Rest a moment from the frenetic chaos we have made our daily lives. Excuse yourself from the binge-purge cycle of fear then outrage. We are meant to be more than only this. Look up.
Look Up
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Untitled Thing Inspired by If 6 Was 9
I’m not sure exactly what this piece is. The impulse came while driving home from the grocery listening to Jimi Hendrix’s “If 6 Was 9”. I wanted to write a thing that moves like that song. Alternating bruising punch with psychedelic caress. This isn’t the thing but it has some of the shape of the thing.
***
That first night after her burial is the longest night of your life. You are meant to be putting the past behind you, placing things in their proper order, making room for the new normal. That first night becomes your entire life. It never actually ends, just stretches more and more thin until the shell of it finally cracks and morning rushes out in a bloody smear of light.
You don’t sleep. Every where you look is a place she isn’t, a place she is meant to be.
Evelyn snores in the next room, coiled cozily in oblivion. She is too young to need the help of sleeping pills but the doctor gave them anyway, pressed her gently into the soft, dreamless slumber beyond grief.
You don’t take the pills. You want to keep your wits or at least keep watch for them in hopes those wits might return. This night is the rest of your life.
You envy Evelyn, her youth, her future. She still has the illusion of a long, happy life ahead. Perhaps she has not yet sensed the thing you now know that life is short and brittle and brutally brief.
You looked through the pictures in the photo albums, the photos on your laptop and phone. How all those moments seemed enough to fill a endlessly long lifetime but now seem to have gone screaming by. What had seemed long years, decades now seem a mere piffle of days. There is nothing for it but to revisit. Each picture a moment gone, a memory you could visit but only as a guest knocking on the door of your neighbor’s house. The door opens. You are welcome to come inside but you can’t really get comfortable. You don’t really belong. This place is not your place even though it is close to where you live. The past, even your own happy past, is a friendly neighbor’s home. You are welcome to visit anytime but you cannot stay.
That first night is the longest night and you mark time by walking the floor. Checking the windows and the doors. Keeping all the lights turned on, wondering how to keep all that darkness outside from getting in. You do not check the clocks. The clocks are all liars. They measure it out in steady increments. The ticks. The tocks. The clocks pretend time is a constant, steady thing but now you know it is not. Time is capricious. The past moves quick. Now drags slowly by. The future is a mote of dust right in front of your face. Right in front of your face. A moment. Then another. Perhaps another. That’s all there is.
Last Smoke | Flash Fiction
“Hand me a cigarette, will ya?”
“I don’t smoke anymore,” he tells her, that inscrutable smile of his. Mocking her.
“Bullshit. Hand over.”
“For real. Not joking.” He turns away from the view to show her his serious, not-joking face. Cars and buses and bikes and people walking dogs bustle below. They stand alone at the rooftop, the roofline of the world, not drinking, not smoking. Contemplating the end of the world.
It wouldn’t be much more than one step to it all now. One committed step and the quick tug of gravity. Not smoking. Not drinking. Contemplating the end of the world.
“Since when did you give up smoking?”
“Since last year. Those things will kill you.”
It was a stupid thing to say but now it was said and he couldn’t keep the inscrutable smile from breaking into ironic parody. All of the TVs in the apartments beneath them tuned to the Fox News, the CNN, the MSNBC. All counting down the missile exchange with hysterical enthusiasm. It was the last day on earth but it would be the best ratings day ever. Everyone watching. No one able to look away. Except the two alone on the roof of the midtown apartment building surrounded by the midtown apartment buildings and banks and restaurants and coffee shops. The restaurants and coffee shops were full. It was, at last, to be the end of the world, but no one could be bothered to interrupt their meal, their last lingering cup of joe. The people below ate and drank and laughed with the languid leisure of another age. They did not belong to this time, this place. These people were already dead. They just did not know it. They couldn’t see. Or seeing, they could not care.
She nods. “Yeah. Those things will kill you. Not fast enough.”
He laughed. “Yeah. A slow motion execution. One puff at a time.”
“How much time you think we’ve got?”
He watches the far horizon. The city spreads in every direction. He cannot look and find a place that is not the city. Hard to imagine the fiery stitch of missile reaching in like fingers. But they were on their way.
“Minutes.”
She nods again. “Not even one cigarette?” she says, watching him with those steady, eager eyes. He had fallen in love with that look of hers before, that expression of naked need, that bald hunger. She catches his gaze and, for a moment, he can’t remember why they aren’t together anymore.
“Why did we break up?” he asks her.
“You said you needed space.”
“Ah yes. That’s right. Space,” he recalls.
“Was it worth it?”
He shrugs. Is anything really worth it? But instead he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a single, crooked cigarette. “My last,” he tells her, handing it over. “For emergencies.”
She takes the cigarette, pushes it between her lips. “I think this qualifies.”
She tries to light the cigarette with trembling hands but the flame is restless and will not catch.
“Me too,” he says, taking the lighter from her to steady her hands. The cigarette catches and releases its small bitter breath.
She drags a few and offers the rest to back to him. “One last time?” she asks.
He studies her face for a hint of mockery or shame or uncertainty. There’s only that look of need, that hunger which is life.
“I’d like that very much.”
He takes the cigarette. Pulls a few drags. Coughs a little. It is a vice his body has almost forgotten but quickly remembers.
He surveys the city one last time. It is mid afternoon but in his mind the sun is already sinking low.
He smokes it down, hands it back to her. She takes the last drag, flicks the butt off the roof. They don’t watch it fall.
“Let’s go inside,” he says and takes her hand.
“One last time.” She smiles and lets herself be guided to the stairs.
They walk unhurried though there is so little time to waste. So little time for their bodies to remember all those things they thought had been forgotten.
Inspired by Daily Prompt: Talisman
What’s White Privilege?
For much of today I kept one eye on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica debacle. I had planned to write tonight about Facebook, how my use of the platform has changed and rules for putting social media into its proper place.
For my morning commute, I listened to a podcast speculate at length about whether or not the president is about to fire Robert Mueller. It was decided that the president appears more likely to fire Mueller than he was a few weeks ago but is still not very likely to fire Mueller after all unless he actually does. The rest of the podcast was devoted to what would happen if the president did, after all, fire Mueller.
I glanced at headlines about another school shooting, this time in Great Falls, Maryland.
This all happened today. But for the most part, I was thinking about Facebook/Cambridge Analytica and my social media hot take.
Meanwhile, people of color in Austin, Texas are finding bombs on their front porch. They are stepping on trip wires. Boxes are exploding on Fed Ex conveyor belts. It was almost eight o’clock before I heard about the most recent explosion and really thought about it.
That’s white privilege.
Speed Reading: A (Hoped For) Superpower
If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
Whenever people ask me this question, I usually run down the traditional pros and cons of invisibility versus flying versus mind reading but the honest, actual truth is I’d choose speed reading. I would rather read three times faster than I do now (with complete recall and undiminished joy) than prowl forbidden hallways unseen beneath a Cloak of Invisibility or leap tall buildings in a single bound or peer inside the unguarded mind of friends and foes.
With the talent of speed reading, I could plow through my personal bookshelves and liberate the unread volumes from their years of dusty confinement. I could traverse my library’s bookshelves, first reading everything that interested me from the new book shelves before systematically attacking the circulating stacks in Library of Congress Classification order. First: philosophy, psychology and religion. Then: World and American History. Then: Geography and Anthropology. Next: Political science, law, education, music, fine art, language and literature, science, medicine and technology. I would weave from topic to topic, bouncing from print text to eBook and back again, setting each discipline atop the other like a foundation of well-hewn bricks. When I had digested the entire collection, I would end my journey in the Zs, which is where Library of Congress places Bibliography, or Books about Books. And I would take extravagant notes until my Goodreads account was bursting with To Read titles. And my college would have to hire two additional interlibrary loan clerks to manage the volume of my requests.
The PDF app on my iPad would rejoice whenever I pushed an article there because, at last, articles saved for eventual reading would be read. And my Pocket app for mobile would be a well-oiled machine — articles in, articles read.
It would be a joy.
And so, try to imagine the scene when I came home from work today and my wife said, “Do you want to sign up for this summer speed reading class? They meet for two hours every Monday evening in June. Its kind of expensive, but we can figure it out if you want to give it a try.”
Yes!
When the call center guy at registration asked about my goals for the program, I told him I read about 20 books each year but want to read more. My dad’s dad took a speed reading class many years ago and eventually came to read a book a day. I know because my grandfather let me scavenge his basement mounds of mass-market paperbacks. That’s where I found out about Clive Barker and Dean Koontz and Robert R. McCammon.
And so, I signed up for summer speed reading classes with the University of Tennessee non-credit program. I gave the call center guy at registration my credit card number and fully expect to gain an incredible superpower in return. I always look forward to summer but this summer is going to be extra nerdtastic. You can have your fantasies about invisibility or flying or mind-reading. I will be gaining an actual super power. I’ll be learning how to read. By August I expect to be making my way through the Top 100 Lists of the Top 100 Books About x.
And yes. You’ll be most welcome to peruse my basement.
Saturday night poem.
This is a night I wish to write poetry — loud, brash, unrhyming poems that stick sideways inside your head and make you walk around shaking like a dog, trying to jar loose that cockeyed idea that did not start with you but lodged in and got dressed up in your own life, became your own words.
A poem like home invasion — sudden, brutal, unflinching — arriving like a stranger in the dark unlocked hallway of your home. Unsmiling. Dishonest. Up to no good.
A poem could be that one saving shove back away from the subway tracks where you had stood contemplating. Your reverie interrupted by the rude press of unseen hands and then gone, leaving you there to wonder how close you might actually have come to stepping down while the night’s last train goes barreling by.
Poems like coffee taken black too late at night, a sinister brew of dreams which you will imbibe and quickly forget, except for one phrase that reaches out and scalds your gullet, scorching as you swallow, all the way down.
Poems dumped like a box of cockroaches, scurry and scatter everywhere, finding the cracks, the crannies, all the tiny, secret places of your life you pretend are not there. Places even the finest brushes cannot reach. Places inside yourself which you can never get clean.
Ah. Here comes a poem, approaching like the evening’s last shopper casually strolling the aisles in a grocery store about to close. The cashier has made her last announcement. The lights are half off. The grocers have other places to be, but the poem makes its way, perusing the shelves, making its maddening slow inventory, a list of things it does not need and will not buy. They cannot lock the doors until it pushes its empty cart through the checkout line.
Here it is. At last. A poem about poetry, which is the writer’s main retreat. When you do not know what to write, you write about writing. You post it for others, inject it into their Saturday night. They read it with a shrug, except for that one other writer who feels the same inexorable urge and pours herself another heavy draught.
Birthday Greetings
Today is my birthday. I’m 44. I don’t feel 44. I don’t feel any particular age at all. I suppose I’ve reached the part of life they call Middle Age. Half the people I know think I’m still pretty young but the other half think I’m pretty old so Middle Age probably describes the situation pretty well.
I had a good day. I took the day off. I played Words with Friends while drinking my morning coffee. I wrote and read. I went for a run. I spent time just hanging out with my wife. We picked the kiddo up from school and got ice cream. We ran a few errands. I practiced piano. I walked the dog. We had dinner with my mom and dad and grandmother.
At 44, I don’t need a lot to make me happy. I don’t need gifts or parties or crazy midlife adventures. Each passing year, just being here still is a source of joy. I think that might be the secret of aging well.
I do enjoy the messages. Birthday greetings arrive by Facebook, text and email all through the day. I am grateful. I have a good life that I enjoy. Thanks for being part of this good life with me.
Kinship with Losers
I love the Olympics, even if they are an economic, social and political nightmare.
When I was younger, I used to marvel at the sheer and shining brilliance of the three athletes on the medal stand. Whichever three athletes; whichever three medals. The sport didn’t matter. Mastery mattered. Those three athletes who triumphed above all others through preposterous trials of competence to be crowned the best. All hail the winners. Cue anthem.
Only now, I begin the recognize the actual beauty on display. The opening Olympic ceremony is a parade of people who have dedicated themselves to improbable, ridiculous dreams. Most of these people will not be winners. Most won’t get medals. Most won’t be interviewed by Jimmy Kimmel or Katie Couric. Most won’t appear anywhere in the four hours of nightly prime time coverage. They will go home battered and bruised, some of them broken. Some will get a hero’s welcome but then are quickly forgotten. They’ll take jobs they may or may not enjoy. They’ll have kids and grandkids. Maybe their kids and grandkids will care. Maybe they won’t.
It doesn’t matter. These people burn with weird, impossible, potentially useless urges. They want to push a stone across the ice, 126 feet from hack to tee. Or they want to hurl themselves together in crowded circles at breakneck speeds on millimeter thin blades in races where victories and defeats are defined in hundredths of a second. Or they need to send themselves head first down perilous tubes at interstate traffic speeds with only a helmet and a St. Christopher’s medal. Who sells these kinds of people life insurance?
And then there’s me – this 44 year old person who has spent the last 34 years trying to write a beautiful sentence in hopes that a beautiful sentence might somehow lead to a beautiful paragraph and then a beautiful page and, perhaps, most ridiculous of all, a beautiful story.
There’s no parade for this weird desire. No procession to show the world. No anthem. No medal. No primetime coverage.
I feel tremendous kinship with these Olympic losers, these ridiculous dreamers. We are always working, seldom winning, dreaming our ridiculous, improbable, wonderful dreams.
Another School Shooting
Yet another mass shooting in an American high school. That’s eight in the first seven weeks of 2018.
Facebook is torn up with people pressing their hopes and prayers for the family while chastening anyone who suggests there are actual solutions to curb some of this violence. My own senator has tweeted his thoughts and prayers while his own pockets are lined with cash from the gun lobby.
My prayers are with the victims of the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and their families.
— Sen. Lamar Alexander (@SenAlexander) February 14, 2018
You have taken $14,850 from the NRA. The third most of active politicians in TN. @MarshaBlackburn leads the state with $30K from NRA. 9,900 NRA dollars is on the ledger of @SenBobCorker. This is on all of you.
— Kim Bernstein (@kimbernstein11) February 15, 2018
This doesn’t happen in other countries. We like to say America is a Christian nation, but we are doing it wrong.
“In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” James 2:17
Menagerie: Our History Told in Dogs
My house used to be a menagerie. Five dogs living, more or less, in harmony. You learned to overlook the occasional outburst from grumpy Bella, so full of fiesty swagger she picked on Sunny, a dog twice her size. Bella went blind and learned humility late in life. Better late than never.
Five dogs is a lot for one home. We didn’t plan it. We found them or they found us. Hard to say who rescued whom.
Now we have only two dogs and our house is much quieter. We lost Bella and Bailey last autumn and Tinker just last week. Losing Tinker was the hardest hit. He was my good friend. He was also the last pack mate of our first dogs Lucy and Jasper. Losing Tinker was losing a link in a chain that went back to the beginning of my marriage.
My wife and I have shared our home with eight dogs since the beginning of our marriage.
Lucy found us while we living in a tiny one bedroom apartment with a kitchen so small you couldn’t open the refrigerator and the stove at the same time. Lucy ran across the intersection one rainy night. Fearing we had run over her, we stopped the car. My wife opened her door and called, “Puppy?” Lucy jumped into the car and went home with us. She was a wise, patient, noble soul with a passion for stolen bread. She loved kids and skunks. Fun fact: you can turn a terrier pink by using tomato sauce to cut skunk spray.
My wife found Jasper while donating aluminum cans to the animal shelter. I was finishing graduate school and we had just bought our first house. Jasper, a Manchester terrier, was picked up by animal control in a local coal yard, riddled with worms. We had to quarantine Jasper for 10 days in my mom-in-law’s garage while purging the worm infestation. If you’ve ever had a nightmare where plates of unsauced spaghetti come to life and start looking for you, you’ll know something about those 10 days. Jasper recovered and quickly adapted to his new life. He never lost his dread of hunger or his anxiety about being abandoned. He was the most loyal, care taking dog we ever had. Jasper was our nurse. My wife put an axe into her leg one evening while I was at work. She managed to drag herself into the house before passing out in the bathroom. Jasper cleaned up the scene and woke Michelle with kisses. Medical science does not recommend dog licks as a cure for cuts and abrasions but Jasper’s kind kisses healed many wounds in a fraction of the normal time.
We found Bailey at the animal shelter. My wife thought Lucy’s mothering instincts deserved a puppy. We came home with a full grown golden retriever mix, instead. Bailey was our happiest, friendliest dog. He also had the worst breath. He liked to get up close and personal. You just held your breath and went with it. Bailey loved toys but rarely actually played with them. He mostly just enjoyed seeing how many he could carry in his mouth at one time and obsessively moved them from room to room to keep the other dogs from stealing them. He had long, luscious fur and everyone assumed he was a lady. He was pretty. We might have called him Bowie. He gave the impression of being large, but, when shaved for summer, was quite small.
I found Tinker while on a run. He was sniffing around a dumpster in front of the low-rent apartments across the street. I picked him up and carried him from door to door asking if anyone knew him. No one did. I took him home. Bailey got excited, having found his good friend. We kept Tinker. Tinker was a dachshund/chihuahua mix, a scrappy low-rider. Bailey was big and Tinker was small. Looking at one another and lacking mirrors, each assumed the other reflected his own proper size and stature. Bailey thought he was small. Tinker thought he was big. It worked for them. I used to carry Tinker around like in one arm, like a football. Or a loaf of bread because why would I be carrying a football? Being carried was Tinker’s favorite place to be.
Phoebe wasn’t with us long. The neighborhood kids found her roaming around and decided to bring her to the crazy dog people house. She was a black lab/hound mix and the smartest dog I’ve ever met. She could work out problems like how to bring a six foot tree branch through a twelve inch dog door. The dog actually dropped the branch, studied the problem and then brought it through sideways. I’m pretty sure she understood quantum physics and relativity. Unfortunately, she was also a touch aggressive when it came to pack dominance. When our daughter was born, Phoebe decided to challenge Lucy for head of pack status. She attacked Lucy while Lucy was sitting on the couch near Michelle and newborn Emersey. She would never have intentionally hurt anyone but was ready to kill Lucy. No longer able to trust her, she had her put down the next day. It was the right decision but not finding a new home for Phoebe still stings.
Michelle and Emersey ganged up on me to adopt Sunny. They went to the animal shelter while Michelle was feeling depressed. Sunny was a hound who had lived her entire life inside an apartment with an elderly shut in. Sunny was pad trained but had developed a grass allergy because she had never been outside. She didn’t trust men and freaked out everytime someone came to the door. People didn’t come to the door where she had lived before. Certainly not men. For five months, she barked in confused anxiety when I came home from work, as if she didn’t know me. And then, one day, she chilled. That’s the power of putting down the dog food. Food, eventually, equals trust. We are friends now.
Nellie came to us from Michelle’s grandmother, who at the age of 90, decided she couldn’t live at home alone anymore. Ma and Nellie moved in with us for one day and then Ma decided she could live at home alone after all. Nellie stayed. Nellie is an 18 year old Jack Russell terrier mix. We attribute her longevity to the fact that Ma cooked chicken breast and rice and vegetables for dinner everyday for years. Nellie is a bit neurotic, but who among us is not? She loves my wife fiercely and follows her around the house all day and night, keeping herself in sight at all times.
Bella was a true mutt and a true rescue. My mother-in-law took Bella in as a temporary foster while taking radiation for Stage 4 lung cancer. Bella’s sojourn was meant to a temporary stop over on her way to another home. Everything at that time was temporary. We lived day to day, grateful for the moments we still had together. I am still amazed at the generosity my mom-in-law showed to help a dog while she herself was dying. Dog people are special. Bella was meant to catch a ride north with a relocation/rescue service but she missed her ride because the program organizer was a flake. After three missed attempts, we took Bella in permanently. I suspect that was the organizer’s plan all along. Bella was an older dog who had whelped many litters in a puppy mill. She had been misused and was tired and crabby about it. She didn’t easily tolerate the fun and games of the other dogs and often growled at Sunny for breathing too much of her air. Bella went blind one week while we were on vacation. We returned to find her stumbling under tables and trapped by chairs. We never learned why she went blind but the blindness taught her humility. She learned to enjoy being held and tolerated the presence of other dogs.
Eight dogs so far, but right now only two. We have Sunny and Nellie. Nellie is very old.
When we said goodbye to Bailey, my daughter asked why dogs lives are so much shorter than ours. I told her it was to help us practice loving them completely even when we know we will eventually lose them. That is, it seems to me, the secret of a well-lived life. A life well-lived is a life where you have allowed yourself to love completely despite the knowledge of inevitable pain, disappointment and loss. Our dogs prepare us for the harder times when we must say goodbye to the people we most love.
My house is very quiet. I miss my good friends. I am grateful for them and for their help with the practice of loving in the face of certain loss and the bravery required to open oneself to the loss that makes life much richer and bigger than before.
Ubiquitous. Quotidian. 