LYN LIFSHIN
My Mother's Old TV on the Curb

abandoned as a pet that is
too much trouble to keep.
Once the center of attention,
now it turns away from where
it is going, faces the front door.
I think of my father hearing my
mother sigh she couldn't take
another day of our black puppy,
dcooping Nia up before anyone 
was awake and driving out into
the country, letting the dog out
in a field of cornstalks.  A part of
my wants to drag the broken Sony
back as we burned rubber to
rescue the dog.  The tv, a gift
for my mother's surprise 70th
party in case she didn't make it to
the next big one tho she was still
kicking her legs to balalaika music,
would sleep three hours and take
the bus to my house if I needed her
to house sit.  The tv was more
reliable than daughters who didn't
visit or call or pick up their answer-
ing machines even if they weren't
home.  It was a companion when
she couldn't sleep, or didn't want
to eat alone.  When she could still
climb the stairs in the last months,
she unhooked the cable, sighed
that that meant goodby.  Before she
came to my house by ambulance,
we brought the tv down for her room.
Those last August days the cat
dozed on top of it, as Ophra and
Donahue droned on.  It was ordinary,
familiar as nothing else was.  After
the iv and the striated ringers, pills,
I sat on the bed and ate with her
while PBS took us out of where we were
were better than the drugs did.  Today,
on the curb, in front of a house she
never came to, I watch the garbage
trucks roar up and think how everyone
said when the undertakers come, they
try to have the family look away, so
they won't see the body leaving.  But I
watched then and I watch the men in
sweats and gloves hurling boxes into the
grinder and then, the bell flshing me
back to my father having to go door
to door in East Middlebury looking for
out abandoned dog, “Miss, would you,
I mean maybe I can get this thing working,
it would be good for my kids?”  And I
feel better, the way I did when Nia came
back, an ease like someone must who
believes in reincarnation or ressurrection.

LYN LIFSHIN
My Mother's TV on the Curb

once sleek and as full of color and
light as my mother was, even at 70,
the year we gave it to her, with the 
small diamond in case she didn't make
it to 75.  In photographs of that party,
my hair is long and full, my sister and
I still talking and no uncle needs oxygen.
The tv danced in the grey living room, Winter
nights she imagined my car skidding
off roads 3 hours east it was there
and her main companion.  She could 
scream at it when it misbehaved, coax
what soothed, distracted.  No wonder a 
woman in Japan wrote her suicide note
to her tv, her only friend she said.  The
Sony was there thru thunderstorms she
always unplugged it for, was there the
nights she couldn't sleep.  When I came
we curled in the cove of the couch
together, dozed thru Johnny Carson
and then made black cow sodas before
sliding into sleep rocked by Otter Falls
and the rambling of trucks over Main
Street.  In the last weeks, we brought
the tv to my house before she came on
the ambulance, hooked it up in the room
with wooden ceilings that began to look
more and more like a box.  It was there
while I crushed Demerol downstairs.  The
cat curled on top of it.  It droned on, as
if everything else would until the last
day, a Monday, some new talk show and
news of Iraq moving in Saudi.  “Turn it off,”
she said and then asked for milk and bread
in a bowl, what she had as a child on
the porch on Sunday.  By 9:40 she didn't 
breathe.  When I turned the tv on a few days
later, there was no picture, just green.  I
couldn't throw it out, left it in the room
where the lipstick plant dripped guava
blossoms on the wood floor and a few
years later brought it south, farther south
than my mother had ever been where, fixed
up, holding on as she did, it lasted two more
years.  What was so smart, top of the line
as my mothers was always sure I was, now
seems small, old and with its face turned away 
from what was coming for it, as my mother
said of herself those last days, “like the air
conditioner, honey, I'm broken, I've had it.”