progress

Progress
by Jessica M. Stein
When I think of my parents, I think of them
watching television.
I don’t think of myself this way.
I think of myself on a train, reading,
or pulling my body through a swimming pool,
or sleeping with an arm slung over my pillow.
My parents didn’t always watch television.
My mother didn’t have one
until after college. Even then
her parents kept it in a closet.
They saw it as a cultural specimen.
When I think of my parents, I think of them
watching television, my mother upstairs in the bedroom
where she slept, my father downstairs in the den.
I’d come home late and see the blue flickering
in both windows, the separate rectangles on the lawn.
Often they had on the same show.
And when she died,
and the sun itself flickered in the sky,
my father said, Do you think she knew I loved her?
And I said, Yes.