My every thought is like a crumbling rock,

it just gives way beneath my mind

and my mind stumbles and staggers downward dragging

my soul along with it…

I went to the cleaners to get my suit. Just as I was about fifty feet from the door, you know the cleaners over there in the shopping center, I saw a dress going toward it, a woman’s pink dress suit, entirely by itself. Because of the angle and some cars in the parking lot that’s all I saw, an empty dress drifting toward the dry-cleaning establishment. (Pause.) Nobody carrying it. A pink dress like the ghost of a cartoon…(Pause.)

Back in town?

MARIGOLD: Dad?

DAD: I’m thinking of every sad thing in the world.

MARIGOLD: Dad, could you take off your sunglasses?

DAD: Yes. Quick as I get a couple things figured out.

Pause.

I’m trying to figure out everything I saw between now and the last time I was in bed.

MARIGOLD: You mean yesterday.

DAD: Everything I saw. I feel it reaching for me. Everything’s got something to say.

A black rubber inner tube—two yards in diameter at least, standing up straight on its rim, tall as a man, just rolling along the street. Rolling right past this apartment house. Not a soul in sight. Five o’clock in the afternoon. Nothing else moving anywhere around here. Not a sound in the world but the wind. Big old inexplicable inner tube rolling by like it had a select purpose.

Then up the street I see three little schoolboys all out of breath, chasing toward me. When they reach me they give up. There goes the inner tube. It’s still just rolling along. The wind’s got it somehow. It enters State Street without observing the stop sign. A black pickup strikes it dead-on, and it goes sailing up into the air and over behind some bushes in front of the public library…I’m holding a bucket of fried chicken, got my arm around this bucket of fried chicken like a little child…(Pause.) That’s what I have to deal with right now. Among other things.

Pause.

MARIGOLD: I flew from Houston to SFO and rented a car.

DAD: SFO?

MARIGOLD: Yes, Daddy. The City. San Francisco.

DAD: That what they’re calling it these days?

MARIGOLD: They’ve always called it that, Daddy.

DAD removes his sunshades and peers at her.

Pause.

DAD: What’s the O for?

MARIGOLD: I don’t know.

DAD: Oh. Oh yeah. OK…Oh my soul. It is my soul. It’s my darlin’ Marigold. Oh, baby. I thought you were here about the gunfire. I thought you were the police.

They embrace.

MARIGOLD: There’s a kind of situation, Daddy. I’ve been delegated to tell you Bro humbly apologizes for ruining the TV.

DAD: Yes. I thought I heard his voice. Are the police here yet?

MARIGOLD: No. Was he shooting?

DAD: I believe it was just that thirty-two of Mother’s. It wasn’t all that loud…Are you still on the forced vacation?

MARIGOLD: I’m on suspension from the Department.