Tim Crews
January 29, 2018
Someone broke into our car last night. We didn’t realize it until my wife got a phone call from a stranger who said he found an emissions test receipt with our name on it on the sidewalk several blocks away. He said he was coming by our neighborhood and dropped it off. We looked at it on the counter, baffled at how the receipt could have wound up where it did, and then Abby went out to the car and found that the glove compartment had been emptied. A cellphone holder, a charger, and cord that allowed me to play music from my phone through the car stereo had also been taken. A box of tissues had been taken. The hood had been popped.
I started writing about this Tim Crews card a week and a half ago, when all the people I love the most were still alive. I didn’t know exactly what I’d write, but knowing the story of Tim Crews I’d knew I’d probably cook up something about what gets taken, about what disappears, about how there’s this world and then there’s the invisible world, the one you can’t see and that everything comes from and is taken back into. You can’t do anything about it.
A couple days ago, Saturday, six days after my father died, I put on some borrowed hip-waders and lurched around behind my big brother in a river. He tried to teach me how to cast a fly-fishing line out into the water. We didn’t stay out for long, having to get back to our mom’s house for the last night of our improvised half-Jew version of sitting shiva. Right near the end, Ian caught a fish, a brown trout. It took him a while to get the hook out. When he finally did and placed the fish in the water it disappeared instantly.
“He vanished,” I said.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
I kept scanning the river, but he was gone.
Cardboard Gods 
I do not like things you can’t see, But what the hell can you do about it. Thanks Josh. Take Care Friend.
You continue to be in my thoughts, Josh.
Beautiful piece, as always. I am really sorry for your loss but happy to know you had your father in your life for so long and that he got to see you as a father, too.
Sorry for your loss.