Four-hundred ninety-nine loads of laundry since the divorce. It was the five hundredth that slapped Connor’s face, pulling that goddamned shirt out of the dryer. The warmth of it never like that feel of socks out of the machine on a cold winter day. More like a muted sliver off a branding iron. In all the days since he had been cast out of what he thought was home, the heat and sight of that shirt only increased in the pain it caused. This morning he held the shirt crumpled tight into a ball. Wondering, wondering what to do. He turned to the dog sitting at the kitchen entry. An expectant look crossed its face, as if Connor was holding a favorite treat.
“I should get rid of this, Murph.”
Connor felt a thickening in his throat. His face grew warm. There was wetness in his eyes. Murphy sat up straighter, cocking an ear, waiting. The dog was perplexed by the change in Connor’s voice. The man coughed. Clearing his throat, he spoke again, sliding down the wall to slump onto the floor. Murphy rose and sauntered over to his owner. A graying muzzle craned over to lick Connor’s face.
“Honestly, doggo, this should have been tossed sooner. Can’t fathom why I didn’t. Guess I was too lazy to replace it.”
Connor patted the dog, bunching the short, wiry coat in his trembling hand. Murphy let out a gratified snuffle as he lay his head in Connor’s lap. The man closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. The shirt cooled in his hand. Echoes of the connection it signified played out in the afternoon light. A gift of a few square feet of cotton growing so heavy on the mind and heart. Truth be known the condition of the shirt was good. It could still be worn. He just couldn’t do it anymore.
He held the shirt up, shaking it out. Blue cotton with stripes, shot through with the freight of memories carried over from a very different time, a very different person. Some ghosts in the weave, Connor swore. And only he knew the locations of the tears that had fallen more than once, from joy once held and despair never to be forgotten. Life and death in a button down wrapper for this human shaped container of sadness and hope. Connor sighed.
“What’ll it be, Murph? Toss it? Give it away?”
The dog lifted his head slightly to peer at Connor through heavy-lidded eyes. It craned its neck to sniff at the shirt. Chuffing quietly, Murphy turned his head away and laid it back down. The man thought he should not read too much into that gesture, but the dog did appear to have made its feelings known in certain terms.
Connor gently lifted Murphy’s head so he could slide over to stand up. He balled up the shirt as he made his way to the trash can. He hesitated after lifting the lid. It could still be donated, an anonymous item among other anonymous items in an anonymous bag dropped off at a local charity. He decided against giving it away. Too much history in that shirt to risk inflicting a curse on an unsuspecting innocent. As silly as it seemed, that thought made the decision for him. Connor threw it into the can more forcefully than he intended. The weight went with it, his shoulders and neck feeling lighter. Stepping over the dog, he went back to folding laundry, and moving on.
Showing posts with label broken. Show all posts
Showing posts with label broken. Show all posts
08 April 2018
21 January 2018
On the Verge of Gone
The milk. It has been in there for two weeks past the expiration date. Unscrew the cap anyway. Wipe off the seal. Peering into the jug reveals no curds, at
least that can be seen by the naked eye. Good sign, maybe. Do you want to take the chance? Cereal is no good with water on it, right? Water on cereal. Yes, that happened once. Never want to be that low again. So, what to do. The kicker will be the sniff test. No getting around it. Lift the jug. Breathe in deep.
Then fall down a rabbit hole of memory, the lingering sweet dairy aroma undercut with the faintest undertone of curdling. The kitchen is different, but standing at the sink is the same. The hands engaged in myriad domestic entanglements, the mind drifting to thoughts of warmth and affection after the dishes are done. A carton of milk sits on the counter, awaiting transport back to the refrigerator. Other groceries surround the carton, the results of grocery shopping shared with someone, a way to take the drudgery out of chores.
The light in this kitchen is different than the one in which you pace nowadays. The light seems better, warmer, welcoming. This is the difference between a house that knew love and a glorified cell harboring cold desperation. The routine once known as an incubator of good feeling no longer exists. Time and distance have seen to it. But what peculiar cruelty arisen from the banality of sliced white bread and a container of milk. This is what hurts.
It used to be the groceries could be put away and the hands were freed up to seek out touch. To wrap arms around warmth. Fingers resting on the gentle curve of hips, drawing closer to a kiss and shared breath. The simple acknowledgement of a humanity close to the soul, near impossible to find any other way. Travel in time and space. A miracle contained in the molecules of milk on its way to immortality.
Two weeks old, approaching undrinkability, but there is little choice to do otherwise. Snap. The cord breaks. The eyes water. Once again at the counter on a gray morning, bewildered with jug in hand. It is almost spoiled, it won’t be long. Bitterness and hunger leave no options. The milk is poured. The cereal downed. The stomach lurches and the heart spasms at the scent of milk on the verge of gone.
least that can be seen by the naked eye. Good sign, maybe. Do you want to take the chance? Cereal is no good with water on it, right? Water on cereal. Yes, that happened once. Never want to be that low again. So, what to do. The kicker will be the sniff test. No getting around it. Lift the jug. Breathe in deep.
Then fall down a rabbit hole of memory, the lingering sweet dairy aroma undercut with the faintest undertone of curdling. The kitchen is different, but standing at the sink is the same. The hands engaged in myriad domestic entanglements, the mind drifting to thoughts of warmth and affection after the dishes are done. A carton of milk sits on the counter, awaiting transport back to the refrigerator. Other groceries surround the carton, the results of grocery shopping shared with someone, a way to take the drudgery out of chores.
The light in this kitchen is different than the one in which you pace nowadays. The light seems better, warmer, welcoming. This is the difference between a house that knew love and a glorified cell harboring cold desperation. The routine once known as an incubator of good feeling no longer exists. Time and distance have seen to it. But what peculiar cruelty arisen from the banality of sliced white bread and a container of milk. This is what hurts.
It used to be the groceries could be put away and the hands were freed up to seek out touch. To wrap arms around warmth. Fingers resting on the gentle curve of hips, drawing closer to a kiss and shared breath. The simple acknowledgement of a humanity close to the soul, near impossible to find any other way. Travel in time and space. A miracle contained in the molecules of milk on its way to immortality.
Two weeks old, approaching undrinkability, but there is little choice to do otherwise. Snap. The cord breaks. The eyes water. Once again at the counter on a gray morning, bewildered with jug in hand. It is almost spoiled, it won’t be long. Bitterness and hunger leave no options. The milk is poured. The cereal downed. The stomach lurches and the heart spasms at the scent of milk on the verge of gone.
14 January 2018
Highwire Over the Black
8:13 PM. Notes from the cell. A mid-winter night's nightmare. I tell you now this is not a "feel good" essay.
On one side of this chasm lies a carnivale of connection and affection which I crave. On the other lies a fortress, built of the stones of bitterness, into which my heart wishes to retreat. All the while, my feet shuffle gingerly over the wire. The wind of desperation tests my balance.
Move forward, move back, it matters not. Any choice involves a fall. The blackness of mistrust threatens to swallow me whole should I slip. It threatens to swallow me should I stand still. Paralyzed, cold, frantic. Mistrust seeps into every feeling, every thought. This is no way to have a life.
Paradoxically it also feels like being backed into a corner. Two walls, floor, a low ceiling all closing in. There is no wind, only a thickening atmosphere. Left with nothing but desperation to figure out who to trust, as there is none towards others or myself. The unofficial motto for the Disunited States of Me: “In Pain We Trust”.
Snow is falling as I write this. I see the fat flakes hurtling to the ground. On the radio, The Jayhawks croon “You shouldn’t hide your colors” to which a bitter chuckle escapes my lips. Shouldn’t hide my colors? Noble, it might seem. Courageous, perhaps. I let my colors fly because I believed those things to be true. My reward was to watch while the heart to which mine had pledged allegiance cut down my mast and set the flag ablaze. Glory ending in ashes and rubble.
My soul is neither coroner nor archaeologist, but it finds itself sifting through the blackened debris that surrounds it. Fragments of a life. Bits and pieces tattooed with words barely visible through traces of smoke and charred edges. It is painful, this performing of forensics on the shattered remains of one's own heart.
Move forward, move back, it matters not. Any choice involves a fall. The blackness of mistrust threatens to swallow me whole should I slip. It threatens to swallow me should I stand still. Paralyzed, cold, frantic. Mistrust seeps into every feeling, every thought. This is no way to have a life.
Paradoxically it also feels like being backed into a corner. Two walls, floor, a low ceiling all closing in. There is no wind, only a thickening atmosphere. Left with nothing but desperation to figure out who to trust, as there is none towards others or myself. The unofficial motto for the Disunited States of Me: “In Pain We Trust”.
Snow is falling as I write this. I see the fat flakes hurtling to the ground. On the radio, The Jayhawks croon “You shouldn’t hide your colors” to which a bitter chuckle escapes my lips. Shouldn’t hide my colors? Noble, it might seem. Courageous, perhaps. I let my colors fly because I believed those things to be true. My reward was to watch while the heart to which mine had pledged allegiance cut down my mast and set the flag ablaze. Glory ending in ashes and rubble.
My soul is neither coroner nor archaeologist, but it finds itself sifting through the blackened debris that surrounds it. Fragments of a life. Bits and pieces tattooed with words barely visible through traces of smoke and charred edges. It is painful, this performing of forensics on the shattered remains of one's own heart.
Out on the wire, nothing stays still. Thoughts, feelings. The pulse in the veins even contributes its own instability, a constant challenge to the act of standing still. Staring into the tea mug I watch the trembles of my hands translate into ripples over the mahogany liquid. Closing my eyes, I dive in, surfacing on the wire again. The sun is peeking through the clouds. But I am still there suspended over the void. Connection seems so close, if only I could believe.
The fortress may be cold and dark but it has thick walls. Walls that deflect pain and rejection, behind which sleep might be possible. The carnival is bright and warm but in the past I have paid dearly for the cost of a ticket. A ticket which did nothing to prevent the despair of rejection. So it is I am paralyzed on the wire. My colors are mute and hidden. It is only a matter of time before I fall. The question is, which way?
07 January 2018
Moment Stretches On Forever
Nothing lasts forever. Everything is transient. So says popular wisdom and some religions. If so, does that mean time is elastic? Heartache drawn out in front of a second hand that never seems to move. Despair squeezed my heart with a cold hand, the shock of which galvanized me into twitchy wakefulness.
Awake to a sky burnished pearly and streaked with dull orange. The cottage cold as the fire burned low. Sitting up on the edge of the bed I felt the dream receding like the waves sliding up and down under the ice along the shoreline. Head heavy and sluggish, the ocean looking the same and eerily gelatinous. The ocean, I thought, is transient in appearance but not in existence. It is there. Always.
Apparently like the pain I felt this morning. Still feel, that is. The notion of transient and "this too shall pass" seeming an insult in the face of the broken heart lodged in my chest. It too shall pass?
"When?" I muttered to the icy air. "Time is stretching out before me, and the end point of this seems nowhere in sight!"
Oyster colored clouds parted out over the waves. A thin beam of sunlight slowly made its way into the cottage, limning the interior with a glow that had little warmth. Outside the waves continued their slow caress of the beach along the headland. Faint tinkling reached my ears as the ice clotted along the tideline shifted.
The blood seemed thicker in my veins. I could smell the salt water but it did not stir me in the usual manner. It was cold. I needed heat. I needed light. Time to stoke the fire. I shuffled over to the hearth, picking up the ice cold iron poker to prod the embers. Driftwood was low. I would need to do a beach walk.
I threw a few pieces of salty wood into the fireplace. More would go into the small potbelly stove, for tea and breakfast. The flames winked into existence, slowly growing in intensity. The minerals in the wood flared faint blue and green as they burned off. The heat seeped into my grateful bones.
I turned to look out the windows facing the sea. The water was jade flecked with orange and gold from the sun. It was beautiful. The horizon stretched from side to side, infinite, relentless. It became my moment, delineator of pain, stretching on for what seemed like forever. To my lips came the prayer that soon the clock would tick, and this moment of pain would pass. The waves break, the ice cracks and groans. I wait.
Awake to a sky burnished pearly and streaked with dull orange. The cottage cold as the fire burned low. Sitting up on the edge of the bed I felt the dream receding like the waves sliding up and down under the ice along the shoreline. Head heavy and sluggish, the ocean looking the same and eerily gelatinous. The ocean, I thought, is transient in appearance but not in existence. It is there. Always.
Apparently like the pain I felt this morning. Still feel, that is. The notion of transient and "this too shall pass" seeming an insult in the face of the broken heart lodged in my chest. It too shall pass?
"When?" I muttered to the icy air. "Time is stretching out before me, and the end point of this seems nowhere in sight!"
Oyster colored clouds parted out over the waves. A thin beam of sunlight slowly made its way into the cottage, limning the interior with a glow that had little warmth. Outside the waves continued their slow caress of the beach along the headland. Faint tinkling reached my ears as the ice clotted along the tideline shifted.
The blood seemed thicker in my veins. I could smell the salt water but it did not stir me in the usual manner. It was cold. I needed heat. I needed light. Time to stoke the fire. I shuffled over to the hearth, picking up the ice cold iron poker to prod the embers. Driftwood was low. I would need to do a beach walk.
I threw a few pieces of salty wood into the fireplace. More would go into the small potbelly stove, for tea and breakfast. The flames winked into existence, slowly growing in intensity. The minerals in the wood flared faint blue and green as they burned off. The heat seeped into my grateful bones.
I turned to look out the windows facing the sea. The water was jade flecked with orange and gold from the sun. It was beautiful. The horizon stretched from side to side, infinite, relentless. It became my moment, delineator of pain, stretching on for what seemed like forever. To my lips came the prayer that soon the clock would tick, and this moment of pain would pass. The waves break, the ice cracks and groans. I wait.
24 December 2017
The Fall of the King
The king awoke to the metallic caw of ravens, and a sharp stabbing pain in his left arm. He struggled to open his eyes through the crust of dried blood caking them shut. A raven sounded loud in his ear, and he started in spite of himself. The heat ebony bird hopped away and took flight. It had been pecking the the king's exposed arm. The vambrace was missing, lost somewhere on the hill above the beach.
The king groaned. A throbbing in his head sent forth waves of nausea, threatening to spill out on a flood of bile. He gritted his teeth. Bloody, groggy, he determined that he would not embarrass himself by spewing the little contents of his stomach in front of his men.
His men. Where were they? he wondered. The only sounds he could hear were wind on the grass and waves on the strand. No human noises met this ears. Only ravens and the earth. The king struggled to sit up. Rolling over, he braced his arms against the turf and pushed. He made it to his knees before a lancet of pain shot through his head. He trembled. He spat blood onto the emerald grass.
Slowly he lifted his head. The helmet he began to lift off. His hands trembled but managed to slide the iron with a bit of tugging. Blurry eyes focused on the inside of the helmet, dark and slick with blackening blood. One side of the piece was deeply dented. It was only by grace that whatever had struck his head had not split the helmet asunder.
The blow had perhaps knocked him unconscious. Gingerly he felt around the top of his skull. Sure enough, there was a knob about the size of a small goose egg, split slightly across its middle. His fingers came away damp with blood, a few graying hairs sticking to his flesh. The king sent up a prayer of thanks to the war god that the wound was not worse.
But his men. In his field of vision he could see what seemed a carpet of corpses, strewn about the hillock, entrails and blood bright and obscene against the deep green of the grass. Not a soul stirred while the ravens feasted. He saw them. They hopped and pecked. They ceased to pay the king any deference now that he appeared to be alive. Their feathers shone dully nacreous under the pewter overcast sky.
"I am alive", said the king, "yet the world appears to be dead. By what fortune is this?"
The king struggled to his feet. A cool wind sprang up, bringing with it the smell of blood and ocean, iron and salt. His sword lay in the grass. The tip was broken. The oyster colored steel shone through a film of blood. Notches in the blade gave testimony to a hard fight. On instinct, the king reached for the sword. The dread eased as he wrapped his scarred hand around the grip.
The sky was swirling with ravens. A cloud of jet broken only by patches of gray sky a few brave seagulls flitting in and out of the crowd. Death saturated the air, barely kept at bay by the ocean breeze. It was clear to the king now that he was apparently the only survivor. The captain of his guard lay a few feet away, his skull split by the axe still lodged in the bone. The sword of the captain jutted from the ribcage of his killer, both unseeing and stiff beneath the sky. The rest of his guard and the cohorts of the barbarians were splayed about the hill. Not one appeared to breathe, or make a sound.
Wind picked up, gusting, bringing with it the scent of rain. The king turned to face the sea and found himself wishing the drops would fall, if only to wash the blood and failure off his broken armor and battered body. He felt the specter of sadness nosing about his mind. So many lives lost of those who had believed in him, had made him king. But now he felt there was no kingdom, unless the territory was defined by the shell of his body alone. The king wept.
Hours may have passed. Maybe days. The king grew insensate to time, or so he thought. It was the creeping chill of sundown that finally roused him from his despair. Behind him the birds had settled down, some in a nearby copse of trees, others walking stilt-legged through the grass pecking at insects and the bodies.
The king stood. The sun, peeking fitfully through the clouds, neared the horizon. Waves beckoned to him, and he resolved to wash himself clean in the saltwater. A staggering walk downhill along a rutted path, he divested himself of his armor and padding, piece by filthy, bloody piece. He clutched the sword by habit, but when he reached the tide line he thrust the pitted blade downward into the sand. As he did so, he pierced the body of a crab that had washed up in the wrack.
Fitting, he though darkly, that no respect is accorded to the living or the dead. He stood naked before the sea. Cold wavelets lapped his feet and ankles. A few sluggish strides forward found him knee-deep in the surf. The waves were gathering height and force, now, and he wondered of the sea god knew he was here. He wondered if the sea would reject him, now that his kingdom seemed lost, his body wracked and bruised.
The king raised his arms and leaned forward to plunge into a tall wave that rushed up the strand. The shock of the green water evoked a roar from the king's ragged throat. Seawater ran over his body. The salt stung the myriad cuts and scrapes that webbed his flesh. Pain and cold galvanized the king. He struggled further out into the surf, scraping blood and the flesh of others off his aching frame. He roared again, anguish and shame pouring from his soul. Out in the water came an answering voice, which to the king sounded like a command.
The king swam deeper into the sea. Up on the hill, in the company of birds and the night, the remnants of the kingdom slowly faded from sight. He swam on, not knowing if it could be saved or if it would rebirth itself, and he would once again know the feel of a crown bestowed by the heart of another.
03 December 2017
Huggy Bear
I heard the Hugger well before he embraced me. Hard not to. He was shouting. I had my head down as I walked to work that morning. Loud noises are not unusual on the workday street. There was no urgent need to look up. But maybe I should have.
The hug happened just past the convenience store and in front of the Methodist church mid-block. I heard more shouting and this time I looked up to see a man weaving back and forth on the sidewalk. He was waving his arms and shouting at passers-by, asking for money.
Just another city scene. I grew nervous as I drew closer. There appeared to be no easy way around the guy. I was going to keep my head down and keep moving forward. Good plan. It didn't work. He made a beeline for me.
Tall fellow, slim. Fast. Loud. He came at me quickly with no way for me to step around him. He yelled, "My brother, my brother!" then knelt at my feet with hands clasped in front of his face.
He knelt in front of me. I was stunned into immobility. He shouted again.
"Please, please, brother I need some coffee. Coffee! Can you, please, please gimme some change for some coffee?"
He stood before I could say anything. He lunged forward to sweep me up in a bear hug. I could barely breathe he was squeezing me so tight. Instinctively, even though I was lugging my backpack and a camera tripod, I sort of hugged him back. I hoped that would make him let go. No such luck.
"Please, my brother, can you give me some change. I need coffee. Please!"
He squeezed tighter. It was then I began to get worried. I apologized to him, and said I did not have any change. Which was true. He shook me a little and drew back. He held me by the shoulders. The look on his face was sad and a bit manic, if you can imagine it. It occurred to me at that moment that this guy was probably high. On what, I could not say.
"You don't have any change?" he asked. He looked crestfallen. "No, I don't. Sorry, brother" I said.
The stranger tottered back and forth a bit. He still had me by the shoulder and the loop of my backpack. My anxiety grew. He looked at me quizzically when I told him I needed to get to work.
"Work? You on your way to work?" he said.
"Yes. Gotta get to work."
Momentary silence. He looked around, gripped my shoulder and shook me gently again.
"No change?"
"No, sorry, my man."
"Aww, man. Aiight. Aiight. You get on to work."
With a flourish, he let me go. He shouted again "I need some coffee!" as he turned away from me. I then noticed another person a short distance away, he had been watching us and grinning. I think he may have been friends with the Hugger. He just smiled like a Cheshire cat and laughed when I shook my head and took a deep breath.
I turned back to the Hugger. He was already making his way up the street, shouting some more. "Take care of yourself, man!" I hollered. He glanced at me but did not reply. It wasn't clear if he had even heard me. I shrugged and started up the street. A sigh of relief escaped my throat.
He could have been a thief. He could have been delusional or suffering from mental health issues. He even could have been violent. I don't know other than my wallet was till in my pocket, my backpack was intact, and the only physical artifact was the fading pressure of the hug. I'm grateful it ended the way it did.
I wondered about my place in the world. How really did my position differ from that of the Hugger. Grace of God? Pure luck? A stubborn tendency to avoid self-destruction? All I know is that for a few minutes a human being connected with me in perhaps the only way he knew how, in a weird and touching way. My hope is that the Hugger finds a stable connection to this world, and that I get to keep the one I have. I wish him well.
The hug happened just past the convenience store and in front of the Methodist church mid-block. I heard more shouting and this time I looked up to see a man weaving back and forth on the sidewalk. He was waving his arms and shouting at passers-by, asking for money.
Just another city scene. I grew nervous as I drew closer. There appeared to be no easy way around the guy. I was going to keep my head down and keep moving forward. Good plan. It didn't work. He made a beeline for me.
Tall fellow, slim. Fast. Loud. He came at me quickly with no way for me to step around him. He yelled, "My brother, my brother!" then knelt at my feet with hands clasped in front of his face.
He knelt in front of me. I was stunned into immobility. He shouted again.
"Please, please, brother I need some coffee. Coffee! Can you, please, please gimme some change for some coffee?"
He stood before I could say anything. He lunged forward to sweep me up in a bear hug. I could barely breathe he was squeezing me so tight. Instinctively, even though I was lugging my backpack and a camera tripod, I sort of hugged him back. I hoped that would make him let go. No such luck.
"Please, my brother, can you give me some change. I need coffee. Please!"
He squeezed tighter. It was then I began to get worried. I apologized to him, and said I did not have any change. Which was true. He shook me a little and drew back. He held me by the shoulders. The look on his face was sad and a bit manic, if you can imagine it. It occurred to me at that moment that this guy was probably high. On what, I could not say.
"You don't have any change?" he asked. He looked crestfallen. "No, I don't. Sorry, brother" I said.
The stranger tottered back and forth a bit. He still had me by the shoulder and the loop of my backpack. My anxiety grew. He looked at me quizzically when I told him I needed to get to work.
"Work? You on your way to work?" he said.
"Yes. Gotta get to work."
Momentary silence. He looked around, gripped my shoulder and shook me gently again.
"No change?"
"No, sorry, my man."
"Aww, man. Aiight. Aiight. You get on to work."
With a flourish, he let me go. He shouted again "I need some coffee!" as he turned away from me. I then noticed another person a short distance away, he had been watching us and grinning. I think he may have been friends with the Hugger. He just smiled like a Cheshire cat and laughed when I shook my head and took a deep breath.
I turned back to the Hugger. He was already making his way up the street, shouting some more. "Take care of yourself, man!" I hollered. He glanced at me but did not reply. It wasn't clear if he had even heard me. I shrugged and started up the street. A sigh of relief escaped my throat.
He could have been a thief. He could have been delusional or suffering from mental health issues. He even could have been violent. I don't know other than my wallet was till in my pocket, my backpack was intact, and the only physical artifact was the fading pressure of the hug. I'm grateful it ended the way it did.
I wondered about my place in the world. How really did my position differ from that of the Hugger. Grace of God? Pure luck? A stubborn tendency to avoid self-destruction? All I know is that for a few minutes a human being connected with me in perhaps the only way he knew how, in a weird and touching way. My hope is that the Hugger finds a stable connection to this world, and that I get to keep the one I have. I wish him well.
12 November 2017
Awake By the Sea of Dreams
My right arm woke me up. I was dreaming. Bad dreaming. Fighting things I could not clearly see, I flailed and screamed in desperation. Clenched fist on the end of a swinging arm. In the real world my arm spasmed. My fingers smashed into a pencil cup crammed with pens and a small crafting knife. The pens spilled over the desk in muted tintinnabulation. The cup itself clattered like a cowbell against the steel sash of the window, ricocheting into my chest as I flung my self up and awake. The world swam into focus.
“Where am I?” I croaked. It was nearly dark except for lamplight and a gauzy moon rising over the headland. My face was wet on one side.
My hands shook. I raised the left one to my left cheek. It felt hot and damp. And flat. I had been sleeping, head down on the desk. The dampness turned out to be drool, confirmed by the wet patch on the note paper in front of me.
Night. No idea how late, or how early. The sea groaned and boomed down on the tide line. Breeze, salty and cool, blew softly through the open casements facing the beach. The fire I had lain hours ago was down to dull embers. Red patches like the eyes of spiders crouching in the firebox. Faint yellow rays leaked from the lantern perched at the end of the desk. Something told me it was in need of fuel.
I decided it could wait. My heart was still racing. Phantoms were fading from my mind. Shivering, anxious, I found myself with no desire to recall what they had been. Not now.
I looked around the cottage. Nothing unusual could I see. The louvers on the west side were in place. I remembered adjusting them earlier before I sat down to write. The fading sun had been a bit much, then. The door was still closed. Locked, too, from what I could see.
Turning back to the water I could make out some profiles in the weak moonlight glow. Clumps of seaweed on the beach. The curl of breakers, with faint phosphorescent edges, sliding up the beach. A dark blocky shape on the horizon, small and indistinct. Pinpoints of light wavered on the swell. A freighter, maybe? Bulk carrier? No way to tell. The shape momentarily disappeared, dipping I thought below the horizon. Fog might be gathering out there. Or heavy chop. The wind was picking up.
I shivered again. Manannan stirred, I could feel it in the thrum of the waves hitting the sand. How long I had been asleep, there was no way to know. I had no clear recollection of what I had done between arriving at the cottage earlier in the day and when I sat down to write. Except dinner. Dinner had been a hasty affair of roasted fish and day old cornbread washed down with tepid tea. Then I sat at the desk to write. I had hoped to cast off the jumbled emotions and stresses of the previous week.
The cottage is good for that sort of thing. To my chagrin it is not without failure now and then. Tonight had been less than a success.
A sharp puff of wind hit my face. The cool, briny air perked me up. With a napkin I wiped my face. The simple action brought my pulse down further. Anxiety receded not unlike the wavelets down the strand. The bad dream was dissolving like mist. The walls of the cottage lit up, brilliant white in the beam of the lighthouse up on the head.
Day bloomed briefly to sparkle on the disarray of pens strewn across the desk. I began to corral the pens into the cup. The crafting knife had lodged itself point first in the bead board paneling. I tugged gently to free it. It was then I noticed writing scrawled across the top sheet of paper. The light flared, was gone.
So. I must have written something. Not much from the looks of it, although the remaining light was too dim to make out what I had jotted down. I put the pens and the knife in the cup. In the shadows I sat breathing slowly for a few minutes. For some reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what I had written. The lighthouse beam pulsed and flared. I did not look down. My interest had attached itself to the ship or whatever it was out there on the horizon. I watched until the sea or fog or who knows what made it disappear.
I reached for the lantern. Turning up the wick, a pool of yellow light spilled across my desk. Leaning forward I could make out my spidery scrawl, dark blue ink tracking across the cream of the paper, curling slightly from damp and spit. There were two sentences written there. Terse, compact, brittle in the lamplight.
I don’t know what surprised me more, the deep cuts of the words or the sudden tightening of throat and moistening of eye that stole over me. Head in my hands, the cottage dimmed in a swirl of emotions that took my breath away. The events of the week bowled me over. No amount of speed or finesse was going to take me from their path.
This explained the dreams. The shadows in the cave of the head and the heart. Fighting things I could not describe except through the dread and pain they laid upon my desperate soul. Well-mannered ghouls plucking at the flesh. The flesh itself recoiling and quivering as it sought escape.
I rocked back and forth until my breath was under control. The cool damp had made its way into my bones. The ghost of William Faulkner whispered in my ear “A man always falls back upon what he knows best in a crisis—the murderer upon murder, the thief thieving, the liar lying.” I had no plans to kill, steal, or lie, but what I was going to do was make a pot of tea. Warmth would help, Tea would have to do for warmth, as there was no one with me to offer theirs.
And probably wouldn’t be, pessimism congealing in my heart. I picked up the paper. The fire would need stoking. My hands ripped the paper into strips. The dry scrape of it abraded my heart. Leaning into the fireplace, I blew on the embers while casting about for the poker. A few thrusts of the cast iron, a few breaths, and the embers glowed as if eager to burn the past. The present. Telling omens for the future.
I cast the ragged strips into the coals. They writhed and curled and burst into flames as I watched. Shadows danced over my face and the walls. I fetched the teapot from the mantel as the paper swiftly burned down to ashes. Out past the eastern windows the Sea of Dreams muttered and moaned, waiting for me fall asleep once again.
“Where am I?” I croaked. It was nearly dark except for lamplight and a gauzy moon rising over the headland. My face was wet on one side.
My hands shook. I raised the left one to my left cheek. It felt hot and damp. And flat. I had been sleeping, head down on the desk. The dampness turned out to be drool, confirmed by the wet patch on the note paper in front of me.
Night. No idea how late, or how early. The sea groaned and boomed down on the tide line. Breeze, salty and cool, blew softly through the open casements facing the beach. The fire I had lain hours ago was down to dull embers. Red patches like the eyes of spiders crouching in the firebox. Faint yellow rays leaked from the lantern perched at the end of the desk. Something told me it was in need of fuel.
I decided it could wait. My heart was still racing. Phantoms were fading from my mind. Shivering, anxious, I found myself with no desire to recall what they had been. Not now.
I looked around the cottage. Nothing unusual could I see. The louvers on the west side were in place. I remembered adjusting them earlier before I sat down to write. The fading sun had been a bit much, then. The door was still closed. Locked, too, from what I could see.
Turning back to the water I could make out some profiles in the weak moonlight glow. Clumps of seaweed on the beach. The curl of breakers, with faint phosphorescent edges, sliding up the beach. A dark blocky shape on the horizon, small and indistinct. Pinpoints of light wavered on the swell. A freighter, maybe? Bulk carrier? No way to tell. The shape momentarily disappeared, dipping I thought below the horizon. Fog might be gathering out there. Or heavy chop. The wind was picking up.
I shivered again. Manannan stirred, I could feel it in the thrum of the waves hitting the sand. How long I had been asleep, there was no way to know. I had no clear recollection of what I had done between arriving at the cottage earlier in the day and when I sat down to write. Except dinner. Dinner had been a hasty affair of roasted fish and day old cornbread washed down with tepid tea. Then I sat at the desk to write. I had hoped to cast off the jumbled emotions and stresses of the previous week.
The cottage is good for that sort of thing. To my chagrin it is not without failure now and then. Tonight had been less than a success.
A sharp puff of wind hit my face. The cool, briny air perked me up. With a napkin I wiped my face. The simple action brought my pulse down further. Anxiety receded not unlike the wavelets down the strand. The bad dream was dissolving like mist. The walls of the cottage lit up, brilliant white in the beam of the lighthouse up on the head.
Day bloomed briefly to sparkle on the disarray of pens strewn across the desk. I began to corral the pens into the cup. The crafting knife had lodged itself point first in the bead board paneling. I tugged gently to free it. It was then I noticed writing scrawled across the top sheet of paper. The light flared, was gone.
So. I must have written something. Not much from the looks of it, although the remaining light was too dim to make out what I had jotted down. I put the pens and the knife in the cup. In the shadows I sat breathing slowly for a few minutes. For some reason I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what I had written. The lighthouse beam pulsed and flared. I did not look down. My interest had attached itself to the ship or whatever it was out there on the horizon. I watched until the sea or fog or who knows what made it disappear.
I reached for the lantern. Turning up the wick, a pool of yellow light spilled across my desk. Leaning forward I could make out my spidery scrawl, dark blue ink tracking across the cream of the paper, curling slightly from damp and spit. There were two sentences written there. Terse, compact, brittle in the lamplight.
“In the battle for self-worth being your own worst enemy is a guaranteed path to defeat. In this arena, I exist to be rejected.”
I don’t know what surprised me more, the deep cuts of the words or the sudden tightening of throat and moistening of eye that stole over me. Head in my hands, the cottage dimmed in a swirl of emotions that took my breath away. The events of the week bowled me over. No amount of speed or finesse was going to take me from their path.
This explained the dreams. The shadows in the cave of the head and the heart. Fighting things I could not describe except through the dread and pain they laid upon my desperate soul. Well-mannered ghouls plucking at the flesh. The flesh itself recoiling and quivering as it sought escape.
I rocked back and forth until my breath was under control. The cool damp had made its way into my bones. The ghost of William Faulkner whispered in my ear “A man always falls back upon what he knows best in a crisis—the murderer upon murder, the thief thieving, the liar lying.” I had no plans to kill, steal, or lie, but what I was going to do was make a pot of tea. Warmth would help, Tea would have to do for warmth, as there was no one with me to offer theirs.
And probably wouldn’t be, pessimism congealing in my heart. I picked up the paper. The fire would need stoking. My hands ripped the paper into strips. The dry scrape of it abraded my heart. Leaning into the fireplace, I blew on the embers while casting about for the poker. A few thrusts of the cast iron, a few breaths, and the embers glowed as if eager to burn the past. The present. Telling omens for the future.
I cast the ragged strips into the coals. They writhed and curled and burst into flames as I watched. Shadows danced over my face and the walls. I fetched the teapot from the mantel as the paper swiftly burned down to ashes. Out past the eastern windows the Sea of Dreams muttered and moaned, waiting for me fall asleep once again.
24 September 2017
Punchout
Kerchunk. With that sound my belly dropped to my feet. A few years gone, just like that. A new hole in the identity of my life.
The clerk drops the hole punch on the scruffy laminate counter between us. It lands with a bang, making us both jump. Louder than seemed possible, overheard over the PA system announcements and background chatter of the crowded licensing service area. She apologizes, chuckling nervously as she arranges my paperwork. I assure her it is no big deal, happens sometimes, right?
What I don't say is that maybe now I don't mind the most recent chapter of my life going out with a bang. Much better than a whimper. Certainly a tenfold improvement on the chunking sound the punch made as it bullied its way through my old license.
She hands over to me a thin sheaf of paperwork. On top of the sheaf is the license. There is a hole, oval-shaped, near the top of the dull plastic card. The hole is off center. Fitting, it seems. Not that the hole in the license is of consequence. Not now. Not ever, unless I was dumb enough to use it again for any purpose where it would be scrutinized. So never. I am many things. Dumb is not one of them.
The clerk tells me in a voice unexpectedly cheerful for the DMV that I am all set. Everything proper, signed off, good to go. She points out the temporary license. My very own register receipt verifying my fitness to drive in my new state. I can expect the official validation of my existence to arrive in the mail in about ten business days. Wonderful. "How ever will I survive ten days of marginal personhood?" the snarky question asked in my head.
"Easy answer," says the shadow in the back of my head, "in the manner you survived months of marginality before pulling the reverse Oregon Trail maneuver that brought you here. Numb patience and the art of non-thinking."
No comfort to be found in that pronouncement. I step through the doorway of out into the bright, hot, muggy day. The humidity makes me breathe harder its so thick. I walk slow back to the car. The old license is in my left hand. I flip it back and forth between my fingers, a clumsy card shark maneuver. The license seems heavier. I have no idea what I will do with it. Unusable, unnecessary, undesired. Descriptions not lost on my weary soul and battered ego.
Bruisingly hot air spills out of the car upon opening the door. A veritable pizza oven on wheels. I wait momentarily to let the hot rush subside. No hurry. No place to go that requires my presence. Not yet, anyway. Standing in the searing light I'm staring at the empty car. No one in it except a passenger seat full of memories. The rest hot and empty.
Empty. Null. Void.
I glance at the license again. The punchout is a sharp relief shadow against my palm. Lao Tzu whispers in my ear sweet nothings about nothing.
"Moulding clay into a vessel, we find utility in its hollowness."
Sweat rolls down my face, stinging my eyes. Or so I tell myself. Maybe it is the pain in my heart causing the eyes to water.
"Cutting doors and windows for a house, we find the utility in its empty space."
My heart is a shell, but it exists. Like the clay vessel, it is hollow. As with that vessel, it is the void within that will ultimately grant fullness.
"Therefore the being of things is profitable, the non-being of things is serviceable."
Actinic light on a cerulean day illuminates the chunk of sky collapsing on my head. Words of a dead Chinese philosopher advise me to look deep within the emptiness of my heart to find a way back to life.
License as talisman. The hole in this plastic locket a reminder to embrace the void within, and without. I get in the car and drive off to home, relief flooding my system. "It is useful. My heart is useful. It will be filled." The words are loud in the cabin of the car.
The license rests serene in my shirt pocket. My heart is serene inside my chest. Patience, and it will be filled.
Quotes in italics are from Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Commercial Press Edition, Shanghai, 1929.
The clerk drops the hole punch on the scruffy laminate counter between us. It lands with a bang, making us both jump. Louder than seemed possible, overheard over the PA system announcements and background chatter of the crowded licensing service area. She apologizes, chuckling nervously as she arranges my paperwork. I assure her it is no big deal, happens sometimes, right?
What I don't say is that maybe now I don't mind the most recent chapter of my life going out with a bang. Much better than a whimper. Certainly a tenfold improvement on the chunking sound the punch made as it bullied its way through my old license.
She hands over to me a thin sheaf of paperwork. On top of the sheaf is the license. There is a hole, oval-shaped, near the top of the dull plastic card. The hole is off center. Fitting, it seems. Not that the hole in the license is of consequence. Not now. Not ever, unless I was dumb enough to use it again for any purpose where it would be scrutinized. So never. I am many things. Dumb is not one of them.
The clerk tells me in a voice unexpectedly cheerful for the DMV that I am all set. Everything proper, signed off, good to go. She points out the temporary license. My very own register receipt verifying my fitness to drive in my new state. I can expect the official validation of my existence to arrive in the mail in about ten business days. Wonderful. "How ever will I survive ten days of marginal personhood?" the snarky question asked in my head.
"Easy answer," says the shadow in the back of my head, "in the manner you survived months of marginality before pulling the reverse Oregon Trail maneuver that brought you here. Numb patience and the art of non-thinking."
No comfort to be found in that pronouncement. I step through the doorway of out into the bright, hot, muggy day. The humidity makes me breathe harder its so thick. I walk slow back to the car. The old license is in my left hand. I flip it back and forth between my fingers, a clumsy card shark maneuver. The license seems heavier. I have no idea what I will do with it. Unusable, unnecessary, undesired. Descriptions not lost on my weary soul and battered ego.
Bruisingly hot air spills out of the car upon opening the door. A veritable pizza oven on wheels. I wait momentarily to let the hot rush subside. No hurry. No place to go that requires my presence. Not yet, anyway. Standing in the searing light I'm staring at the empty car. No one in it except a passenger seat full of memories. The rest hot and empty.
Empty. Null. Void.
I glance at the license again. The punchout is a sharp relief shadow against my palm. Lao Tzu whispers in my ear sweet nothings about nothing.
"Moulding clay into a vessel, we find utility in its hollowness."
Sweat rolls down my face, stinging my eyes. Or so I tell myself. Maybe it is the pain in my heart causing the eyes to water.
"Cutting doors and windows for a house, we find the utility in its empty space."
My heart is a shell, but it exists. Like the clay vessel, it is hollow. As with that vessel, it is the void within that will ultimately grant fullness.
"Therefore the being of things is profitable, the non-being of things is serviceable."
Actinic light on a cerulean day illuminates the chunk of sky collapsing on my head. Words of a dead Chinese philosopher advise me to look deep within the emptiness of my heart to find a way back to life.
License as talisman. The hole in this plastic locket a reminder to embrace the void within, and without. I get in the car and drive off to home, relief flooding my system. "It is useful. My heart is useful. It will be filled." The words are loud in the cabin of the car.
The license rests serene in my shirt pocket. My heart is serene inside my chest. Patience, and it will be filled.
Quotes in italics are from Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching, Commercial Press Edition, Shanghai, 1929.
27 August 2017
In the Drowning Clouds
Her voice carried over the cacophony of ducks swarming the end of the marina. There were tears in it, raspy and liquid. At the sound of it, Jackie turned his head slightly to see from whom it came.
"I'm sorry," she had said following it with another sniffle. She was staring up at the youngish man standing in front of her. Jackie couldn't see his face, but could tell the jaw was working. The man had his arms hanging with a slight bent. No fists, exactly, but fingers flexing.
Jackie sipped the iced tea he held cradled in his hands. The woman raised her hands to her head, forming an inverted 'u' with with she swept her hair back to clutch it in a bun. Jackie's heart lurched. Goddamnit she was pretty he thought, never mind the tear tracks silvering her cheeks. Sputtering into his tea, he forced himself to look slightly past her so she would not think he was staring.
But he was. He long ago had mastered the art of observation without flagrancy.
The man said something to her Jackie couldn't catch. The wind was up and the ducks chose that moment to burst out quacking en masse, for all the world sounding like laughter. It took all of his self-control to not leap to the concrete wall and shoo them all off. In Jackie's mind, ducks had never been good at eavesdropping.
He risked another glance. Her mouth has dropped open, her arms following suit as they fell to her sides. Her expression balanced itself on that knife edge between shock and incredulous anger. Something in her eyes told Jackie she was feeling gutpunched with no way to respond. The man kept talking, hands moving a little faster now. They were, Jackie noticed, shaking quite a bit.
She shook her head. He heard something that sounded like "God's plan" and "for a purpose", but a powerboat was making its way up the marina cove. The low chugging of its motors blotted out more. Jackie took another sip of tea. She continued to stare at the man, crestfallen and fading. Her eyes were growing shinier.
"I'm sorry," she had said following it with another sniffle. She was staring up at the youngish man standing in front of her. Jackie couldn't see his face, but could tell the jaw was working. The man had his arms hanging with a slight bent. No fists, exactly, but fingers flexing.
Jackie sipped the iced tea he held cradled in his hands. The woman raised her hands to her head, forming an inverted 'u' with with she swept her hair back to clutch it in a bun. Jackie's heart lurched. Goddamnit she was pretty he thought, never mind the tear tracks silvering her cheeks. Sputtering into his tea, he forced himself to look slightly past her so she would not think he was staring.
But he was. He long ago had mastered the art of observation without flagrancy.
The man said something to her Jackie couldn't catch. The wind was up and the ducks chose that moment to burst out quacking en masse, for all the world sounding like laughter. It took all of his self-control to not leap to the concrete wall and shoo them all off. In Jackie's mind, ducks had never been good at eavesdropping.
He risked another glance. Her mouth has dropped open, her arms following suit as they fell to her sides. Her expression balanced itself on that knife edge between shock and incredulous anger. Something in her eyes told Jackie she was feeling gutpunched with no way to respond. The man kept talking, hands moving a little faster now. They were, Jackie noticed, shaking quite a bit.
She shook her head. He heard something that sounded like "God's plan" and "for a purpose", but a powerboat was making its way up the marina cove. The low chugging of its motors blotted out more. Jackie took another sip of tea. She continued to stare at the man, crestfallen and fading. Her eyes were growing shinier.
Little crescents of liquid welled up at the bottoms. She shook her head in response to whatever the man was saying. Dark blots spattered her blouse. Jackie instinctively reached to his shirt pocket thinking to grab a tissue, then realized how odd that might appear if she noticed. He kept his hand going and casually brushed back his hair.
The sky was growing heavy. Clouds the color of bright lead rolled in carrying a faint scent of rain and ozone. The water in the cove had a miniature chop on it, wavelets caroming back and forth between the walls. The powerboat had gone silent. Two men were securing it to pilings across the cove, tying up in front of the dockside bar where some intrepid souls appeared to be getting a head start on the weekend. Full tables festooned with bottles and glasses.
Jackie swallowed more tea. Looking over the woman's shoulder, he felt a pang and flutter of zombie memories. His drinking days were over, too bad he couldn't quite forget. The look of anguish on her face had him wishing he could crack the seal in a search for the cure for pain.
She was crying openly now, but quiet. He heard the wet intake of breath as a counterpoint to the laughter of the ducks. Her head swept back and forth. Twisting lips mouthing "no, no, no" as her companion continued to talk. The man reached out and took her by the upper arms. The woman had raised her face to the man. The expression on her face was cryptic. Jackie saw anger, mixed with a bit of fear.
Jackie stood up, setting his cup down on the concrete wall of the planter. The situation gave him a shiver of dread. He hoped they were just arguing, but one could never be sure. All the time he spent down here, among the tourists and the locals strolling blithely eating their ice cream or fiddling with cameras, he had witnessed too many breakups and temper tantrums. People could be so ugly to each other, and Jackie wished he could unwind them all.
The woman slapped the man's hands away from her arms. The man stepped back half a pace, genuinely shocked Jackie could see now as he moved closer to the two. The woman's eyes blazed as she loudly said "Then go. Just go! Maybe you can numb yourself with that bullshit, but I can't. I won't!"
Jackie felt the anger radiating off of her, even at distance. The man took another step back as if the anger was a force field. Jackie saw now that the man had been crying too. Flushed cheeks and red eyes bordered by a drawn and haggard face. He looked tired in the bone, while she stood there, hands on hips with tears drying up on her face and glaring.
Turning around, he saw the woman had collapsed onto a nearby bench. She sat staring straight ahead while cradling her elbows in her hands. The pain was near visible, magnetic, a corona of grief in Jackie's eyes. He walked slowly as a hunter trying not to scare off quarry. At the end of the bench, he stopped.
Magda turned to look at him. Gray eyes clear as crystal and hardened with pain. She blinked slowly. Behind the hardness flickered a low curiosity. Jackie swallowed before speaking.
"I'm...sorry. So sorry. I overheard..."
She looked at him again, tears running slowly down her face. At his words, her eyes softened.
The sky was growing heavy. Clouds the color of bright lead rolled in carrying a faint scent of rain and ozone. The water in the cove had a miniature chop on it, wavelets caroming back and forth between the walls. The powerboat had gone silent. Two men were securing it to pilings across the cove, tying up in front of the dockside bar where some intrepid souls appeared to be getting a head start on the weekend. Full tables festooned with bottles and glasses.
Jackie swallowed more tea. Looking over the woman's shoulder, he felt a pang and flutter of zombie memories. His drinking days were over, too bad he couldn't quite forget. The look of anguish on her face had him wishing he could crack the seal in a search for the cure for pain.
She was crying openly now, but quiet. He heard the wet intake of breath as a counterpoint to the laughter of the ducks. Her head swept back and forth. Twisting lips mouthing "no, no, no" as her companion continued to talk. The man reached out and took her by the upper arms. The woman had raised her face to the man. The expression on her face was cryptic. Jackie saw anger, mixed with a bit of fear.
Jackie stood up, setting his cup down on the concrete wall of the planter. The situation gave him a shiver of dread. He hoped they were just arguing, but one could never be sure. All the time he spent down here, among the tourists and the locals strolling blithely eating their ice cream or fiddling with cameras, he had witnessed too many breakups and temper tantrums. People could be so ugly to each other, and Jackie wished he could unwind them all.
The woman slapped the man's hands away from her arms. The man stepped back half a pace, genuinely shocked Jackie could see now as he moved closer to the two. The woman's eyes blazed as she loudly said "Then go. Just go! Maybe you can numb yourself with that bullshit, but I can't. I won't!"
Jackie felt the anger radiating off of her, even at distance. The man took another step back as if the anger was a force field. Jackie saw now that the man had been crying too. Flushed cheeks and red eyes bordered by a drawn and haggard face. He looked tired in the bone, while she stood there, hands on hips with tears drying up on her face and glaring.
He turned away from her and towards Jackie, looking right through him. The man began walking back up towards the head of the cove. His face suddenly sagged and he stopped walking. Turning back to the woman, not five feet away from Jackie, he nearly shouted at her.
"Don't you see, Magda? Don't you see that you are broken? Why don't you believe me when I say that it is in your brokenness that God often uses you the most!"
Jackie looked from the man to Magda. He made no attempt now to hide the fact that he was watching. Few others appeared to notice, only a few side glances from the tourists and boat crews. The look on Magda's face transformed from hard to furious. She was shaking when she shouted.
"Adam, any God that would let our babies die for being born too early has no right to use me for anything! Why don't you see THAT?"
Passers-by stopped, stunned at what they just heard. Jackie froze, dizzy. He could not believe his ears. Memories rushing out of the dark sump in the bottom of his mind. Nightmare glimpses of the machines failing his own children, tiny, frail, too sick to live. He swallowed bile past the bulge in his throat and forced himself to look to Adam.
Adam stood, swaying as if he were about to faint. He was panting. He shook his head, realizing he was now the center of attention. His mouth open and closed, a beached fish on the hot bricks of the promenade. An anguished groan burst forth, then he spun on his left heel and hurriedly walked away from the scene. Jackie watched his back recede up the hill and into the crowd milling about at the foot of Main Street. The small knot of onlookers dispersed, perhaps plunging back into their own thoughts of crabs and beer.
Turning around, he saw the woman had collapsed onto a nearby bench. She sat staring straight ahead while cradling her elbows in her hands. The pain was near visible, magnetic, a corona of grief in Jackie's eyes. He walked slowly as a hunter trying not to scare off quarry. At the end of the bench, he stopped.
Magda turned to look at him. Gray eyes clear as crystal and hardened with pain. She blinked slowly. Behind the hardness flickered a low curiosity. Jackie swallowed before speaking.
"I'm...sorry. So sorry. I overheard..."
She looked at him again, tears running slowly down her face. At his words, her eyes softened.
"It's okay, thank you. For being sorry."
There was a heartbeat or two of silence. Magda looked up the street, eyes narrowing. Jackie turned to look, and could see Adam about to turn a corner and go out of sight.
Magda said, low and hoarse, "I just wish he was, too." She leaned her head back, eyes closed, letting a deep sigh rush from her lungs. Her eyes opened. She stared up into the darkening clouds and said "And I wish He was, too."
The emphatic weariness and pain in her voice jolted Jackie. He looked up, following her gaze. The clouds roiled and glowered, rain began to fall in fat drops. He would not swear to it, but for a split second he thought he saw a face vanishing back into the pewter mist of the downpour.
He looked back down. Magda sat there, shivering, blank-eyed. From his back pocket he took out and unfurled the umbrella he had been carrying. "May I join you?"
She nodded. He sat. Drops beat a ragged tattoo on the umbrella as they both searched the sky, looking for that face. Behind them, the ducks cackled and quacked, laughing in spite of the rain.
15 August 2017
Be Proud You're A Rebel?
This is a bit of a long one, but it could not wait. It contains some words that are hurtful demanded by context. I submitted a version of this in December 2016, in response to "We Are Bitter, No. 2: From 2016 Forward," an essay (linked here) by Chuck Reece, editor-in-chief of The Bitter Southerner. The Bitter Southerner is a fine online magazine about the South and things Southern, in its myths, its realities, and its futures. I did not hear back from The BS (as it is affectionately referred to), but with the horrible events that occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia over August 11th and 12th, I felt compelled to give it another turn in the light. It has been edited to take into account those recent events.
I was born and raised in southeastern Virginia, Portsmouth to be exact. I went to college at Virginia Tech, up in the Blue Ridge mountains in Blacksburg. Upon graduation, I wound up in Baltimore, Maryland where I stayed for over twenty years to find myself with an ex-wife, a daughter I adore, and probably nowhere to go from there. This before life got really crazy and I ended up in love again and in Kansas, where I lived until July 2017. Things did not work out in the heartland, and I moved myself back to Maryland, this time to the city of Annapolis.
To talk about a new South, a new America, we have to discuss the ugly, nasty truths of the past. The last election cycle in particular made everyone –hopefully, everyone—look inward to reexamine their consciences and outward to reexamine the cultural matrix to which they are beholden. I know I did.
To my shame, racism and bigotry were part of my upbringing. It never reached the magnitude of joining the KKK or actively seeking out the “others” for abuse and belittlement, but it was there. It was casually woven into the fabric of our daily lives. We, including myself, had no qualms about telling ‘nigger’ jokes or using it to say “those niggers” in the same way that more enlightened people would say “those folks.” You would hear stuff like that among white peers at the same time you wouldn’t actually say it to someone’s brown face.
The same shameful treatment was applied to Hispanics, Middle Easterners, Asians, the disabled, and LGBTQ folks. Equal opportunity bigotry, no doubt. I often felt uncomfortable spewing such things, but it never bothered me enough to stop myself or call out others when they did. I let myself be misled because I did not think to question it.
That is until the day I had a jarring break with the culture in which I was embedded. My awakening to what was really going on around me. An occurrence I will never forget happened in front of me as I walked into a shopping mall in my hometown. Ahead of me were two white men, appearing to be in their 20’s. Bearded and clad in a fairly typical set of work clothes that almost could have been our city’s uniform, they reached the door just as a little African-American girl was coming out.
She was probably no more than about four or five years old, carrying a toy and pushing on the door while her mother followed behind. The girl paused in the doorway which momentarily blocked traffic. Just as I came up behind the two men, I heard one of them snarl at the girl “Get outta the way, you little nigger!”
Thunderstruck is too mild to describe what I felt. I stopped while the two men pushed rudely past the girl and into the mall. To her credit, the girl did not seem to notice the slur hurled at her. But I am sure her mother heard it, because she hustled the child out the door much faster than you would expect for something so casual as a shopping trip. A few steps into the building, I had to stop a moment to collect myself.
I felt sick. A churning stomach and a racing heart catalyzed by the brush with violence and hate I witnessed. I had no understanding. How could that be? The girl was being a child, no bother to anyone, and yet these men saw fit to verbally abuse her because of her skin color? The illogic and injustice of it made my head spin. It sank in that this was how a lot of society, my society, operated, hurting others with thoughtless cruelty because they could get away with it, backed up as it was with structural and institutional racism.
The first of many switches flipped that night. I went home uneasy and sad while trying to make sense of the loathsome behavior I witnessed. It sparked the first of many years (in my teens then, in my 50’s now) of introspection and inquiry into the causes of such bad behavior and how to eliminate it in myself. I started turning a skeptical eye towards society. Intellectual laziness and lack of awareness had led me down a slippery, dead-end path. I began to question things, starting off with how I had allowed others to do my thinking for me.
I felt ashamed of the Southern way of life in which I lived. The people around me began to sound backwards. My own voice started to trouble me because I realized I did have a drawl, even if it wasn’t as deeply twangy as some of my friends and relatives. Arriving at college, I actively sought to drop the accent and even leave behind certain figures of speech. I was around a lot of different people in that time, and was self-conscious about being considered too “Southern.”
I succeeded, to a degree. In my early years out of school, working for what ended up being about 20 years in Maryland, many of my co-workers seemed mildly surprised to find out I was from Virginia, because I did not sound particularly Southern. I even lost my taste for sweet tea, if you can imagine that! The net result was that slowly over time my roots loosened their grip on the soil from which they sprang. I became untethered from the past in such a way that I cast off the prejudices I despised but forgot to hold on to some of the good things I loved.
As the years unfolded I thought more and more of myself as American, but without regional identity. I was haunted by the notion that I was missing something that I could not put my finger on. I cannot tell you exactly when my search began to find what I lacked. But I can tell you my primary research medium was food. I have always been a trencherman, and learning about myself through cooking and eating foods from my birth region was a natural fit even if I was not fully cognizant of why I wished to do so.
Smithfield ham. Cornbread and grits. Fried chicken and collard greens. Some things I loved to eat and some things I thought I could happily do without now became more important than ever. Mail-order sorghum even made an appearance or two in my house. An old cast-iron skillet of my maternal grandmother’s fell into my hands as an inheritance when she passed away. It took me years to understand the great gift that skillet was, one that I still hope to live up to when I cook.
The point is that each dab of sorghum and butter on a biscuit, each skillet of cornbread, each forkful of collard greens I washed down with my (unsweet) tea began to fill me up in ways beyond the mere existence of calories in the belly. It all filled me up with home. The sense of dislocation I dragged around for years slipped away and the roots began to push themselves back into the dirt of my creation. There was an eagerness to share with others the Southern boy that I was and am. My adventures in cooking also taught me history as a spectrum, and food as a bridge to others.
This eagerness and comfort grew in the years between my divorce, subsequent relocation to the Midwest, and the travesty of the 2016 election year. My sense of well-being took a big hit as I watched the ugliness spewing out of the mouths of our President-elect and his repugnant followers. Who could pay attention to the news cycle and not be shocked and upset by the flood of bigotry bearing down on us as a nation?
Memories started creeping back in. Flashbacks to the times as a teenager when I paraded a Confederate flag around the neighborhood because I thought it was cool. Embarrassment at having participated in Civil War reenactments, on the side of the South of course, because I wanted to be a rebel. Shame welled up when I recalled telling and laughing at ‘spear chucker’ jokes, thoroughly thoughtless and disrespectful of the African-Americans I personally knew and liked at school. Waves of regret when I remembered that little girl at the mall and how I lacked courage to stand up to racist bullies and call them out on their vileness.
I was young, once, and stupid.
So it was when the election results were announced that I felt horrible for Americans in general and Southerners in particular. All this time having gone by, the history under our collective belts, and we have learned not enough to elect such a terrible representative of the American ideal?
Watching the news about racists and neo-Nazis marching Charlottesville stirred up the muck again. The horrific act of murder we witnessed in that car plowing into a group of marchers who had taken upon themselves the hard work of opposing hatred, bigotry, and evil. A young woman who stood up for many good things killed by a man who took hatred and spite to obscene levels: this is the malignant fruit falling from trees planted long ago.
Hearing the president generically condemn the violence, with the morally bankrupt stance of "many sides" being at fault, it hit me hard that we could have done so much better. We have to do better, be better . For the sake of all of us, we are going to have to oppose the white nationalist agenda of hatred, discrimination, and violence.
In the South, whether you live there or carry it in your heart (as I do) and in America in general, we have to learn to talk about Confederate flags without waving them or using them as tools of fear and oppression. We have to stop fetishizing statues of deeply flawed, sometimes evil people. We have to understand we can move into the future without necessarily burying our past, but that future means inviting everyone to the table and being honest in our conversations with our fellow Americans. Claiming superiority because of skin color and heritage is a desperately weak gambit to demand participation in the ideal of America. It only shines a bitter light on the institutional racism built into our society.
Difficult work is needed to determine who we want to be as Americans moving into the future. The arc of history is pretty clear on that score. We carry the moral imperative to resist hatred and bigotry wherever we encounter it. I learned that lesson long ago, acknowledging my personal shame in these matters and opening my mind and heart to cast out the hate I had thoughtlessly absorbed. After Charlottesville, it is clear that many white Americans have not done the same. We cannot avert our eyes, stifle our voices, shut our ears. We have bridges to build, not burn, if we claim to be Americans.
I was born and raised in southeastern Virginia, Portsmouth to be exact. I went to college at Virginia Tech, up in the Blue Ridge mountains in Blacksburg. Upon graduation, I wound up in Baltimore, Maryland where I stayed for over twenty years to find myself with an ex-wife, a daughter I adore, and probably nowhere to go from there. This before life got really crazy and I ended up in love again and in Kansas, where I lived until July 2017. Things did not work out in the heartland, and I moved myself back to Maryland, this time to the city of Annapolis.
To talk about a new South, a new America, we have to discuss the ugly, nasty truths of the past. The last election cycle in particular made everyone –hopefully, everyone—look inward to reexamine their consciences and outward to reexamine the cultural matrix to which they are beholden. I know I did.
To my shame, racism and bigotry were part of my upbringing. It never reached the magnitude of joining the KKK or actively seeking out the “others” for abuse and belittlement, but it was there. It was casually woven into the fabric of our daily lives. We, including myself, had no qualms about telling ‘nigger’ jokes or using it to say “those niggers” in the same way that more enlightened people would say “those folks.” You would hear stuff like that among white peers at the same time you wouldn’t actually say it to someone’s brown face.
The same shameful treatment was applied to Hispanics, Middle Easterners, Asians, the disabled, and LGBTQ folks. Equal opportunity bigotry, no doubt. I often felt uncomfortable spewing such things, but it never bothered me enough to stop myself or call out others when they did. I let myself be misled because I did not think to question it.
That is until the day I had a jarring break with the culture in which I was embedded. My awakening to what was really going on around me. An occurrence I will never forget happened in front of me as I walked into a shopping mall in my hometown. Ahead of me were two white men, appearing to be in their 20’s. Bearded and clad in a fairly typical set of work clothes that almost could have been our city’s uniform, they reached the door just as a little African-American girl was coming out.
She was probably no more than about four or five years old, carrying a toy and pushing on the door while her mother followed behind. The girl paused in the doorway which momentarily blocked traffic. Just as I came up behind the two men, I heard one of them snarl at the girl “Get outta the way, you little nigger!”
Thunderstruck is too mild to describe what I felt. I stopped while the two men pushed rudely past the girl and into the mall. To her credit, the girl did not seem to notice the slur hurled at her. But I am sure her mother heard it, because she hustled the child out the door much faster than you would expect for something so casual as a shopping trip. A few steps into the building, I had to stop a moment to collect myself.
I felt sick. A churning stomach and a racing heart catalyzed by the brush with violence and hate I witnessed. I had no understanding. How could that be? The girl was being a child, no bother to anyone, and yet these men saw fit to verbally abuse her because of her skin color? The illogic and injustice of it made my head spin. It sank in that this was how a lot of society, my society, operated, hurting others with thoughtless cruelty because they could get away with it, backed up as it was with structural and institutional racism.
The first of many switches flipped that night. I went home uneasy and sad while trying to make sense of the loathsome behavior I witnessed. It sparked the first of many years (in my teens then, in my 50’s now) of introspection and inquiry into the causes of such bad behavior and how to eliminate it in myself. I started turning a skeptical eye towards society. Intellectual laziness and lack of awareness had led me down a slippery, dead-end path. I began to question things, starting off with how I had allowed others to do my thinking for me.
I felt ashamed of the Southern way of life in which I lived. The people around me began to sound backwards. My own voice started to trouble me because I realized I did have a drawl, even if it wasn’t as deeply twangy as some of my friends and relatives. Arriving at college, I actively sought to drop the accent and even leave behind certain figures of speech. I was around a lot of different people in that time, and was self-conscious about being considered too “Southern.”
I succeeded, to a degree. In my early years out of school, working for what ended up being about 20 years in Maryland, many of my co-workers seemed mildly surprised to find out I was from Virginia, because I did not sound particularly Southern. I even lost my taste for sweet tea, if you can imagine that! The net result was that slowly over time my roots loosened their grip on the soil from which they sprang. I became untethered from the past in such a way that I cast off the prejudices I despised but forgot to hold on to some of the good things I loved.
As the years unfolded I thought more and more of myself as American, but without regional identity. I was haunted by the notion that I was missing something that I could not put my finger on. I cannot tell you exactly when my search began to find what I lacked. But I can tell you my primary research medium was food. I have always been a trencherman, and learning about myself through cooking and eating foods from my birth region was a natural fit even if I was not fully cognizant of why I wished to do so.
Smithfield ham. Cornbread and grits. Fried chicken and collard greens. Some things I loved to eat and some things I thought I could happily do without now became more important than ever. Mail-order sorghum even made an appearance or two in my house. An old cast-iron skillet of my maternal grandmother’s fell into my hands as an inheritance when she passed away. It took me years to understand the great gift that skillet was, one that I still hope to live up to when I cook.
The point is that each dab of sorghum and butter on a biscuit, each skillet of cornbread, each forkful of collard greens I washed down with my (unsweet) tea began to fill me up in ways beyond the mere existence of calories in the belly. It all filled me up with home. The sense of dislocation I dragged around for years slipped away and the roots began to push themselves back into the dirt of my creation. There was an eagerness to share with others the Southern boy that I was and am. My adventures in cooking also taught me history as a spectrum, and food as a bridge to others.
This eagerness and comfort grew in the years between my divorce, subsequent relocation to the Midwest, and the travesty of the 2016 election year. My sense of well-being took a big hit as I watched the ugliness spewing out of the mouths of our President-elect and his repugnant followers. Who could pay attention to the news cycle and not be shocked and upset by the flood of bigotry bearing down on us as a nation?
Memories started creeping back in. Flashbacks to the times as a teenager when I paraded a Confederate flag around the neighborhood because I thought it was cool. Embarrassment at having participated in Civil War reenactments, on the side of the South of course, because I wanted to be a rebel. Shame welled up when I recalled telling and laughing at ‘spear chucker’ jokes, thoroughly thoughtless and disrespectful of the African-Americans I personally knew and liked at school. Waves of regret when I remembered that little girl at the mall and how I lacked courage to stand up to racist bullies and call them out on their vileness.
I was young, once, and stupid.
So it was when the election results were announced that I felt horrible for Americans in general and Southerners in particular. All this time having gone by, the history under our collective belts, and we have learned not enough to elect such a terrible representative of the American ideal?
Watching the news about racists and neo-Nazis marching Charlottesville stirred up the muck again. The horrific act of murder we witnessed in that car plowing into a group of marchers who had taken upon themselves the hard work of opposing hatred, bigotry, and evil. A young woman who stood up for many good things killed by a man who took hatred and spite to obscene levels: this is the malignant fruit falling from trees planted long ago.
Hearing the president generically condemn the violence, with the morally bankrupt stance of "many sides" being at fault, it hit me hard that we could have done so much better. We have to do better, be better . For the sake of all of us, we are going to have to oppose the white nationalist agenda of hatred, discrimination, and violence.
In the South, whether you live there or carry it in your heart (as I do) and in America in general, we have to learn to talk about Confederate flags without waving them or using them as tools of fear and oppression. We have to stop fetishizing statues of deeply flawed, sometimes evil people. We have to understand we can move into the future without necessarily burying our past, but that future means inviting everyone to the table and being honest in our conversations with our fellow Americans. Claiming superiority because of skin color and heritage is a desperately weak gambit to demand participation in the ideal of America. It only shines a bitter light on the institutional racism built into our society.
Difficult work is needed to determine who we want to be as Americans moving into the future. The arc of history is pretty clear on that score. We carry the moral imperative to resist hatred and bigotry wherever we encounter it. I learned that lesson long ago, acknowledging my personal shame in these matters and opening my mind and heart to cast out the hate I had thoughtlessly absorbed. After Charlottesville, it is clear that many white Americans have not done the same. We cannot avert our eyes, stifle our voices, shut our ears. We have bridges to build, not burn, if we claim to be Americans.
07 August 2017
The Ruins of the Empire Shall Be Dusted with Gold
So it has come to this, staring down the barrel of the gun that is my life. Days on which I cannot be bothered to spend dinner money, such as this one, I eat hunched over a paper plate. Clutched in one hand is a plastic fork. It is gilded. Plastic, of course, but a welcome suspension of disbelief makes it an artifact of the dreams of Spanish kings.
Golden forks, like the spoons and knives purchased together, were part of a cheeky joke shared with my daughter. We had to eat with something in the last days of my Midwestern empire. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all amongst the ruins. She is gone back to her mother. I sit alone and swallow bitter stones. The setting sun slats through the patio door casting shadows on a kingdom returned to dust.
According to the Persian poet Rumi, "Love is the bridge between you and everything." A pity. My eyes, my heart, all full of smoke and cinders from the burning. I see no bridges.
Except the two that fell out of a nightstand that made the eastward trek with me. The drawer slid open while tilting the stand into place. Two bridges in the shape of two letters I forgot were in my possession. They crossed a river of memory that should have dried up years ago.
I stare at the letters laying on the table. Zombie letters in a sense. They were never sent, but they did arrive. They lay in ambush while moving that bedside table. I chew with the mien of a cow. Food as cud in my mouth, tasting of what, I do not know.
Sunlight slants through an opening in the leaves outside the windows, by trick of circumstance landing as a spotlight on the letters. The heat brings out a faint musty aroma. Breathing it in brings on a flashback to the libraries in which I buried myself as a youth.
This is the smell of aging paper and daydreams that took me out of myself. The imp of reason residing in my head tells me the odor is simply from having been stored away so long. The imp of my heart feels differently, tersely replying that the scent is of aging memory and burning hearts.
Food sticks in my throat. A hurried gulp of iced tea pushes it down past the lump. The letters were addressed, front and back. The envelopes themselves toothy wrappers that embodied the artist I believed I was when the letters were written. The stamps were leftover from the Christmas season. The cat stares at me while I laugh loudly at the images of "Madonna and Child" in the heat of the summer.
Fading light paints the apartment with soft patches of gold-tinged dusk. The sun is behind the trees now. I can see swatches of its glow through the gaps in the blinds. In the light of the dining room chandelier the letters acquire a hue that reminds me of wedding bands. White gold or some such appellation. They remain unopened.
The letters I moved to my nightstand. A few hours would pass before they called again for my attention. Covers turned back, alarm set, the bedside lamp encircled the letters in a gauzy pool of pale gold light thrown off through a yellowed shade. The lamp was another castaway rejoined with its master in the move. Shaking hands reached out to take up the letters.
Without a knife, I resorted to using a car key to open the envelopes. The tearing was remarkably precise. It should be noted that the envelopes were also numbered, #1 and #2. Apparently, I must have felt that one was insufficient at the time. That or my heart must have been overflowing as the towers fell around me.
The date was April 14, 2010.
Hand to mouth I perched on the bedside and read the outpourings of an emperor who was witnessing the earth open up to swallow his domain whole, under roiling clouds of ashes and dust. The frantic begging of a heart desperate not to lose something which made it whole. It was so long ago, and the shock made it as yesterday.
I read the letters through twice, almost refusing to believe that it was my hand that put ink to page. Evidence has its own agenda and it was not to assuage my fractured heart. History repeats itself, the earth casts up shards of the broken past. In my hands I held their weight.
Those letters were never sent. Desperation is no guarantor of wish fulfillment, and I knew that when I wrote them. Perhaps the head knew better when it tucked those letters in the nightstand, to be forgotten until the wheel turned to the new old futures unfurling before sore, astonished eyes.
I put the letters back in their respective envelopes and wiped my face. There are no words up to the task of offering comfort to a man deposed his second time as emperor, and who in total three times suffered the demise of his crown. Victim of neither abdication nor death, but dethroned by banishment from the realm. It is an honor of dubious distinction that tears will not expunge.
Before I could regroup to sleep my mind insisted on an attempt at distraction by mindless scrolling through the internet. This as if a good meme or pictures of cats could revitalize my bloodline. Just before I turned out the lights I stumbled across a video of Motörhead, of all bands, performing a cover of David Bowie's "Heroes."
I watched it to the end. Heroes. We could be heroes yet I heard no songs of Roland played for myself. The light I turned off, the gold fading behind eyelids sailing a hot and salty sea. I was an emperor, thrice before, and now not even a hero just for one day. I fell asleep to dream of a crown that surely must be buried somewhere in the gilded ruins of the empires of my heart. Would that my head be heavy with it.
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