Life's Rich Pageant - III

When I moved into my first house there was a couple who lived next door named K and M. They were pretty old-fashioned, and argued with each other more than they conversed, but each was wonderful in unique and special ways. We were in our early thirties, K & M in their sixties, and they took us under their wing. They shared neighborhood gossip and history. They took in packages for us, I shoveled their sidewalk. We'd sometimes meet in one driveway or the other on summer evenings and discuss the news of the day. M was planning on retiring soon and they talked about all the things they wanted to do.

Then, K got sick. Real sick. I've not seen too many old Russian men cry, but M sobbed when he stopped me in the driveway to tell me. He said it was inoperable, and she had maybe a month, more likely a couple weeks. I said anything I could think of.

The next day he stopped me again and told me the doctors had offered them an option: a new surgical procedure that just might save her life. He was cautiously elated, and I said all the right things.

A couple of days later he said the operation had been a success and K would be home in a couple of weeks. He was having the back room on their house renovated so she didn't have to climb stairs. I told him how happy I was.

When K came home I went over to visit. She didn't look very well, but who would, right? In the following weeks I went over to do some chores for them, and once or twice I had to lift K because she'd fallen out of bed. She seemed to be getting better some of the time, but not all the time. I told M she looked good.

Within a few months K started to slide downhill again. She went back into the hospital, and M had no good driveway news this time. K died about a month later.

At her funeral M was sobbing. I said all the right things, if there are right things at a moment like that.

The months rolled on and life returned to normal. We'd wave to M and he'd wave back, but there were no more driveway chats. Until one evening, when he looked particularly ragged and I stopped to ask him if he was okay. He said he was tired of working, that his company was trying to push him out and bring in a younger salesman, but that he couldn't let them do that. I asked why he didn't just retire, relax a little, like he'd planned. He turned to look at me and said, "The insurance fuckers wouldn't pay for K's operation - they said it was experimental and not worth the cost...well, I couldn't do that. If there was a chance for my K I had to take it...so I took all my retirement money and paid the fucking hospital and fucking doctors. It gave her four fucking months, but if I had it to do over again I'd do the same. There's nothing left. All I have is this house. I gotta keep working."

I didn't say anything. I didn't want an old Russian man to see me cry, so I hugged his shoulder and saying nothing at all hurried across the driveway into my house. I think he understood.

M died about six months later.

Missing Memories

It’s seven in the evening.
Does she remember?
Can she hear the tock
of her grandfather clock that
I was supposed to rewind twice a week?
Does she recall the secretive sound of our
sentences after we’d made love?
When she turns on the shower
Is she reminded of how
I was astounded by
The music she made, and the
Way water beaded on her skin?
When the sun rises,
And her new lover leaves
Does her mind recall the times she
Opened the door for one more goodbye
Before she returned to her tumble-down bed?
I have the chair we used to share,
But is there another she can
Sit in with him, together?
Does she ever wake up, dreaming that
We are still talking on the phone
Making love using just our voices?
Can she pass through a highway rest stop,
Or stay in a cheesy motel
Without thinking of me?
Does she remember the woman in the airport bar
Who told us we looked perfect together?
She wondered where I’d been all her life
And I puzzled about how lucky
I’d suddenly become

Life's Rich Pageant - II

The woman who lives in the apartment below mine spends nearly every night screaming at her pre-teen son; don't sigh with regret...he gives her back as good as he gets. Usually what they are saying is pretty unintelligible except for the anger, which comes across clearly.

Tonight, though, I heard her words plainly as she screamed: "I'm taking a shower, I'm taking a shower!"

The building I live in is 150 years old, and recently someone told me it once housed a stage coach terminal. My little suburban town was at one time served by two different interurban railroad lines and a traction trolley...and, apparently, there was a stage coach route that stopped here, too.

This house has strange acoustics. Sometimes I don't hear another soul in the building all day, though there are eight units, and my apartment is next to the front door; at other times I can hear a neighbor screaming over the sound of her shower. The house stands alone on a low hill, surrounded only by traffic and crabgrass. I moved here last July, but immediately recognized it had been a mistake. When my lease is up this July, I think I'll move again. I just can't take the silence and the screaming.

On and on.

Life's Rich Pageant - I

I was walking with my daughter down my little suburban town's little suburban main street, and we passed a coffee shop with a couple of tables outside on the sidewalk. At one of the tables sat two women, both of whom were nicely dressed, and for whatever reason had an air of "middle-class security" around them. As we walked past I overheard one of the women said to the other, "...and now I have to protect my daughter, 'cause he's beating the crap out of me, and I don't know what he'll do next..." By that point we'd walked passed and their conversation was drowned out by distance and traffic.

I hadn't tried to eavesdrop, but because she'd spoken in a matter-of-fact tone at a normal volume I couldn't help but hear her very clearly.

Last Friday, I walked up Eighth Avenue to Penn Station having just left a dinner with friends in Greenwich Village/Chelsea. The sidewalk was crowded, as it will be in that neighborhood on a Friday night, but then for a moment the crowd cleared and all I saw were two young people facing each other, a few feet apart, about fifteen feet in front of me. They were well-dressed, looking as if they'd just been at a party or a family dinner. As I got closer I realized that the young man was yelling - screaming, really - at the young woman, gesticulating in the air between them with his hands cupped and upturned, as if begging. Though I couldn't make out what he was saying, he was clearly very angry.

The young woman just stood there, staring at him, saying nothing; when I went to pass them by, I looked directly at her and saw that she was weeping uncontrollably. Her jaw hung slack and she seemed - well, she seemed "defeated." I'll never know what the young man was yelling about; but the young woman clearly sensed that she would never be able to make him understand...if she'd been trying to talk to him, to make him hear her side, by then she'd given up. The look on her face was one of utter loneliness and defeat.

Life's rich pageant plays on and on.

Absolute Zero

The coldest place in the universe
Isn’t a point of interstellar space
Just to the right of Antares.
It’s a physics lab in Helsinki, Finland

The electrons sit quietly
Indecisive and uncertain
Waiting to be observed
No motion, no spin, no interactions

No strong force, no weak
Gravity has no rainbow
No up, no down, no charm
The center holds, but only from ennui

Is the color of cold
A shade of deepest blue?
One of the hues of hydrogen?
Or simply the absence of red?

Reflecting Rolke's Prose/Stories of God

Reflecting Rilke’s Prose/Stories of God

First the old man says:
Finding no rest in their beds
The men come out into the night
To gaze wordlessly, agape
At the silent, windless heavens

And then the beardless youth goes on:
Until, in the rising sun
Figures of men can be seen
Silhouetted against the flat distance
Atop the ridges of the kurgans

When a weary mother adds:
Within the kurgans lay cold
The fathers of forgotten fathers
Buried deep in earthen mounds
That ripple on the steppe like waves

To which a strong man responds:
Sometimes birds fly among the mounds
And wild songs drop deep inside
Where graves are the mountains
And men are the abysses

Now the child speaks his part:
Even their houses can’t protect
Them against the limitless steppe
For the dusty windows admit
The glaring light of eternity

A young maiden has this answer:
Only the icons succor them, as
Mileposts on the road to God
Glinting with flecks of gold they
Show His lost children the way

Based on a translation by M. D. Herter Norton

100 words on the subject of: quiet

The house was so quiet I could hear mice skittering in the attic three floors above me. I listened to them running willy-nilly and wondered if they were playing; I’ve always imagined that animals focus pretty much on their own survival – play seems like a luxury.

But in that nearly silent moment I suddenly understood that play is much more than a human diversion. It’s a genetic condition, evolution requires it. Those mice gamboling happily above me would die without their play, I was sure of that. Perhaps they’d have no reason to be born, if not to play quietly.