Meet Jonah, an elderly man who decides to take a stroll, sit on a park bench, and then make his way home. But what is home, anyways? Is it something clearly defined? How do you know when you’ve recognized it? In Taylor Thornburg’s “Come On, Come On, Come On,” when is the key word indeed. Jonah searches, “…in the windows. They reflected an unfamiliar figure. Jonah had white hair and a crooked posture. His reflection had thick brown hair and stood upright. Bewildered, Jonah did not notice his reflection.” Juxtaposition signals a tangle of memories that flood Jonah’s mind and pull the reader’s attention in multiple directions.
In this way, the distinction between past and present becomes as hazy as the sky in a snowstorm. “He smelled familiar smells – roast beef and carrots and mashed potatoes and garlic and green beans sautéed with shallots. His ex-wife used to cook that way for Christmas. ‘Julia?’ Jonah opened the door. ‘Is that you?’” The reader is pulled into the scene with concrete sensory details just in the same way that Jonah is pulled into his memory. Yet, reality is never too far off, when the repeated, “[c]ome on, come on, come on,” throws us back into context and then pulls us forward.
What should be a sweet memory turns out to signify the beginning of the end. “He passed the Christmas tree he remembered, a special thing – silver, tinsel, and tin, lit from below by a rotating light behind candy-colored gels. Julia would take it in the divorce.” Rather than representing joy, a full Christmas spread invokes the opposite feeling, where “[t]he roast beef made Jonah’s stomach turn.” Here, we see a fragmented family during Christmastime where a feverish son is tucked away in bed and a wife refuses her husband’s affection. This is the point after which everything was different. And so it is fitting that this scene should surface so much later in Jonah’s life.
The narrative doesn’t stop there. More critical junctions surface and the reader becomes entangled in the details of these memories in the same way that Jonah relives them. Time and tense stretch wide until they converge at, “…the place he lived before he was born and then the place he would live after he died.” Another reflection signals a return to the present time, “He did not recognize the face in the mirror. Deep wrinkles, yellow teeth, and thin white hair.” Every crucial moment then snaps into place with a fast-paced conclusion that may have readers reaching for a tissue or two. Come on. Read it for yourself.
Source: Thornburg, Taylor. “Come On, Come On, Come On.” L’Esprit Literary Review, is. 3, October 2023, https://lespritliteraryreview.org/2023/10/03/come-on-come-on-come-on/.
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