A Little Something For Halloween

We used the first sentence of a novel to begin our 500 word homework assignment this month in my writing group. I decided to take Catcher in the Rye in a new direction.

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."

As a matter of fact, the thought of my parents screwing is about as revolting an image as I can conjure up. But squirt, squirt, there I was in all my miraculous life essence, sliding around my mother’s insides like some kind of fleshy pinball. And I dare say, it was the last time I had a good night’s sleep and a decent meal.

The truth is, my mother never wanted me to begin with. She had one kid already, my darling sister, the angel from heaven. I was an accident and an expensive inconvenience, and she went out of her way to try to end my time insider her, stretching and reaching on her hands and knees, scrubbing floors, carrying heavy buckets of water up and down stairs and hoping to miscarry. She hasn’t worked as hard since.

But I came out early, and the old man quit his job to care for me, ‘cause she couldn’t be bothered.

“Let that thing die,” she said to my father as he hunched over my tiny body. “We can’t afford it.”

But he just ignored her, and I’m pretty sure I understood what she was saying, because something gave me the strength to survive and to think little baby thoughts of someday growing up and killing her. And survive I did, though I was sort of sickly and kind of a runt.

They say there’s no such thing as a bad child, but I set out to prove them wrong. In church I stole money out of the offering plate and got told to stay home. At school I spat in the Principal’s hand and got suspended. Those things happened by the first grade. It was later that I set fire to some paper towels in the janitor’s closet. What a ruckus that caused. Half the school burned that day and a bunch of children with it. I watched from the playground, enjoying the show and tossing rocks through the openings in a chain link fence.

When I was older I got blamed for just about anything bad that happened in our town. Church didn’t want me, school couldn’t stand me, and my mother died and ruined my murderous plan. So I started trapping animals in the back yard in a shoebox propped up by a pencil attached to a long taut string. Those critters died slow, especially when they bit me, and I carved ‘em up with the knife daddy gave me when he showed me how to whittle. I collected the fur and bones and set fire to the rest.

So here I wait, just as happy as can be. They bring me three squares every damn day. I taught myself to read and write just as good as any school could. They say I’m bad to the bone, a freak, and I think they’re right. That’s why they put me in a special place all by myself. But that’s ok. I have lots of thoughts to keep me entertained. I think about the things I done. Wonderful things. Awful things.

And tonight I get one more good night’s sleep and tomorrow one more meal, whatever I want, and it better be good. ‘Cause tomorrow at midnight they’ll take me down the hall, strap me to a cart, talk about mercy and crap and ask me if I have anything left to say. Oh and I have a few things to say alright, ‘cause that’s the last time I get to say anything. After that I’ve got a date with the devil, and she looks a lot like mom.

Extreme Gardener

I have an experimental garden. It is roughly the shape of one of those idiotically dangerous trampolines you see in the yards of every otherwise obsessively cautious parent these days. Fortunately our trampoline did not claim any victims. We were among the lucky ones, and I relished the clanging sound of tubular steel being tossed into the back of a garbage truck the day it was finally hauled away.

What remained were pleasant memories and a large circular burned out spot on our back lawn. If Google had timed it right and updated the aerial photographs of our neighborhood it would have appeared like a crop circle or a large letter “O.” Well-placed pumpkins and a semicircular row of beans would have created a smiley face worthy of Forest Gump when viewed from the air.

I decided that half the work of creating a vegetable garden had been completed by the trampoline. All I had to do was turn over the topsoil with a shovel and water the Earth with the sweat of my brow. Lots of sweat. The area was loaded with rocks and crisscrossed with tree roots from Pines and Oaks. Only about two inches of rich black topsoil had supported the layer of grass we enjoyed prior to installation of the heat-focusing trampoline bed. Beneath that was clay and sand, a testimonial to the river-bed nature of ground conditions two blocks away from the mighty Des Plaines. In other words, the dirt was crap. 

I began to add things; “amend” as the professionals would say. Peat moss, mushroom compost and manure. I even rented a very fun rototiller and discovered a deeper layer of tree roots that caused the machine to kick and buck. I brought out an axe and a wheelbarrow to cut and haul the underworld cartilage. A week later I planted my crops.

I’ll just cut to the chase. It didn’t work. My vegetable garden yielded six tomatoes, five beans and a handful of lettuce. I now have profound respect and admiration for the farmers who grow our food and for the abundance and variety of beautiful items in the produce section at Dominicks.

So I tried something else this year.

I went online and bought a pound of zinnia seeds. I can grow these. Each year for the past half dozen, butterflies and neighborhood children stop to worship the colorful display I cultivate near our streetside mailbox. Zinnias require little care other than periodic watering and pruning that causes even more zinnias to bloom.

“Can we go see Mr. Vic’s garden?” ask the kiddies.

“Yes you can dear,” say their mothers.  “He’s a genius with a green thumb.”

If you’ve ever purchased a packet of zinnia seeds, you know that for $1.79 you get about two dozen lighter-than-air disclike seeds in the bottom of a paper packet. A pound of these “California Giants” is enough for Vincent Van Gogh to scatter over acres of land in preparation for painting a masterpiece if he chose to repeat the giant sunflower experiment. I used half a pound in my trampoline garden.

That was May. I planted the seeds in two waves so as not to overwhelm neighbors or low flying aircraft with the explosion of color that would burst skyward at ground zero. Google, prepare for something spectacular! This is the time for an update.

Well, I’m writing this in August, so you can imagine what I’m dealing with after ten weeks of unrestrained growth. Daily harvests of bouquets for my wife. Requests by artists to set up easels and chairs for the day while they paint. The photojournalists with their annoying clicking shutters and the legal contracts that Ken Burns insists upon before panning and zooming to the sound of harmonicas and the droning of a vaguely familiar narrative voice. Yeah, none of that.

For all my planning and dreaming, I never expected this. See the photograph below. I took it myself. Click for a larger, more stunning view.

Hammock Gazing Skyward in the Night

Hammock Gazing Skyward in the Night

The humor and its goodness fade away

With screen door slamming sweat and jangling bliss 

While longing, notwithstanding empty arms

Spilled sparkling fluid memories of this.

The starlit summer sensual decay

Cacaphony of cricket-grinding greed

Impassioned by the lengthening of the day

Has celebrated solstice in our need.

Unwinding through the intervening years

Departure, such a simple thing to do

Left ringing all the seasons in my ears

And darkening the image that was you.

This subtle devastation of the night

For me, provides the equinox you might.

A World of Hurt

I recall turning twenty-five being an unpleasant milestone that got me thinking a lot about my future. I considered how unimaginably old I would be in the year 2000, the bar against which everyone measured time’s passage in the last century. Forty-five. Holy crap. What would my life be like by then? A doddering old man wearing Depends, soaking my dentures in a glass of Efferdent?

Twenty-five was an age at which I could still jump off a three foot wall if I wished, landing and bounding like a coiled spring without injuring myself. Pain was usually a temporary annoyance, maybe a few throbbing hours after a hard workout. A pleasant burn that made my muscles sing. And there really weren't many three foot walls where I lived. Parkour hadn't been invented yet.

Twenty-five was also the age at which I got my first glimpse into the kind of pain that becomes familiar and more frequent as the decades pass and the body loses its resilience. It was the year I headed to Wisconsin with a group of friends for a weekend getaway. Upon stepping out of the car into the cool north woods I took a deep breath of naturally pine scented air and promptly choked on a bug, coughed hard and heard a snap in my upper back that doubled me over. It was an immobilizing dislocation of something in my rib cage that was crucial to standing up straight and breathing without wincing. It was not a spasm that could be stretched out, a knuckle that could be cracked or a fatigue that could be rested away. It took me out of action for the entire weekend, flat on my back and swallowing my friend’s mother’s potent pain relievers in hopes of rejoining the fun.
But still, I recovered from that incident within a few days or weeks.

I visited a chiropractor yesterday for my injured knee. As a new patient, I was presented with forms to fill out and an interactive patient history program on a small computer terminal. A diagram of the human body, front and back, covered with small circles to indicate regions for treatment accompanied a list of qualifiers. To click inside a circle, in my case on the left knee, indicated an area of pain. Associated adjectives helped the doctor understand if certain activities initiated, aggravated or alleviated symptoms.

Presented with this cartoon version of myself and a crayon stylus, it occurred to me that recovery time from injuries in your forties and fifties leaves you with a patchwork quilt of pain, overlapping in time and debilitating to the point at which a pain free day is noticeable in the way a terminally ill patient is often reported to sit up in bed and state, “that feels great!” just before collapsing dead. “Wow, I feel great today!” Oh crap, that won’t last.

I began to poke the screen with my electronic pencil. My left shoulder hasn’t been right for four years. It is aggravated by exercise or lack of it, a true no-win scenario. And come to think of it, my right knee isn’t what I’d call a hundred percent, nor is my right wrist. Hell, I haven’t been a hundred percent since 1972.

Poke, poke, poke, I colored in the circles. My back hurts all the time, sometimes when I awake in the morning after a night spent running down hallways looking for a classroom on the last day of the semester or chasing antelope in my dreams. My stomach hurts. Apparently I can no longer digest pepperoni. Poke, color, poke.

Doctors shouldn’t ask questions they don’t want answered, I thought as I completed the exercise. But maybe this guy had magical methods unrevealed to older, less athletic patients afraid to admit their frailty. After all, he is the team chiropractor for a major professional Chicago sports team. These young bucks take a beating regularly and come back for more within hours or days. Many of them are in their twenties. Some are twenty-five. Oh yeah. Just starting to hurt. They have no idea what lies ahead.

Wicked

Katherine sipped cold latte at a café table in an outdoor market. The touristy area was crowded for a Monday. Weekend street performers who usually returned to day jobs were in full force, juggling, on unicycles and in top hats. Those painted like bronze statues jerked to life in response to donated coins and bills. Foot traffic was unusually heavy. Out of towners mingled with college kids. Backpacks, baseball caps and baggy jeans abounded.

Her coffee was hot when she arrived an hour earlier. At 49 degrees, the day chilled her beverage almost to the temperature of her blood. Yesterday had been warmer, but yesterday seemed eons ago, and her job with Swiss Air felt like a memory from another lifetime.

She waited for a phone call in the cool sunshine. Her stern demeanor kept strangers at a distance. Even foraging birds knew better than to approach. An aggressor who asked to join her at the table appeared perplexed, even violated at the suddenness with which he found himself alone. Without a word, she stood and moved to a less congested location. Her sunglasses hid dark circles and darting glances.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

I Promise

“Azure,” she says, and then “porch.”

The beach gradually comes into focus. Terns sprint between tide pools on comically thin legs, startling small crabs back into their glistening sandy burrows. The color of the sky and the front of her weathered house are the first images with which she can associate words. Others follow as her head clears.

“Low tide,” she whispers. 

She sits in knee-deep water that will be over her head in a few hours. She faces the shore. Summer heat bakes the sweat and salty air onto her forehead. Water laps gently at her legs. Sand oozes between her tingling toes, circulation impaired by the ties that bind her to a partially submerged chair. Minnows dart beneath the water’s surface, alternately visible in cloudy shadows, hidden by reflected sun.

It is afternoon in the tropics. Lightning flashes in the distance. Roiling hot and cold rivulets of air slap the surface of the ocean and disrupt its gentle rhythm. Gulls and wind chimes are the only sounds for miles. Beach grass sways in the breeze. A crisp envelope on her lap bends beneath her fingers. He has found her.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Hamlets and Bars

I’ve long insisted that a life crisis is evidence that you simply haven’t been paying attention. But looking in the mirror at graying hair is a singular awakening experience, whereas navigating an auditorium filled with “old people” feels like swimming upstream with a population of decaying salmon. It hurts to see how old we’ve grown.

The average audience age at a 2013 Gordon Lightfoot concert had this effect on me. And honestly, the ghostly apparition who took the stage with his guitar and backup musicians made it clear just how long this troubadour has been writing and singing to a very dedicated, if somewhat eccentric, fan base. It's hard to see our heroes age.

I have been attending Lightfoot shows since the singer was thirty-five, when he was riding high on a second wave of popularity with his Sundown album. Now a frail fragment of his former physical self, he is one of a small group of aging musicians still touring and selling tickets to several generations of fans. And the passage of forty years caused the remnants of my eighteen year old inner child to reach for reading glasses to see “Row E, Seat 1” on my ticket at the charming Pabst theater in Milwaukee.

And then there are those younger fans. Next generations, old souls born out of sync with their own time and longing for a taste of the unparalleled music of the 1970s, or perhaps watching “That Seventies Show” for insight into the journey their parents traveled to get here.

The concert I reference here was attended by a particularly enthusiastic young fan dressed entirely in period attire, sporting an afro (he was white) and drinking far too much at his personal Lightfoot pre-game tailgate. To his credit, he knew the title of every song and most of the lyrics, at one point shouting “Hamlets and Bars” at just the right point and at the top of his lungs. He subjected the audience to slurred outbursts at Gordon right up until the intermission, when he was summarily removed from the concert by two no-nonsense security guards. He wailed in protest, maybe not so much in reaction to the assault as in grief at the realization that he would not be enjoying the second set. As relieved as I was to see him go, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him.

The most recent audience featured a young-sounding female fan shouting repeated pleas from the darkness at the back of the theater to “Give it to me Gordon!” Gordon, ever the gentlemen, continued to strum and sing without comment, but no doubt appreciated the option of an offer to “give it” still, at age 74. He has continued to tour since this performance, strengthening his voice and improving his health, reportedly with daily workouts. His perfectly tuned guitars resonate with a seemingly genetic musical memory stored from decades of shows. Now 81 years old, an album he previously vowed would not happen has in fact been released. Appropriately named "Solo" it features Gordon in the studio with only his guitar but is a collection of previously unreleased tracks, not new material. It is enjoyably reminiscent of collections by other greats, but is no Nebraska. I can't help but wonder if the steady stream of adoring posts by fans on his Facebook page may have added to a renewed vitality in his eighth decade. It is gratifying to realize that I am not the only Lightfoot superfan.

So the show goes on. Old Gord, like Old Dan, in one of his infrequent spoken comments, mentioned that the band plays for ticket sales. He struggled with the high notes, sounding at times like air blown through a whale bone, increasingly nasal with each passing year and in the wake of a near-death aneurysm. But through it all, fans show up for his unique musical tales of life on the Carefree Highway, On The High Seas and in the Early Mornin’ Rain.

We’ll continue to buy tickets as long as you sell them Gordon, popping Tylenol and dragging our aching bones to the nearest venue, settling into our comfy chairs and “waiting for you.”

I could be caught between decks eternally

Waiting for you to ask what's keeping me

The skies of North America are covered in stars

Over factories and farms, over hamlets and bars

Seventh Spring

Curls of white steam that drifted from a cradled mug and over Sarah’s fingers dissipated into the chilled darkness of an unheated living room. Embers crackled in a wood stove, the only source of warmth in this sixth winter since onset of the reversal. Cambridge was a distasteful memory still, eight years after her dismissal. She felt as fragile as one of the glass flowers exhibited at the university’s museum, and as breakable.

April arrived with weather that seemed to mock lengthening days with temperatures that seldom rose above zero. Her supply of firewood was almost exhausted and the food she stored in September was running low. She stared at the glass specimen on the kitchen table. Galanthus nivalis, the snowdrop, her favorite from Harvard’s collection, stolen on her last day as professor of botany.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.