Kenny Porpora Quotes

Now and then I see a balloon caught in the power lines, holding on, waving, flapping softly in the evening air, and I wonder if somebody in some faraway city tried to send it to heaven the way my mother and I used to do.

Sometimes I think, Was she thinking about me when she was drinking? Did any of them ever think about me when they were putting straws in their noses and needles in their arms? Did they even think about me once?” And she asks me, “What would it mean if they didn’t?” I stare at her, trembling. She knows what I think it means, and she wants me to say it out loud.

I look away from her. “I have felt like an old man my whole life. And they get to have fun and snort their fucking drugs and get wasted and it doesn’t matter who they’re hurting because they’re young and having fun and I’m a judgmental prick if I say anything.” “Do you think they’re having fun?” I don’t have an answer for her. “I’ll never be able to compete against it.” “Maybe you don’t understand how powerful it is,” she says. “How powerful is it?” “Very.” “And that’s an excuse?” “No.” “When do they get to take responsibility?” “For themselves?” she asks. “Yes.” “Always,” she says.

It’s funny… when you’re young you spend your life trying to convince yourself you’re not like your parents. And then, every now and then, you’ll do something a certain way, some mannerism, or you’ll say something. When our car broke down upstate, I remember I hit the wheel and said, ‘I’m not made of money!’ And I caught myself and thought, Gee, Louie, you just sounded like Pop. When you’re young and it happens, it drives you crazy. And then you live long enough, and it makes you smile a little.” He wipes a tear from his eyelashes with the back of his hand. “That’s a nice part of life,” he says.

She asks to see my diploma, holds it in her hands and smiles, reads it out loud before handing it back to me, and I hold it tightly on my lap, this piece of paper, the proof they won't find me dead on a couch on my thirty-eighth birthday or in some basement bathtub with my eyes wide and lifeless or alone in the bed I slept in as a child with a Baggie of white powder under my mattress.

For a long time, I felt like I was destined to inherit a certain kind of life and so I wouldn’t let myself think of it for fear of being even cognitively associated with it. But writing about those same people and places changed that, and I could suddenly face them and understand them and forgive them. It was really then that I was able to understand that I wasn’t my past. Nobody is. One thing I have always loved about writing is how it can transform you and allow you to reinvent yourself. You could spend your whole life as a teacher, a doctor, a mother, a convict, whatever it may be; but the day you start writing, you start over. You’re a writer now.

She likes to write messages on balloons and send them to the sky. She takes out a black Magic Marker and she starts writing on the dozen or so balloons, one for each member of our family who died. She doesn't think she can write well and asks me not to read her notes.She likes to think they'll soar all the way to heaven. I think she knows they end up tangled in power lines or deflated in a pile of orange leaves in someone's backyard miles away, but I can never bring myself to say that to her. I've often wondered what they must think, those people who find our balloons. I've wondered if they read the messages and understand what they mean.I remember watching those balloons as a little boy, each fall, wondering if someday I, too, would be nothing but a balloon in the sky, soaring toward the sun until I began to fall slowly back to earth and into the hands of a stranger.

We met in a school elevator, and he could tell from the way I spoke that we had some sadness in common.