You okay, my man? You need to talk?

And really means it. And really listens.

Calls his bike a Magic Broom, spins it in so many circles

we all get dizzy, but not Daniel,

who bounces the front tire back to earth

without even blinking,

says That was for all of y’all who are stuck on the ground.

Me, I play the guitar. Mostly songs

that come into my head. Music

is always circling my brain. Hard to explain

how songs do that.

But when I play them, everything

makes some kind of strange sense like

my guitar has all the answers.

When I sing, the songs feel

as magic as Daniel’s bike

as brilliant as Ollie’s numbers

as smooth as Darry’s moves

as good as the four of us hanging out

on a bright cold Saturday afternoon.

It feels right

and clear

and always.

Ollie

Ollie says he doesn’t really remember the beginning

of his story.

Says he’s glad about that.

It was a tragedy, he says.

And when things like that happen, your mind blanks out.

It’s like your mind knows, he says, how to take care of itself.

Before he was one of my best friends, he was a baby

with green eyes and a bright red Afro

left outside a Texas church in a basket

with a note pinned to his blanket

Please take care of this baby. And love him like crazy too.

He used to take the note out of his pocket all the time.

Too delicate, Ollie says, to show anybody anymore.

We all know what came next in the story Ollie says

he can’t remember.

A preacher and his wife found

and kept him.

Loved Ollie just like the note asked them to do.

Then the preacher died and it was only his wife—

Bernadette, who’s Ollie’s mom.

Bernadette, who comes over sometimes to drink coffee with my own mama

and sometimes, if it’s a Friday night, one glass of wine.

Any more than that, Bernadette says,

and I forget my own name.

Even though she’s said that a hundred times,

she and Mama laugh anyway.

Ollie looks at my dad sometimes

with those bright green eyes like he’s deep

in a dream of remembering his own father living.

Ollie, who my dad used to call my son from another

father and mother,

which always made Ollie duck his head to hide

how red his face got

to hide how big his smile got.

Ollie says he doesn’t really remember the story of being a baby in a basket

but sometimes the story lives inside his eyes when kids ask

What are you?

You Black or white or Spanish or mixed?

And Ollie has to shrug and say

Maybe I’m all those things.

And maybe I’m something else too.

Once, when Ollie told my dad about

kids always asking him this,