Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
100 Word Story: Sweeping
This time the broom was right where she’d left it, leaning against the railing on the back porch. But the day before, it was leaning on a far tree trunk and before that it was lying on the top of her car.
The broom takes flight in the night, she thought, then caught herself at how crazy that sounded.
Did it walk on its thin straw legs? Slither around the yard in the dark like a snake searching for a sleeping rabbit?
Her mother told her that objects breathed in the life around them. Her broom knew her so well.
__________________
Photo by Jane Slack-Smith on Unsplash
The Sweet Life of Trash Picking
It’s a sign of something that I want to start keeping garbage bags and disposable gloves in my car so I can swerve over to the side of the road and pick up trash whenever the spirit moves me.
It seems like a very elderly thing to do.
“Who is that old woman? I always see her out here picking up trash.”
“No clue. There’s another old lady who pushes a baby stroller around the neighborhood all day. Loads the thing up with garbage bags and books so it’s super heavy. The trash lady’s probably her sister.”
Today was pick up the trash day along Milwaukee’s rivers. Volunteers were given t-shirts, disposable gloves, and giant black garbage bags and sent forth. I worked my way along a ridge overlooking the Menomonee River. Down below, I could see piles of beer bottles, ragged t-shirts, cardboard, and mysteries. I wanted to, but I didn’t climb down the hill. I’m not surefooted anymore. I know that much. I had to stay in my lane at the top of the hill and pick up the itty-bits, smashed plastic liquor bottles and the like. It was okay.
Anyway, picking up trash is very gratifying. And probably a metaphor for something really important. Like dealing with the detritus of life, all the dropped balls and lost jobs and wounded people. Or proving one’s continued value on the planet by making everything tidier and more orderly. Old people love having a place for everything and everything in its place, it makes it easier on the heirs.
I ramble. Suffice to say, picking up trash was an oddly elevating experience. So much so that I’m just going to carry on, comparisons to the baby stroller pusher notwithstanding.
_____________
Photo by Tommaso Pecchioli on Unsplash
Where’s the Money When you Need It?
I wish I’d come up with the scratch to buy the land adjacent to our cabin on Lake Superior, so someone wasn’t able to build an enormous, earth-scarring monstrosity next door. I say ‘next door’ hesitantly as it implies neighborliness, as in, let’s go borrow a cup of sugar from the folks next door.
There is more wrong about the building next door than the building next door.
I wrote about my frustration with the construction of this Trumpian horror a few years ago but then a reader told me to get over myself and my second house and go do something useful like help the homeless. Oh well.
Looking back, I could’ve sold my car, taken a second job at the 7-Eleven, you know, hustle a bit. As it was, I just watched ugliness unfold, like the world’s slowest vomit.
Most of my life’s regrets are about actions I did take not ones that I didn’t. This would be the exception. And it’s a doozy.
Not the most beautifully written post but you asked and I answered.
Two Vignettes for Your Reading Pleasure
We followed a beat-up white panel truck with no license plates down the street that winds through the forest of apartment buildings along the Milwaukee River. When the street expanded to two lanes, we pulled up next to the truck and right away heard the driver talking to us. “One day I’ll make a lot of money, and I’ll buy a car like yours.” He was a young, good-looking guy, smoking a blunt. He went on to say more about how he admired our car (a 2017 Audi sedan) and then announced, “I’m a plumber.” We almost invited him home with us because the day before our water heater had died but we already had a plumber coming. Still, it’s not every day that you meet a plumber who likes your car.
The cashier at Walgreen’s asked if me if my day was going like I’d planned. I said, “yes, pretty much,” and then added that it was my birthday. “So what great thing are you doing on your birthday?” he asked. I told him I was cleaning my back porch. “Ah,” he said. “Is that your place of peace?” Later in the car, I saw that in addition to the Advil and lotion I’d bought, there was a small box of fake nails in the bag. I’d seen the box on the counter, left by someone else, but in my delight in contemplating the porch as my place of peace I’d not noticed I’d bought them. The next day I took them back for a refund. The same cashier wasn’t there and I was glad because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.
_______________________
Photo by MacDonald Almeida on Unsplash
People You Can’t Forget: Mr. Dillard
Mr. Dillard always wore a dress shirt buttoned up to the neck but no tie along with pleated dress pants, I remember khakis but maybe they were just plain black pants, and nice shoes. He was always handsomely put together with a cardigan or light jacket over his shirt. He was a man who thought about what to wear.
I remember his brown hands and his long fingers, the perfectly manicured ovals of his nails. Everything about him was finely trimmed. And his demeanor matched. Circumspect, quiet, every utterance a complete sentence. He was, as they used to say, very particular.
I knew Mr. Dillard from picking up and taking him home from a regular meeting that we shared. Our conversations were sparse and I remember only one with any clarity.
We pulled up to a stoplight next to another car.
“Chartreuse,” he said. “You don’t see very many chartreuse cars.”
“No, you don’t. Unusual color for a car.”
“I once knew a woman named Chartreuse,” he said, his sentence hanging in the air like letters strung on a string across the windshield. It was all he said but the sentence seemed heavy and thick like Chartreuse had left a mark on him.
Mr. Dillard passed away many years ago but I think of him too often for the slight encounters we had, driving to and from a monthly meeting. It’s because of Chartreuse, the woman that Mr. Dillard once knew; the color, a mixture of yellow and green that is so rare to see on a car these days.
___________________
Originally published in 2018
People You Can’t Forget: Jane
I don’t know why but all day I’ve been thinking about Jane. Two memories collide — the pungent, overpowering body odor wafting down the hallway that announced her arrival minutes before she appeared in my office and the matter of fact way she cinched up the tablecloth she would often wear as a skirt as she began to expound on some critical southside neighborhood issue. When she came to Resident Council meetings at the antipoverty agency where I worked, the other members would scoot down to the end of the long table and start lighting matches. It was awful to witness. She seemed not to notice, but she had to.
She sat with pride, in her tablecloth, in her halo of foul smell, representing her neighborhood because, you see, she was elected to be a Resident Council member. She was there to do her job and she almost never missed a meeting. She walked into meetings, the dirt in streaks on her bare legs, wearing slippers sometimes, sometimes shoes, an old sweater or maybe a filthy parka, her grey unwashed hair straight and pulled behind her ears. She never, ever bathed.
She was so ill. She wanted help, but then she didn’t want help. Mostly, she wanted to talk – about why she couldn’t stay in her house. How it was dangerous to stay there. How she had gone to college and was trained to be a scientist. About her parents and how much she missed them. About how people shunned her, how they were rude and cruel.
One day she came to our agency asking for help getting to County Hospital. She told a story about the bus driver not letting her get on the bus. She didn’t say why but we suspected the reason. My boss called a cab and I rode down the elevator with Jane – all the while trying to pretend that trying not to pass out from the smell and talking to a woman wearing a tablecloth with nothing underneath were everyday things.
I never said, “Jane! You need clothes. You need to take a bath. You need to see a doctor. It isn’t healthy to live like this.” I never said that because, I think, I was trying to be respectful of Jane. I thought Jane was entitled to be treated like everyone else. And in my mind, at that time, that meant pretending that her condition was normal.
But was that respect or just my fear? That if I pushed her to accept my help then I would then have to help her. Myself. Not my agency. Not the case manager down the hall. Me.
Looking back, I think I was hiding behind that notion of respect. Because it was safer for me. But it was a fiction. A complete entry into unreality — where my practice of respect somehow prevented me from actually figuring out how to help her and let me give up on the idea of helping her almost instantly for fear of insulting her. Totally nuts.
I’d like to think that if I ran into Jane today, I wouldn’t be afraid of how ill she was, how impossible it seemed to help her. But I’m not so sure. It’s hard to know. Very hard.
______________________
Photo by Harisankar Sahoo on Unsplash
What I Know to be True: Gray is a Color
This is exactly the first thing that came to mind when I opened my eyes this morning.
Gray is a color.
It’s not the memory of a color.
Gray is the color of doves and steel.
Gray is a long life’s memory.
I must have been pondering this in my sleep because when I woke up I thought of putting Gray is a Color on t-shirts. The constant framing of aging as loss feels debilitating to me. The list of things one can no longer do or dream about doing gets longer by the day, that is, if you’re keeping a list. Successful aging becomes about how well one manages loss. I don’t like that.
Gray is a color. It’s not the memory of a color.
This time of life deserves a color that speaks volumes. Gray does that.
Chores Make the World Go Round
New straw new year rake
Birds fed flitting flapping caw
Porch swept for sitting
However Old You Are, It’s Good to Own a Pitchfork Friday Round-Up
Seventy-seven is cool but it’s got nothing on seventy-eight. Tomorrow’s my birthday. I don’t dread it or rue it or pretend it’s not happening. I’m oddly proud of being an old person and feel that, in many ways, I am just coming into my own. I’ll maybe get there by eighty. (I like writing the numbers out. It feels more elegant.)
Last night at a favorite restaurant, I had my first Manhattan. It was a beautiful burgundy color with a perfect cherry on a skewer. Deep and mellow, the Manhattan went perfectly with a gorgeous bowl of French onion soup with melted gruyere cheese. It was possibly the best thing I’ve ever eaten, although I say that a lot.
We have a new water heater. An amazing plumber showed up early this morning, diagnosed our dire situation, arranged to have a new water heater delivered, shoveled mud off our back walk, carried in a package from the front porch, brought the garbage bin up from the street, and had the new water heater installed in three hours. I consider all of these things, especially the water heater after the icy sponge bath this morning, to be extraordinary birthday presents.
I wore my Street Angels Milwaukee Outreach fleece all day. The young man at the pet supply store asked me about it and I told him that I had been on the board for several years. He commented on what good work they do for homeless folks and then gently tapped his chest, saying very softly, I know that life.
When I’m done with this post, I’m going to take a hot shower. I’m going to lotion up, put on my lounging wear (such as it is), and make dinner. It’s thundering out and going to rain more. Tomorrow, to celebrate my birthday, I’m going to clean up the back porch. There is an unfortunate situation with straw for the dog houses that needs to be addressed. It’s all good, though. I have a pitchfork.
The Perfect Gift can be Years in the Making
My son gave me his cat.
But it was more of a desperation thing than a considered gift. There’s a story attached to the giving or loaning or ‘please, can you take Herc for a while’ but the details aren’t important.
The gist of this is that, after five years here, the ungifted cat turned out to be a once in a lifetime gift.
My father insisted that I learn to type so I could always make a living and never be a pauper. He sent me to college, so I’d meet and marry a college man which I eventually did but I met him while I was a secretary making $85 a week. So the combination of those two gifts worked out pretty well except we got divorced, but after we had a beautiful baby girl who is fifty-three now and being a gift to people all over the place.
See how the gifts accumulate if you just hang on for a bit?
It’s magical.
Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Recent Comments