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.

Dead end

There’s that one that you’ve seen,
passing by gauzy curtains at night.
By chance, a sidelong glance.
A stooped shadow,
seeming to peer back at passing cars.
His round shoulders, sloped by time.
On clockwork, as ever,
There he is, still.
Each night, as you make your way to wintry home.

In wonderment, you muse:
Does he, perhaps, scratch bundles of five on his wall,
as at Shawshank?
Is there another, moldering in a deadened back room?
Or does he wait
for a knock,
thinking to trade hot tea and a biscuit
for someone who will listen?

18. A dream of subjugation

I stand, looking out,
on the highest rampart of the cantilevered castle.
All of the Members stand with me today, deck upon deck,
in honour of this coronation.
The crescent walls jut out below me, each further than the last.
They hold our numbers of today,
ten thousand and one.
I am filled with terrible power and intent.
My robe of eagle feathers encircles me.
All other Members are clothed as lesser birds,
and they remain still, heads bowed.
The crown is of the eagle’s head,
hooked beak and eyes of adamant.
It is set upon me in that moment of stillness.
I raise vast pinions and give a cry.
The lesser birds follow.
In the ten thousand, there are those who would not.
They are bound onto crosses of wood, set alight,
and cast into unfathomable mist.
Now is the time. The time is now.

Impossible

I learned in high school math
That it could be proven, with numbers,
that motion is impossible.
It was called Zeno’s Paradox.

It went something like this:
A man running to catch the bus at a certain time
would first have to run half the distance,
then half of the remaining distance,
and so on, and so on, ad infinitum.
He would never get there.

Some days, I am that runner.
Knowing there is a “bus” to catch,
Every day, every day, ad infinitum.
But I am tired, and sad, and poor in spirit.

The stodgy determined part of me
is a little sick,
but, like a voice crying in the wilderness,
it says I must refute Zeno.
His paradox was meaningless numbers
that could be proven wrong, just as easily.
And, as everyone knows, motion is a fact of life.

I lie in my bed, in the late morning,
and say to the now distant voice:
See?  I have already done the impossible!
Each day I move, I do, I rest, I do again.

Ah! Do you! ( It says back.)
Try!  Try now!
I say I must rest for a little first….
there is chuckling.
Then, there is something like paralysis of the will.
I want to weep from frustration,
but I must rest for a little, first.

Somehow, I get the upper hand in this wrestle.
Shuffle to the shower, start to shave.
What for? (I think, or hear).  I stop halfway.
The sourness of doubt slinks back.
If I could just rest for a little bit first.

Coming back to myself, I am somehow in robotic mode.
Finish the shave, get dressed, carry the laundry downstairs.
Back upstairs I go with the load from the dryer.
Stopped halfway in a spiral of hopelessness.
The Runner.  The Runner.  This is impossible.
If I could just rest for a little bit first.

Zeno has won today.