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The Colonel

Mark Yakich

From a very young age, the colonel kept himself extremely clean. He adored soaps. All kinds. His devotion first began with a birthday present from his mother. He used to bathe twice, three times a day to take that bar into his hands, lather up a ball of it and inhale. The scent of the soap mixed with himself made everything other. The primary use of this fact was low. The secondary use, as it was a figure or illustration of his thought, was where the real worth laid: the colonel saw himself as a soap bubble rising from the newly washed hands of God.

The colonel's mother had been a single parent and an art history professor of some distinction. When he was a small boy, she was always talking about art and throwing fancy parties for mediocre painters. She was a sweet woman. She used to take him to the Art Institute and to the State Symphony. He didn't really like pictures and he didn't really like music either. He went with his mother because sometimes the paintings still smelled of rabbit skin and linseed oil. The music, on the other hand, smelled like nothing but absence. Mainly, he went on these outings because he knew that when they got back home he would get a hot bath.

In junior high he refined himself. He discovered that his favorite soap was lavender with lemon: supple, like the texture of an almond, jaundice-colored, brilliant as a bride's face. He would regularly chip off a piece, with diamond-cutter precision, and put it in his hip pocket. All day long he'd carry it around like a talisman. He spent more time fondling this little seed than paying attention in class. After school he liked to go to the library where he would find very old books and stick his nose into their pages. His favorite was Georg Christoph Lichtenberg's Letters from England, an old 1894 edition, with three scratched-out names of previous owners: Leonidas, Dieter, and Anna. Someday the colonel hoped to name three German shepherds after them.

When the colonel was old enough, his mother used to make him memorize a difficult word each day for good measure. She soon ran out of words, and so he had to begin memorizing an epigram a week. His mother's favorite epigram was by a well-known Russian poet who wrote beautiful pastorals: "All things aspire to weightlessness." As a boy, he didn't really enjoy words or epigrams. But as the colonel, he lived by what he wrote himself: "All things expire in perfume."

Copyright © 2010 by San Diego State University.

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