized for their durability and comfort.” You can overpay for vintage Donmoor on Etsy and similar sites. Maybe you could even end up buying my pj’s!
Probably not, I probably wore them out pretty good.
Or maaaaaybe I figured she'd said it that way because the brand name had sparked a formative memory from her (controversial) early courtship with him — like she was thinking, he wore those pajamas when we [redacted] — I must have been old enough for the possibilities of that unfinished sentence to bug me, for better or for worse; to simultaneously entice and repel my imagination.
And that’s all there is to it. Except for two more pesky details about the “why do I remember it” part:
One, there was a small warm flush of pride and dignity that arrived with the knowledge that I would have the same brand of pajamas as my stepfather (though unbeknownst to me, I wouldn't — I don't think Donmoor even made adult clothes). Two, there was, in the wake of that, a complementary and ever so fleeting dissonance — a faintly electrified transitive intimacy twice removed — this brand of pajamas touched his skin; this brand of pajamas would be touching my skin; so it’s almost as if our two skins touched in that moment?? I shan’t dignify the Freudian implications of that dubious equation with even an ironic deconstruction attempt — that would just be too weird. But (as Jared said in a comment the other day) it does go to show how, with pigeons, the more you look the more you see. And how “I don’t know why” is always, always, always both true and false and something in between.
Nowadays I just sleep in boxer shorts and a t-shirt. I’m a simple man with a complicated past. 😆