Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Hiking with Words
I love serendipity as a word because it smells like flowers and butterflies and happenstance, but I love the word solivagant even more.
I’ve never laid eyes on this word – solivagant – until it popped up in a prompt. So, I had to look it up and when I did, I marveled at how it fit my morning at the dog park where it was so wonderfully wet that I had to wear my beloved mud boots.
Solivagant, if you don’t know and you likely don’t, means “to wander alone, a solitary traveler or wanderer.”
It was only a walk along the muddy paths of the dog park but when no one there, the dog park can feel wild like a forest. I can envision hiking on my own, say, traveling the Pacific Crest Trail with a backpack, a sleeping roll, and a walking stick carved from some tree. And maybe a dog.
I will never hike the Pacific Crest Trail but that’s not important. What’s important is the envisioning. I might not be a solivagant in reality, but I can see myself being one. All I have to do is look down at my boots.
I Smell Bees
[The prompt this week for my writing group is “I smell _____, and I am.” This is my go at it.]
I smell bees.
It is August. The grass in our yard is yellow, burned by the sun. Everything is dry, brittle. I would water the lawn but my father says it is a waste of money. He knows about money and there not being enough of it which is why he runs his dime store during the day and sells televisions out of the trunk of his car at night. My mother reminds me that I need to mow the lawn. Mowing seems ridiculous when the grass is so stunted by heat but there are green patches under the trees. That must be what she thinks needs mowing.
I can’t tell if I smell bees or heat or the remnants of yesterday’s oil treatment on the dirt road in front of our house. They oil the road so the dust doesn’t blow around but the oil is foul and messy. It lies in pools near our mailbox. I reach around the wooden post to open the metal door. Inside is a postcard from my sister in California. There is a picture of palm trees and fancy cars. “You should come visit! It’s great here!” But I am twelve and not going anywhere. I have to mow the lawn.
The lawnmower is big and green and filled with clots of grass from the last time I mowed. I try to pull the old clumps of grass off the blades but they’re stuck like glue. I wonder if the blades will still cut the grass or just pat it real hard and leave it all standing. Don’t the blades need to be sharp? Or doesn’t it matter? It doesn’t matter. It’s just the mowing that matters. The roar of the lawnmower has to reach my mom on the davenport. I’m not one hundred percent sure that’s where she is at this moment but I’d bet big money on it. She is in depression mode, lying motionless, her face to the wall. When I asked her if she was okay, well, that was when she reminded me to mow the lawn.
I wind the rope around the lawnmower’s starter and pull. Hard. I wind it again and pull again, this time with two hands. I do this ten more times. The lawnmower sputters but doesn’t turn over. When I try to turn the lawnmower over, the metal burns my hand. I leave the lawnmower lying on its side and go sit in the breezeway. My face is red, I can feel it, and the sweat is dripping in my eyes. I want to go in the kitchen, open the refrigerator, and stand there, maybe get a tray of ice cubes out and dump them in my shirt.
The bee smell gets stronger. Hotter. Thicker. I can hear the sounds of heat but maybe it’s crickets or heat bugs or some other creature. Not bees. Bees don’t say anything, I don’t think. It’s just my imagination or a wish. That I could be a person who could sniff out weather and birds and insects of all kinds. I look at the lawnmower laying on its side on the yellow grass and I decide to climb a tree.
It is my favorite tree. It has a split in the branches about halfway up where I can sit and watch things, like cars going back and forth on the oily road. Not today, but sometimes I take a book up in the tree. Today, I just sit. It is green and shady, and I see the grass below the tree is long and needs mowing.
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Photo by Damien TUPINIER on Unsplash
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
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