Michael Malone - Weebly

her.
Beanie was dreaming of Rich jouncing down the
sidewalk with their little daughter high above the blurred
crowd, laughing in the crook of his shoulder at the silly
jingle of his song. And then in her dream the sidewalks
raised up and floated off like ghosts, and grass long
buried stirred again out of the earth. And then she was
the little daughter high in that safe crook of frail bone
and flesh. And the red-gold sweet swirling hair was her
father's, and the rumbling sound of song was his voice,
at her command rolling his eyes as he sang, "The choochoo
train that takes you / Away from me, you'll never
know how sad it makes me. / Toot-toot-tootsie goodbye
/ Toottoot-tootsie don't cry." And they jounced
across Dingley Green until they fell laughing beneath the
mammoth copper beech that was, he told her, their
"family tree," planted long ago by the man whose statue
sat in the stone chair nearby. A family tree that flamed in
the fall with the generous color of the Dingleys' hair, a
tree whose roots reached for three hundred years down
toward the earth primeval.
Beanie always remembered of her father, first his