Monthly Archives: August 2018

In her cull

This….by Candice Louisa Daquin at The Feathered Sleep
https://thefeatheredsleepcom.wordpress.com

TheFeatheredSleep's avatarTheFeatheredSleep

Before

Who knew how to die?

That it wouldn’t be instantaneous

As children imagine

A sudden pain, then unconsciousness

Who knew?

Death could go on years

Building and slowing like cold sea water

Burning firework left to fizzle alone in inky sky

That it would wind and unwind, a mad clock void of correct motion

Who knew?

It could take the very young, wrap them in wool, to cast down wet hill

The jarring and bumping eventual colission held at bay

Till forgotten

That it could take you

Suspend you from me and all familiar things

Where the recognition in your once clear and beautiful eyes

Became muddied and clouded with quiet violence

Your touch so soft, stolen and replaced with flinty brush off

Who knew

The courage of fighters

Seathing against their sentence and eventual

Chop chop of parts, scars and marred

Skin once free of blade

A scratch…

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Caturday

When you’re home alone, and you don’t think about closing the bathroom door, it is one of the absolute certainties in life that you will hear a little thump on the living room floor, and a click click click, as the cat jumps down from his window perch, and pads along the hallway to come and stare at you while you’re sitting on the throne.  This is more important and entertaining to him than his usual pastime of licking his behind.

Someone wrote on Twitter the other day that if you get into a staring contest with a cat, and begin to wonder how intelligent it is, you can be assured that the cat is thinking the same thing about you.

We had an old tuxedo cat that lived to be about 18, and he was my infallible companion.  Followed me everywhere, and we somehow got into a game that was mutually fun.  He would lie down on the bed and eye me expectantly, knowing what was gonna happen next.  It started off with my lightly touching each of the pads on his four paws until he got pretty pissed off and grabbed me.  At the moment of the grab, I would toss him up in the air until he did a complete somersault.  He learned to enhance the thrill by going totally limp as soon as I grabbed him, so as to make it more graceful.  This went on for many years, until I buried him last year.  Cried like a baby.

Two of the surviving three (yes, three), seem to have wanted to train as his replacement, so I now have double the pleasure of being followed and pestered incessantly, and, yes, they are eager to learn the mattress games.  The third, who is the youngest and fattest, seems incapable of thinking about anything other than food.

cartcat2

 

Weedless Wednesday?

I weed with what I think is single-mindedness.  Bunched up towel under knobby knees.  Gloves of good leather for those damn nettles.  A healthy respect for the spiders and bees.  We’re getting on close to summer’s end, and we’re pushing for our house to sell.  My wife, you see, is getting a little more sick, but continues to soldier on at work.

We could sure use the money…she needs a long long rest.  I need the peace of mind.
Funny, you know….now that I’m out here with the bag and rake and gloves and all, I am beating myself up over this silly garden.  I never had paid it a lot of attention or put much effort into its care,  and now I am making it look nice for somebody else. 

It’s a lovely day out here, tempered by the busy street noises behind me- the engineered farting of motorcycle engines, cars with stereos so loud you can feel the sound waves through your liver.  Come on, folks.  Let’s just have the birdies instead.  Never mind, this old guy is gonna move, and you can carry on making your mark in the world. 

As I dig and kneel, the earthy scents rise to me and I think that this little pastime is really not so bad.  I am doing a bit of good in some tiny corner of the world.  Surely the bona fide plants appreciate my getting rid of the riffraff.  Even the spiders seem excited (or agitated) at the prospect of new craters in their landscape. 

But, the little lift this few minutes has given me is on a seesaw with thoughts more bleak:  the mauve of regret, the orange of anxiousness.  My nose runs a little.  A fly jets into my left ear, and I slap at it  involuntarily, producing a nasty ringing.  I stumble to my feet after the last offender is pulled out by its roots.  In for a cup of tea, we shall.  Rake up and bag the drying entrails, we shall.  Tomorrow.

Shaving the dead

Sorry.  Not a story for bed time.

Have been in the bad place for a few days now with depression.  There’s the cue for you to abort this reading, if you like……the picture is not of me, but of my phantom friend.

If you’re a kindred spirit, you might identify with some of these:

Sleep (fitfully) for ten or eleven hours
Waken for a bit, realize you need one more, then drift back.
Shuffle to kitchen for coffee, which clears the fog somewhat.
Eat some little thing (for “energy”, not appetite)
It does not work as promised.
Back into bed, this time with the door open.  Two cats join you.
You think “Shit, I can’t do this”, and force yourself into the bathroom for a shower.
Brush your teeth, a must.  You never skip this.  Not yet.
God damn, I really need to shave.  I look like shit.  But not today.  Tomorrow, I’ll do it.

I think of getting dressed, when the back story about shaving hits me.

The first person that I shaved, other than myself, was my father.  In his 70th year, he was dying of pancreatic cancer.  Before I go further, I will say that all of the caregivers I have met are worthy of high praise.  Nurses especially, for what they do, their long hours, and their continual need for more help.

Dad was always a stickler for his appearance, but once he started to decline, of course he could not take care of himself.  I asked a nurse one day if I could give him a shave.  She was apologetic that they hadn’t done it in a few days, and was appreciative of the help.  Looking at his jaundiced eyes without crying was difficult.  That was the last shave he ever got.

My younger brother, about whom I have already written, died in his home, where we had set up a hospital bed at his request.  I had stayed there for several nights, when his partner asked me if I could give him a shave.  The same eyes studied me with regret and tears.  I wonder if he knew who I was.

At last, my old father-in-law.  He lived far away, and we used to visit once every month or two.  He always made sure that he was presentable when he knew we were coming, and that included a shave.  There eventually came a time when he had lost the will and the strength to do it, and I once more got out the hot cloths and warmed up the shaving cream.  This third set of hopeless eyes was almost too much.

Now, I have given myself a figurative slap, and said “God dammit, you’re not there yet.  Do the fucking shave!”

Nobody’s going to catch me looking like hell, and staring out of those 8-ball eyes.
Selfish, maybe.  Running scared, maybe….but I would not want to inflict those moments on anyone who still loves me.

The meaning of life

In a quiet cove I sit, on pulpy stump.
Bulrushes surround: corndogs on waving sticks.
The merciless keen of cicadas.
The breeze is blue.
In chest waders with broad shoulder straps,
I am godawful hot.
My rod lays on flattened reeds
while i munch a sandwich of lettuce, tomato, bright orange cheese.
A darting flutter surprises me, hovering for a taste.
The Dragonfly-
black copter fuselage, biplane wings of foil irridescent.
Noiseless, it flirts for a moment longer,
then pulls my glance to the swirling eddies.
What it seeks there, who is to know.
One of the water walkers?
But, no. There is a stalker.
In shiny convulse from bubbling stream,
he meets his fate
in the grab of the trout.

Parental recollections

  • Having the privilege of being there at my son’s birth, after many hours of my wife’s painful labour.
  • Quitting smoking and deporting our cat to the in-laws while the baby was growing.
  • Being zombies for the first few months because of rocking chair duties to help calm him down from his colic.
  • Missing, by minutes, the birth of my daughter.  I had taken her mother to the hospital, with my son in the car, because it was a late night surprise, and then thought I had enough time to take him to my mother’s place and still make it back.  Arrived breathlessly at the hospital, only to have a nurse announce that I had a daughter (delivered by the nurse, because a doctor was not on hand at the time).
  • Walking through a park with my family and some friends, with my son toddling beside us and our daughter in a carriage.  She became fussy, and I picked her up and rocked her while singing “the bear went over the mountain”.  I think it was her favourite song at the time, and seemed to be the only thing that would calm her down.
  • Bedtime stories, starting off with the mythical Dr. Seuss, then books by Richard Scary, to name a few.  One of them involved complex cartoon pictures, in which you had to find a little critter called “Goldbug”.  That certainly developed a spirit of competition between the two kids, and a little jealousy when one got the better of the other.
  • I actually read the complete “Lord of the Rings” and “Hobbit” books to them.  It took about a year.  Daughter lost interest, but the son couldn’t get enough.
  • Piggyback rides down the hallway to their bedrooms, as part of the nightly routine, with the wife in the background telling me to “get them the hell to bed”.
  • Singing them to sleep when the reading and games didn’t work.  Mostly Beatles and Wings.  If the singing didn’t work, we pulled out a small electric keyboard on which I taught them to play “Smoke on the Water”, I think.
  • Having my son come home from school, very upset, because he had lost a model dinosaur that he had brought there that morning.  This was in November, and we got pretty cold while retracing his steps back there until we found it.
  • Driving my son to a job interview quite far from home, then stopping on the side of the road.  When he asked what for, I said “you’re going to drive”.  It was a standard.  He eventually got the hang of it.
  • Taking my daughter on her first driving lesson (same car) around the oval up at the high school.  She found it difficult, and more than once stalled it, but that is to be expected.  She does claim, though, that I got impatient and said to her “the lesson is over.”  I do not remember that.
  • Physically barring the door so she could not get out to go to a friend’s place late one night.  It had been freezing rain, everything was slick, and I just said no.  She hated me for a while.
  • Being involved in a serious accident one winter night (not hurt), and arriving home at about 2 a.m.  Kids were crying in the hallway.
  • Coming home from work, with my daughter waiting.  I tried picking her up and slinging her over my shoulder (she was about 11 years old), and instead slipped, collapsed, and wrecked some stuff in the hall.
  • Having tickling sessions on the upstairs bed when I went up to get changed after work.  The two of them would run up there, and we would see who cried Uncle first.
  • Bedbugs.   Lice.  Fleas.  Numerous cats.
  • Driving my girl two hours through a snowstorm to attend a talent contest.  Spending 14 hours there, only to have her fail the audition.
  • Taking a load of teenagers to downtown Toronto so they could attend some concert or other, and spending several hours bumbling around waiting for them to get out.
  • Fond memories of going to plays and concerts with my daughter.
  • Going fishing with my son.  Not catching much, but just going fishing.
  • Golfing with both of them at one time or another
  • Many, many trips to North Bay, complete with serious sibling rivalry in the backseat.  Never ever again will I put the four of us in one vehicle.
  • Thinking about taking my son to a strip club, then changing my mind.
  • Having a bunch of kids knock on my door, screaming that my son had been hurt.  Running down the roadway to find that he had broken his wrist in two after a roller blading accident.  He then went on to a career of fairly regular calamities, including another broken arm, elbow, and various accidents with saws etc.
  • Taking him for a dental emergency to a guy that turned out to be something of a butcher.  I could hear the screams from the waiting room, got him the hell out of there, and took him to a place that did sleep dentistry, a thousand bucks later.

Looking back, I loved (almost) every minute of it, and surely would not change it at all.

 

 

Randy Randy

So many human foibles have we.  So many.
In the mid 1960’s, we lived in a fourplex, and had some new neighbors move in.  It was a mother and her teenaged son, and we got to know them and to be friends.  The son’s name was Randy.  He was a skinny, wiry little guy, something like a young Mick Jagger, with kind of a hard looking streetwise countenance.  He may have been a year or two older than I, but we chummed around anyway, being convenient to each other.

About fifteen years old at the time, I was easily impressed (and corrupted) by his cunning ways, and by the picture he presented of being a rebel against his mother’s authority.  Each escapade of his seemed to top the last one.  Looking at it now, I think he was acting out because of his broken home life and estrangement from his father.  He never talked about it.

We got involved in some small time misdemeanors, such as creeping out in the middle of the night and running down the street in our sock feet with a shopping bag to rob a coke machine at the local gas station, using his deft technique, learned from who knows where.  He came on vacation with us one time, to a cottage we rented each summer, then suggested we go for a long walk,  whereupon he magically produced some bags from his trousers, and we pilfered a local farmer’s garden.  We were chased before we got far, but managed to elude the pursuit in the bush.  Farmer Maggot never did catch us.

Things got more serious later on in this career of crime.  Randy got involved with drugs, and his behavior became more erratic and unpredictable.  He made it known that he had a gun, but of this I am not certain.  He was still allowed into our house, as my parents didn’t know.  One night, while we were playing poker, he took out a small bottle from his pants and began to sniff it.  Nail polish remover.  It had an instant effect upon him, and he did some crazy and destructive things.  We got him to his house and left him with his mother,  and we had to explain to our own folks what had happened.  That was effectively the end of our association, and it wasn’t long before he moved away.  A short time later, I heard that he had been picked up for grand theft, and was spending time at juvenile hall.

It may seem wrong to have “Sympathy for the Devil”, but there are a few things that I will always carry with me about Randy…..he needed a friend, and so did I, and it happened.  The little hints that one could divine from his conversation showed what kinds of wounds he had within his soul.

And, lastly, he may have saved my life one night when we were attacked by a group of hoodlums trying to show off to their girlfriends.  They got us from behind, pulled us down on the pavement,  and began the beating.  Six against two.  I didn’t know how to fight, but he did.  We both took a pretty good beating,  but my wiry little skinny friend managed to defend both of us until they took off.  The last memory I had was of Randy beating one guy’s head against the pavement, before someone came along and called an ambulance.