fall away

What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications.  Every person you meet has something wrong.  All at once, you know a lot of old people.  The obituaries become very interesting.  For the vast majority of animals, with increased senescence comes increased complications.  Us humans, we’re no different.  Past a certain point, to live is to decay.  Past a certain point, we are all dying.

I’m out for dinner with a childhood friend and his wife.  Jane, she’s telling me about her rash and scratching her arms like mad.  They’re red, raw, inflamed, with pale nail marks zigzagging this way and that.  Flakes of dead skin fall like snow from her arms to the table.  It’s piling up in drifts.  Her fingernails, they’re caked with disease.  Her husband, Mark, doesn’t seem to notice or he’s trying not to, his eyes fixed on a television screen in the corner of the pub.  His wife, she’s falling apart one cell at a time, and Mark can’t take his eyes off the football game.

Antivirals, corticosteroids, analgesics, Jane is telling me about all of her medications when the waitress walks up to ask if we want more drinks.  Hearing the word ‘Tylenol,’ the waitress, she begins talking about how she takes T3s for her migraines.  She’s been eating them for years.  She says it’s the only thing that’ll take the edge off her pain.  “My pain.”  These words, she says them like she means really means them.  Jane scratches away at her arms, listening to the waitress talk about her headaches, her dizziness, her auras, her nausea.  The migraines have been getting worse as she gets older, she says.  As she gets older, she’s experiencing more pain everywhere, really.  This waitress, she can’t be too far past thirty.

Jane tells us Mark gets headaches too; stress related, she says.  All part of his generalized anxiety disorder and probably the root of his depression.  Me, I can think of other things that might make Mark depressed, but I keep my thoughts to myself.  I look over at him, and the television holds his attention.  The pint glass in his hand contains beer gone warm and flat, and Mark’s breathing is shallow, his face is a blank.  The football game is over, and an infomercial selling electric boots has taken its place.  SSRIs, benzodiazepines, opiates, Jane is listing off Mark’s medications while he’s mesmerized by a man demonstrating how to switch on the heaters in these amazing boots.  Mark, he isn’t even here.

What they don’t tell you about getting older is that your conversations, they turn more to health problems and medications.  Jane scratches at her arms, the table becoming a snow globe, while she and the waitress continue to trade symptoms and prescriptions.  Mark, he keeps staring at the television which is now showing a lengthy commercial for a cholesterol drug, a statin of some type.  The commercial shows us how taking the drug will improve our lives  We’ll go to the fair and ride the Ferris wheel.  We’ll snuggle with our partners on the couch.  We’ll go out for dinner with friends.

The commercial, it concludes with thirty seconds of side effects, the narrator rattling them off like an auctioneer.  Mark is more zoned out than watching.  Dizziness, irregular heartbeat, fainting.  Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried triptans.  She has, she says, and asks Jane if she’s tried itraconazole.  She has, she says.  Increased hunger, increased thirst, increased urination.  Jane asks the waitress if she’s tried ergotamine.  She has, she says, and asks if Jane has tried dexamethasone injections.  She has, she says.  Light-coloured stools, unusual bleeding or bruising, loss of consciousness.

Loss of consciousness, I could use a little of that.  I interrupt the waitress while she’s describing her nausea, and I ask for another beer.  Whenever she’s got a free moment, I tell her.  I ask her to bring one for Mark, as well.  Mark acknowledges the gesture with a barely audible grunt, his eyes not leaving the television.  Sweating, irritability, death.

During the break in conversation, Jane, she notices the growing desert of diseased skin spreading before her, and attempts to discreetly get rid of it.  I watch silently as Jane unceremoniously sweeps herself away, the fine powder of her dead skin falling to the floor like confetti on the eve of a new year.

in all things, beauty

I’m wandering around the mall, lost, as an Alzheimer’s patient might wander around a nursing home. I’m yelling less, of course, and I’m not insisting that every brunette strolling past is my long dead wife, but I’m no less confused. I actually check to see if I’m wearing a hospital gown. I’m not. When we parted ways, you told me you would text me when and where to meet back up. I check my phone. You haven’t texted.

It could be my mood, but everything looks ugly today. Gaudy signs advertise sales. Smudged glass protects storefront displays. In unlikely patterns, sections of stained floor tiles meet large areas of worn industrial carpet. People mill about the wide mall hallways like cattle working their way through the maze of a corral. Just ahead, a worn out mother drags two screaming kids into a lingerie store. Right behind me, a teenager’s ice cream falls onto the floor. I look back, and he’s staring down at it, cursing, his peach fuzz moustache glistening with vanilla. He has no idea what his next move should be. If I listen carefully, I can hear a Muzak version of Beethoven’s Zur Namensfeier playing over the mall’s PA system.

I find the washroom to wash my hands, but what I’m really wanting is a shower. Like mall washrooms all over the world, this one is populated by guys mostly looking to get away for five minutes; no-one really has to use the facilities. A young professional in a burgundy blazer leans over a dirty sink inspecting something on his face. A middle-aged man, his nose a mess of burst capillaries, leans against a brown-tiled wall squinting at cell phone screen. His wife, before she disappeared into a crowd shoppers, told him she’d text him when and where to meet up. This middle-aged man, his thick, greying eyebrows knitted together in confusion, he doesn’t remember how to check his texts.

A dishevelled college student bursts out of a stall, a book of poetry under one arm, complaining loudly about the unsanitary conditions. “There’s shit everywhere!” he shrieks. “Shit dried onto the walls of the toilet bowl and all over the rim. There’s shit on the seat. There’s even shit on the walls!” The rest of us, we look at the college student, our faces blank. I look up at the ceiling over the stall; there’s a constellation of drops splattered up there, as well. The college student, his face a scowl, flees the washroom with his thick tome under his arm. A long piece of toilet paper flaps behind him, stuck to one shoe.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a scatological fixation. I’m serious. Immortalized in nearly forty surviving letters are scatological references from the composer of Requiem Mass in D Minor. Letters to his mother. Letters to his father. Letters to a cousin, his friends, his wife, his sister. One letter to his choirmaster. Mozart loved scat so much he even wrote songs about it. Canons, rounds, where multiple voices would stagger in, layering, repeating the obscene verse one after another, building to the coarsest of crescendos. Occasionally, he would borrow music written by another composer, changing the words to suit his needs. More often than not, he would compose original music as the vehicle for his scatological lyrics. Mozart, he would have loved this washroom.

I dry my hands, and head back into the mall just in time to see the college student meeting up with his partner, toilet paper still stuck to his shoe.  To her, he’s excitedly recounting the disgusting scene in the washroom, waving the book of poetry between them. His face is dark with disgust. Jonathan Swift, essayist, poet, cleric, he loved writing about human waste. Loved it. His best known work, Gulliver’s Travels, is littered with references to both urine and feces. He wrote numerous poems on the subject of bodily functions. In his final years, he wrote a treatise, Human Ordur, on excrement under the pseudonym Dr Shit. Jonathan Swift, he could have found the humour this college student missed.

My phone buzzes in my pocket, and I know it’s got to be you. You’re ready to meet up. Withdrawing my phone, I spot that kid who dropped the ice cream before, and he’s waiting for a new one in a long, twisting line. I glance over at the lingerie store half expecting to see the worn out mother dragging around two screaming kids. But she’s not there. I’m standing in the middle of the wide mall hallway with crowds of faceless patrons swirling around me, and playing over the PA system is a Muzak version of a selection from Handel’s Water Music. My mood, it’s brightening. Me, I allow the ugly to become beautiful.

the package part 2/2

Placing the package on the desk before me, I sit down, trying to remember the last time we spoke.  I rifle through memories as a 60s secretary might deftly flip through a Rolodex.  I grab one from here, one from there.  I find two old ones stuck to another, and peel them apart, inspecting each.  The last time we spoke, we might have been in that little café in Dar es Salaam.  I decide it was, and go from there.

“Are you sure you have to go?” you asked.  The inflection in your voice and the look on your face told me you already knew the answer.  I didn’t bother providing one.  Then you asked what I might miss most about Tanzania, and, thinking back, it feels like I took a long time to answer.  I find there’s usually little purpose in missing anything; we can always return to where we were.

I’m not good at nostalgia.

The small dog, she curls up at my feet, while the large dog cranes her neck to sniff at the package on the desk.  Like a child’s rubber stamp, her wet nose turns the brown paper dark where she touches it.  I don’t do anything to stop her; she knows what she’s doing.

I wonder now what I thought about after that question.  What would I miss about Tanzania?  Perhaps I considered telling you I would miss the beach, the ocean.  Perhaps your uncle’s hospitality.  Piloting scooters through crowded streets.  The chaotic bazaars.  The feeling of the hot sun on my back so close to the equator.  The way the stars in the night sky looked different.

“Coffee,” I said at last.  “I will miss the coffee.”  I raised the tiny ceramic cup in a mock toast and took a sip, the hot, acrid liquid eating its way past my tongue and down my throat.  It was the strongest, most delicious coffee I had ever tasted in my life.

You tilted your head and grinned, sincerely happy with my answer, and said: “That’s easy.”  I thought your response strange then, but knew better than to question it – and now I now fully understand your reaction.  The near boundless depth of your thoughtfulness should never be underestimated.

I pick up the package, the dog’s approving eyes watching my every move, and raise it to my nose to sniff.  Inhaling slowly, deeply, my brain picks its way through various scents.  Past the smell of grime and paper.  Past the smell of tape glue and stamp gum.  Past the smell of ink and cardboard.  And there it is, buried beneath all of those other olfactory delights, the fresh smell of roasted coffee beans.

The large dog looks on, curious, as I begin carefully unwrapping the package.  She tilts her head to one side and then the other.  The small dog at my feet whimpers in her sleep and kicks her legs.  She dreams, digging through her subconscious the way she might dig a hole in the backyard.  Only here, there is no human to stop her.  Here, there is no need for her to stop digging.  Holding a corner of the creased, brown paper, I mutter under my breath: “Dig deeper, my friend.”

Peeling away the last bit of wrap, the powerful aroma of coffee suddenly hits me like the warmest, most welcome of waves.  Picking up a magnifying glass, I turn the paper in my hands and examine the smudged postmark and stamps.  They’re from somewhere in Indonesia.  Me, I’ve been teleported back to that café in Dar es Salaam.  You, you’re already gone.

the package part 1/2

I rummage around in my brain as an old man might dig through his sock drawer looking for a matching pair.  Trying to remember the last time we spoke is like that.  I take a snippet of memory from over here, sew it to a strand over there, and paste these pieces together over a larger scrap to make a whole.  Everyone does it this way, I’m sure.  Remembering is less recollecting and more reconstructing.  It’s not perfect.

My dogs are going berserk while the deliveryman stands on the other side of the screen door.  He looks at me as if I should let him in, and mouths something through the glass.  I open the sliding window a crack so I can hear him.  “It’s okay,” he says, “I’m good with dogs.”

I don’t know what that means, and I stare at him for moment.  He doesn’t even know my dogs.  They’re nice animals, would never hurt anyone, but he has never met them.  I look down at my dogs, barking, pawing at the door, trying to push through with their big heads.  I question the deliveryman’s judgement.

The package he’s holding, I can see your name scrawled across a corner in red ink.  You’ve always preferred red ink.  There’s no return address because you are forever of no fixed one.  Worn fuzzy in spots, there are stains here and there on the brown packaging paper.  Damp has blurred the postmarks.  Myriad stamps clutter up a corner.  There are no rips or tears because every edge has been meticulously taped down.  You know what it’s like to travel; you know what is needed to keep safe.  The deliveryman insists on getting my signature.  “I’m serious,” he says, “dogs don’t bother me at all.”

At once, I open the door and my dogs pile out onto the porch nearly knocking the deliveryman over.  The large dog stuffs her snout right into his crotch, hard, really going for it.  The smaller one, she starts running laps around him.  A look of panic flashes across his face as he teeters there, holding out the package.  I take it, surprised by how light it is for its size.   A car passing on the street slows down, the driver gawking, trying to see what the commotion is about, and the deliveryman laughs nervously as my dogs accost him.  “See,” he says.  I don’t know what he means, but I smile anyway.

With the tip of my index finger, I sign my name on the screen of the deliveryman’s cell phone while he pets my dogs.  Having collected all the data on him they could, the dogs are calm now, enjoying the attention of their new friend.  He tells them they’re good dogs.  My heavily pixelated signature is severe black against the bright white of the cell phone screen.  It’s barely my name anymore, but the deliveryman seems pleased when I hand him his phone.  “I’ve always been good with dogs,” he says.  Maybe he has.  I have no idea.  He walks purposefully back to his van, and I take the dogs inside.

the runner

A guy sitting two tables over hasn’t stopped talking for the entire time I’ve been here.  He’s talking into his cell phone about running, saying stuff about flat tracks, certified courses, and LSDs.  I have no idea what any of this means, but I can tell he knows what he’s talking about because of his shiny shorts, sinewy leg muscles, and impeccable posture.  He alternates sips from a travel coffee mug and a plastic bottle of water.  He has a system.

Me, I’m working my way through a book of crossword puzzles and sipping coffee from a paper cup, the plastic lid sharp on my bottom lip.  I bite the lid with my front teeth when I’m trying to think of an answer, causing the plastic to become thinner and slightly jagged.  It helps, I think, this gnawing.  I used to do the same thing in school, but with my pens and pencils.  More than once, I had to sneak away to the washroom with ink in my mouth.  I can still remember the taste.

The runner two tables over, he mentions something about black toenails.  I’m almost sure of it.  He takes a quick sip of his water before continuing, at length, about overuse injuries and orthotics.  I see him check a second cell phone while he’s talking on the first.  He’s amused; I can see it in the slight crinkling at the corner of his eye.  He systematically takes two more sips from both the coffee and the water.

I’m trying to think of an eight-letter word for ‘lacuna.’  ‘Omission’ doesn’t work.  Not at all.  I chew on the plastic lid of my cup a little more.  At the table to my other side, a girl sits reading a book.  Everything about her seems sad: her weeping willow hair, her charcoal skirt, the shooting star tattoo above her ankle.  Occasionally, I catch a glimpse of her book’s cover; it’s about travelling alone.  It says something about breaks.  The girl at the table, she catches me looking over at her and meets me with a look that makes me feel like a creature existing somewhere between a sexual predator and an orphan.  I count the letters in ‘break’ but there aren’t enough for the answer I need.

Jiggling one leg up and down the way ectomorphs do, the runner’s table vibrates, creating a storm in his clear plastic water bottle.  He talks excitedly about carb-loading, and as he does, his eyes drift over to a glass display case filled with donuts, Danishes, and chocolate-covered croissants.  The word ‘glycogen’ drips from his lips as though he might be saying something erotic.  The phrase ‘side stitches’ is spit out of his mouth as though he can’t stand the taste.

Where we live, winter seems to have forgotten us.  It does a half-assed job, only snowing occasionally, with the temperatures rarely dropping too far below freezing.  I suppose, if one should want to badly enough, running outdoors could still happen.  Past the window, the December sky is grey, and the ground is an ocean of dry, dormant grass with dirty snow islands.  Winter is on hiatus.  I count the numbers in ‘hiatus.’  There are not enough to fill the spaces in 14-across.

The runner, he’s on a tangent about training, leaning forward now, jiggling both legs furiously under the table.  Overtraining, this he rushes past as you might rush past a beckoning stranger on the street when you’re late for an appointment with your bank.  The volume of his voice drops a little when he begins talking about altitude training.  I can tell he’s proud of himself to know the word ‘hypoxia.’  Then he says it, just like that.  This runner, this guy two tables over says exactly what my ears need to hear.  He starts talking about interval training, and my eyes get wide as I look down at my puzzle.

I look down at 14-across, and see that I already have the ‘t’ and the ‘a.’  I air-write the word ‘interval’ across the remaining spaces.  It fits perfectly.  I can’t contain my glee.

stamp it off

“I can’t tell if you’re back,” she says to me.  And I don’t know what to say.  What does one say?

There’s mud in the snow or under the snow or both.  Our boots make a sort of squelching noise, and gunk accumulates on the rubber soles in layers.  The ground is wet from melting snow, and the temperatures aren’t quite cold enough to do a good job freezing anything.  Everything smells kind of rotten.  The earth knows damned well it’s not spring.  It protests.  And I can’t tell if I’m back.

“I decided not to stay there,” I tell her, trailing off.  It’s not really a sufficient response to her statement, and we both know it.  “It didn’t really feel like home,” I add.  “I was never really comfortable.”  Feeling like I already said more than I wanted, I stop talking.

The air is warm, but not so warm that you could go without a coat.  I wear my winter coat that I’ve owned for far too long, but don’t really want to replace.  It was never fashionable, so will never be out of fashion.  Anyway, I don’t want my life to be measured in how many winter coats I went through, and this one is good enough.

“So, you’re back for now,” she says, sounding almost accusatory.  She’s trying to pin me down, to get me to commit.

“That place wasn’t meant to be my home,” I explain.  “It was a place to be for a time.  When that time was up, I arrived at something of a crossroad: stay or leave.  I left.  That I came back here is something I wasn’t really planning.”  I try to catch her eye, but she’s watching her boots squish through the muddy snow.  “But here I am.”

“What do you plan to build here?” she asks.  And I don’t know what to say.  What does one say?

We stand at an intersection waiting for the light to change, listening to automobile tires hiss past us on the slushy asphalt.  Everything is so dirty when winter doesn’t do its job right.  Red and green lights trade places, and we walk, muddy, wet boots clomping over the crosswalk.  We’re in the middle of the suburbs with downtown, the heart of the city, kilometres away.  I don’t know what I plan to build here.  What did I build before?  So much of what I knew is gone.

“I don’t know,” I say, “that depends.  Is here the same place I left?”

She’s silent now, while the warm chinook wind playfully picks up her hair.  I think I catch the hint of a smile, but I’m not sure.  And it doesn’t really matter.  There’s mud in the snow or under the snow or both.  Our boots make a sort of squelching noise.  Gunk accumulates on our soles in layers, causing us to walk a little off balance.  We try to stamp it off.  We try in vain to stamp it off.

future thought

Everything is more artsy in black and white.  This band on stage has it figured out.  Each member is dressed in black and white.  Their instruments are black and white.  Black and white film stock is projected onto a screen behind them – someone’s old home movies from the looks of things.

Clip one is of a family trip through some mountains, but this quickly cuts away.  The shoddy camerawork is so quaint it almost seems intentional.  Next there’s a long segment shot from the passenger window of a moving car.  The smooth, round shapes of the other cars on the street let me know that we’re in the early 1960s.  The people on the street have that look about them like people did back then.  They’re looking up and not down.  They’re present.  Everything is black and white.

The band seems angry.  Their  instruments are loud.  The singer grips his guitar like he wants to break it in half, and shouts into the microphone.  His lyrics are black and white.  Something about this being wrong and this other thing being right.  His face is mostly beard.  His eyes don’t spend much time open, and I’m pretty sure he’s wearing mascara.  If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he hates his job.  And perhaps he does.

The projector does its job, and projects an image of a bunch of people on a fishing boat.  There’s a guy in the frame who is obviously the captain, and I’m wondering why he’s not piloting his ship instead of laughing it up with the tourists.  If not him at the wheel, then who?  The camera catches his eye, and for a spit second I see something like disdain.  I wonder who’s behind the camera.

The captain in the home movie is smoking a pipe and squinting in the sun.  This seems almost too good to be true.  A tourist is struggling comically with a large fishing rod mounted to the back of the boat.  This also seems to good to be true.  I just know he’s going to haul in a giant tuna or something.  His fellow tourists will clap him on the back.  His wife will be so proud of him.  He’ll have his photo taken with it.  I don’t even have to watch the rest to know how this scene turns out.

From my vantage point, I can’t see much of the drummer, but I sure can hear him.  Each crisp crack of the snare demands attention.  Each thud of the kick drum is felt in the chest.  I catch the occasional arm and stick here and there.  Sometimes the hint of a head.  On the front of the kick drum is a black and white image of cityscape along with the band’s name.  It’s artsy.  I can see the drummer’s right foot tapping away on the hi-hat pedal.  He’s wearing black and white Converse high tops.  They’ve thought of everything, this band.

There’s a new scene projected onto the backdrop behind the drummer: a smiling little girl in pigtails stumbling around on a beach.  She’s got a rusted metal pail in one hand and what appears to be a small trowel in the other.  She looks at the camera a lot with something like adoration in her eyes.  It’s her dad holding the camera, I guess.  There are other adults around, maintaining a familiar distance, sometimes hamming it up for the camera, other times fussing over the little girl.  Aunts and uncles.  Cousins.  There’s a lady who looks like she could be the mother.

Where are these people now?  I suppose a lot of the adults are dead or really close to it.  The kids are now into late middle age and making home movies of their own kids and grandkids.  And what will become of these home movies they’re making?  They’ll be watched for a time and then forgotten, only to be found again by future strangers in a dusty attic.  They’ll be batch bought by hungry deal seekers at a future estate sale.

Though they’re not black and white, technology will have progressed by then to such a point that these movies will seem antiquated and cute.  They’ll be artsy.  Some future rock band or modern dance troupe or ironic nightclub or frou-frou art studio of performance art company will recognize their value and use them.  Someone in the audience will run through this same line of thought.