Wistful rain. Rhythmic and drumming down upon the roof of the thirty year old Datsun I bought.
Pulling up along Madison, the lights of the house faint still in the twilight of the early evening. Blinds down, the front yard and white picket fence sacrosanct, the pretensions clear.
Samantha is leaning at the door edge. Coquettish, a wry look and an almost aggressive curve to the lip. Only when Darryl is not around. As if asking, wondering, we had a child together didn't we?
Darwin, gym bag hoisted over shoulder runs out, smile wide, happy to see me. It has been a few weeks.
Dad...have you heard about this show where...
You know, honestly, when I think back to meeting her, Canada Day '96, I see not Samantha but a much younger and different man. Skinny, no grey hair, chain smoking Marlboros bought off the Kingston black market.
Paul and I were doing shots on the patio of the 129. It was so fucking hot almost all had retreated to the air conditioned sanctuary that was the split room of the Charles St inside.
Sam and Val pulled up in Val's VW, parking half drunk, wheel on the curb, stumbling out. She sat down, PHD student, curves to make a Victorian happy, yelling for the waiter to bring a Rum and Coke...hold the Coke.
I was in love.
Down on the beach that night, corporate sponsored fireworks skyside, idiotic classical music blaring from the loudspeakers for drama, Sam telling me that her Marxist analysis did not preclude the sex we were going to have, and I was so happy.
You know what I mean? When you are just happy?
Well not for long. Never really lasts. Pass me the cigarettes I stopped smoking ten years ago.
The road, winding and very dark, Darwin snoring in the back, Rice Lake and the cottage only a few minutes away.
Passing empty side houses and abandoned farmsteads. Forked lightning illuminating overgrown trees.
I carry Darwin into the cabin. Lay him down in the room I remember from childhood. Sky so black that there are almost no lake lights to imply others. The landscape of Canada. A large and magnificent place with not that much going for it.
The shadows you find here.
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Friday, June 17, 2011
Fragment 37: Ottoman Empire
I am just fucking drunk. No kidding.
I sit in one of those blurs that can only come through a bottle of Jim Beam and a boycott of water. Cindy slides over, top a little too low, running her finger down the side of my face. Its kind of a come on I guess!
-So what the fuck?
She laughs.
Touching forehead to table, angry, drinks, more drinks.
Hard for me to believe, cause I knew her once. Lovers once. Cindy was a dream I had, when sober, a few years back.
And here we are, parkside, patio lights too dim, old men looking down on the pits with bottles of Fifty and shots of Jack, or so it would seem. Trees now impressionist by hour sixty-one of a sixty-two hour bender.
I see Cindy as through a carnival glass. Pushing over, detached, rings touching..."I love you".
What was it then, 1994, Cindy dancing down Walnut Ave, driven in a van by her Dad, residence bound.
I met her because I said I would carry that table up the stairs. I met her because I came a day too early. So it goes.
Cindy has a screwdriver. Leaning with that beautiful face over this empty battlefield of failed emotion. Jonathon, really what can you...
Cigarettes out, smoke streams across the table.
The bar patio blessed with the left-overs of a generation I would love to forget.
She puts her index finger under the chin, drawing me a moth to the flame.
And there I am again, these mornings before it all, snug against her, oblivion another brilliant sunset away.
I sit in one of those blurs that can only come through a bottle of Jim Beam and a boycott of water. Cindy slides over, top a little too low, running her finger down the side of my face. Its kind of a come on I guess!
-So what the fuck?
She laughs.
Touching forehead to table, angry, drinks, more drinks.
Hard for me to believe, cause I knew her once. Lovers once. Cindy was a dream I had, when sober, a few years back.
And here we are, parkside, patio lights too dim, old men looking down on the pits with bottles of Fifty and shots of Jack, or so it would seem. Trees now impressionist by hour sixty-one of a sixty-two hour bender.
I see Cindy as through a carnival glass. Pushing over, detached, rings touching..."I love you".
What was it then, 1994, Cindy dancing down Walnut Ave, driven in a van by her Dad, residence bound.
I met her because I said I would carry that table up the stairs. I met her because I came a day too early. So it goes.
Cindy has a screwdriver. Leaning with that beautiful face over this empty battlefield of failed emotion. Jonathon, really what can you...
Cigarettes out, smoke streams across the table.
The bar patio blessed with the left-overs of a generation I would love to forget.
She puts her index finger under the chin, drawing me a moth to the flame.
And there I am again, these mornings before it all, snug against her, oblivion another brilliant sunset away.
Monday, March 7, 2011
Fragment 36: Socialism
Fragment 36: Socialism
I met Denver at an antique market.
He was flipping through some old prints, the kind I like, and he looked up at me. I was anxious to have a glance...aggressive as always I was probably pushing in on him.
“Sweetheart, I promise. If I find anything you like I'll give you first chance...”
And he smiled.
He had me, apologies to Jerry Maguire, at Sweetheart.
Denver was the perfect man. Handsome, but old enough to not use it anymore. Tough as nails, but never towards anyone. Generous. There was no but. He was just generous...of heart and spirit.
We had Sally two years after first contact.
She was so perfect. Ugly as a baby beyond all reasoning. But not to us, of course. To us she was stunning.
She was our daughter.
Denver was quite the fella. He bought into all that “hewers of wood” bullshit and somehow...due to his marvellous good looks, he persuaded me to move to Burke's Falls with him and our baby. My parents, for once, were so thrilled. Bad girl gone good. We had never gotten along much, but now I was their Florence Nightingale.
What a time.
Simple.
Happy.
Denver and I had this little thing we would do. We lived in the Falls, but we often would drive down to campsites across Muskoka. One of us would pilot the RV and the other would drive ahead with Sally in the SUV. We always brought both, so we didn't have to pack up shop to go buy groceries or go to the movies.
That particular July trip I was in the RV.
About ten minutes out of the Falls we hit a foggy patch on the highway. I remember thinking Denver should slow down, just seconds before...
I don't know...have you ever had those moments where it seemed the awful, tight fist in your stomach would never go away? That it would linger with you, sometimes more, sometimes less, but forever? That it would haunt you, as a ghost, inexorable? Reminding you daily of that which you had lost. The family that you had been denied.
I don't know what happened after that.
I really don't.
I moved back to Toronto. To an apartment on Jarvis. Nice place, save the cockroaches, mice, loud neighbours and the fact I no longer cared.
I just didn't care.
I would walk down to Balfour's and slide into the stool every night around six. I would start with a couple of beers, then a Jim Beam or three, then...well then I would drink whatever struck my fancy until they would, finally, ask me to leave.
The days blended. I was running through the insurance policy and the money we had saved like...like...
Like it no longer mattered.
It no longer mattered.
There is this weird moment when you know you are trying to die. Not suicide. Just suicide.
There were nights I would polish off a bottle of Walker and go home to snort coke with some asshole I didn't even know. I'd meet gals at the Bradshaw and do tequila shots. I would do anything I could.
Anything I could to not think about anything at all.
Its odd, you know, the years, and....
Angry. The rain angry. You can barely see out the windows of the bus, weaving its way down the tiny road to Malaucen. The Vaucluse.
Rains exceptionally hard, but fortunately this was our stop.
Filing out like the tour driven fools we were, through empty town square to the Hotel Ventoux. Squat and small town, it was what you would expect.
Attentive old lady, rustic feel and decor, somehow depressing.
I slid into the hurt bed in the tiny room, alone with a skylight as the only single girl on the tour.
I was, at least, not in Toronto.
Funny, next day in the breakfast room I was pleased to hear that the bridges to the south had been washed out. We wouldn't be going anywhere.
Croissants and coffee. Couples laughing at the delay. The guide all apologetic.
Coming out of the hotel, mist settling on the mountain, looking both ways down empty small town streets.
Malaucen had the central plaza that all French towns do. Lined with tree shaded areas for Boules. This day the old men had all stayed at home.
Seeing the Cafe de la Republique open I left hive and spread across.
Bemused but tolerant locals. Me, straight up to the small bar, sitting down and ordering a glass of wine and a double of whatever they had.
With a wry look, the proprietor probably guessed the rest.
Toronto, New York, Malaucen...
Drowning, dying...the town is not important. The landscape is always the same.
I suppose a relatively young Canadian girl was a bit of an event.
To their credit, the event was smiles and laughs, free espresso and Poire William.
By mid-afternoon...well I was very drunk. I was not feeling particularly mademoiselle.
Looking out I knew it was time to go.
And I would have, but for Lloyd.
Lloyd strode in, late afternoon, grizzled with a faded leather jacket that made him look like some delicious WWII fly-boy. Without hesitation, and with nary an acknowledgement, he slid onto the bar stool beside me and ordered a drink.
Lighting an unfiltered cigarette, he tossed me a half-glance...
“What is your issue?”
I laughed and and tapped my glass on the bar...time for another.
Four blurs to five and fades to six and lingers to seven and....
Lloyd, it turns out, left Hastings four years ago and moved to the south. He lived in small stone farm house, with no farm of course, and painted. I supposed for a living.
Now dark outside, pools of light illuminating small dots of the main drag, Lloyd turns, wry smile...
“Want to see my studio?”
Why not?
For Provence it was bracingly cold. Up the winding and very narrow roads of the hillside. Heavy rain beginning again.
His studio is this vast, vault like room above the main part of the house. Who knows what its original purpose was? Lloyd had paintings all over the walls and stacked on the floors. Mostly bizzare. Blurred, disturbing blends of colours. Disconnected images. Eyes isolated, mouths, wilted trees, flames...it sounds derivative, but it was really good.
“Do you sell much?” I asked, flipping through the canvasses flirtatiously.
“I sell nothing” he said with a sideways look, “I do this for me alone”.
Awkward pause.
“Would you like a drink?”
Very much...
Lloyd leaves the studio, off to find what he promises will be the best single-malt I have ever had...
At the bottom of one of his most abstract piles I find them. A strikingly clear painting. A young looking, very beautiful woman, lying on a bright beach, a small boy bouncing above her. Both laughing. Seeming a memory of a perfect moment.
Faces tilted, smiling, smiling at me...
I feel him behind, breath gentle on my neck, saying nothing.
A stillness. The child and the woman. So clearly lost to us now. So clearly...past.
“Who are they?”
Pause.
“You know who they are.”
I met Denver at an antique market.
He was flipping through some old prints, the kind I like, and he looked up at me. I was anxious to have a glance...aggressive as always I was probably pushing in on him.
“Sweetheart, I promise. If I find anything you like I'll give you first chance...”
And he smiled.
He had me, apologies to Jerry Maguire, at Sweetheart.
Denver was the perfect man. Handsome, but old enough to not use it anymore. Tough as nails, but never towards anyone. Generous. There was no but. He was just generous...of heart and spirit.
We had Sally two years after first contact.
She was so perfect. Ugly as a baby beyond all reasoning. But not to us, of course. To us she was stunning.
She was our daughter.
Denver was quite the fella. He bought into all that “hewers of wood” bullshit and somehow...due to his marvellous good looks, he persuaded me to move to Burke's Falls with him and our baby. My parents, for once, were so thrilled. Bad girl gone good. We had never gotten along much, but now I was their Florence Nightingale.
What a time.
Simple.
Happy.
Denver and I had this little thing we would do. We lived in the Falls, but we often would drive down to campsites across Muskoka. One of us would pilot the RV and the other would drive ahead with Sally in the SUV. We always brought both, so we didn't have to pack up shop to go buy groceries or go to the movies.
That particular July trip I was in the RV.
About ten minutes out of the Falls we hit a foggy patch on the highway. I remember thinking Denver should slow down, just seconds before...
I don't know...have you ever had those moments where it seemed the awful, tight fist in your stomach would never go away? That it would linger with you, sometimes more, sometimes less, but forever? That it would haunt you, as a ghost, inexorable? Reminding you daily of that which you had lost. The family that you had been denied.
I don't know what happened after that.
I really don't.
I moved back to Toronto. To an apartment on Jarvis. Nice place, save the cockroaches, mice, loud neighbours and the fact I no longer cared.
I just didn't care.
I would walk down to Balfour's and slide into the stool every night around six. I would start with a couple of beers, then a Jim Beam or three, then...well then I would drink whatever struck my fancy until they would, finally, ask me to leave.
The days blended. I was running through the insurance policy and the money we had saved like...like...
Like it no longer mattered.
It no longer mattered.
There is this weird moment when you know you are trying to die. Not suicide. Just suicide.
There were nights I would polish off a bottle of Walker and go home to snort coke with some asshole I didn't even know. I'd meet gals at the Bradshaw and do tequila shots. I would do anything I could.
Anything I could to not think about anything at all.
Its odd, you know, the years, and....
Angry. The rain angry. You can barely see out the windows of the bus, weaving its way down the tiny road to Malaucen. The Vaucluse.
Rains exceptionally hard, but fortunately this was our stop.
Filing out like the tour driven fools we were, through empty town square to the Hotel Ventoux. Squat and small town, it was what you would expect.
Attentive old lady, rustic feel and decor, somehow depressing.
I slid into the hurt bed in the tiny room, alone with a skylight as the only single girl on the tour.
I was, at least, not in Toronto.
Funny, next day in the breakfast room I was pleased to hear that the bridges to the south had been washed out. We wouldn't be going anywhere.
Croissants and coffee. Couples laughing at the delay. The guide all apologetic.
Coming out of the hotel, mist settling on the mountain, looking both ways down empty small town streets.
Malaucen had the central plaza that all French towns do. Lined with tree shaded areas for Boules. This day the old men had all stayed at home.
Seeing the Cafe de la Republique open I left hive and spread across.
Bemused but tolerant locals. Me, straight up to the small bar, sitting down and ordering a glass of wine and a double of whatever they had.
With a wry look, the proprietor probably guessed the rest.
Toronto, New York, Malaucen...
Drowning, dying...the town is not important. The landscape is always the same.
I suppose a relatively young Canadian girl was a bit of an event.
To their credit, the event was smiles and laughs, free espresso and Poire William.
By mid-afternoon...well I was very drunk. I was not feeling particularly mademoiselle.
Looking out I knew it was time to go.
And I would have, but for Lloyd.
Lloyd strode in, late afternoon, grizzled with a faded leather jacket that made him look like some delicious WWII fly-boy. Without hesitation, and with nary an acknowledgement, he slid onto the bar stool beside me and ordered a drink.
Lighting an unfiltered cigarette, he tossed me a half-glance...
“What is your issue?”
I laughed and and tapped my glass on the bar...time for another.
Four blurs to five and fades to six and lingers to seven and....
Lloyd, it turns out, left Hastings four years ago and moved to the south. He lived in small stone farm house, with no farm of course, and painted. I supposed for a living.
Now dark outside, pools of light illuminating small dots of the main drag, Lloyd turns, wry smile...
“Want to see my studio?”
Why not?
For Provence it was bracingly cold. Up the winding and very narrow roads of the hillside. Heavy rain beginning again.
His studio is this vast, vault like room above the main part of the house. Who knows what its original purpose was? Lloyd had paintings all over the walls and stacked on the floors. Mostly bizzare. Blurred, disturbing blends of colours. Disconnected images. Eyes isolated, mouths, wilted trees, flames...it sounds derivative, but it was really good.
“Do you sell much?” I asked, flipping through the canvasses flirtatiously.
“I sell nothing” he said with a sideways look, “I do this for me alone”.
Awkward pause.
“Would you like a drink?”
Very much...
Lloyd leaves the studio, off to find what he promises will be the best single-malt I have ever had...
At the bottom of one of his most abstract piles I find them. A strikingly clear painting. A young looking, very beautiful woman, lying on a bright beach, a small boy bouncing above her. Both laughing. Seeming a memory of a perfect moment.
Faces tilted, smiling, smiling at me...
I feel him behind, breath gentle on my neck, saying nothing.
A stillness. The child and the woman. So clearly lost to us now. So clearly...past.
“Who are they?”
Pause.
“You know who they are.”
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Fragment 35: Mortal Combat
Perfect moments.
Air still, Trevor, two-years older is ahead.
Bicycles racing down Bethune, early summer morning, heat gentle, not yet oppressive.
1993.
Eight and ten.
Before...well before everything.
Trevor was one of those kids everybody liked. Brown hair, freckled face and toothy grin.
Just a nice guy.
Trevor would make the old ladies at the donut shop laugh.
He would make the OPP guys smoking on break out front of the station house laugh.
He could make our mother laugh, and no one did that.
Even when I was a kid I knew my mother was beautiful.
She had, I later understood, those wistful, country-girl looks that made the very worst men weak in the knees.
And she never made a personal decision that she did not regret and she never met a man who didn't, in the end, walk all over her.
But I couldn't know that then.
She was just mom and she'd hug Trevor and I each day home off the bus with her happy face and sad eyes. Standing, waiting at the top of the stairs of the house that her father bought when our dad left.
1999, just before the new millennium, and the phone call comes from Texas..."Mrs. Ridell, were you once the wife of...
I guess summer city folks would have thought our house quaint or even idyllic, but it was just a home.
God, we never had any money. Sort-of makes me laugh now, you know?
Good thing we had that house because the rest was all Kraft Dinner and Hamburger Helper.
Not that Trev or I cared. KD was OK by me!
She tried. What can I say?
When Trevor was twelve, guess it must have been '95, the Second Time Around got one of those Genesis systems. All our friends had one, or a Nintendo, or so it seemed. I am sure it was not really true, but you know the perceived injustices of childhood are the deepest injustices of all, right-or-wrong.
Trevor wanted it so badly.
He would wander up outside the store window and simply stare, slack-jawed, trying to dream the fifty dollars into existence.
I do know that when Christmas came around and Grandpa made sure it was under the tree it was the happiest day of Trevor's life.
Grandpa mad, mama crying in the kitchen, goddamn it Jennifer, not again, why the fuck would you let him...sudden silence as I walk in unexpectedly.
I can't even begin to count the hours we spent in front of that fucking thing.
I loved the fighting games. All that martial arts shit.
Not Trevor. He would play them, but for him it was Sonic or sports or even Bugs Bunny stuff.
He was a gentle guy, you know?
Remembering Grandpa dying, mama almost stone faced in shock, Trevor's head on her lap, tears streaming down his face, long lines of neighbours anxious to pay respects and there, in the front yard, I see the cardinal, high tree-top, gazing intently into my eyes.
Years-and-years-and-years.
All a kaleidoscope.
Colours blending as do memories, swirling together and then apart.
Girls, then young women, then women.
The kisses. The hands held. The break-ups and...
All the friends moving away, taking that one-way ticket to Toronto.
Shannon, hugging Trevor, big eyes and honest smile, I am sure I will only be gone a few months...
Somehow you stumble through, right? You make it through.
And you know why?
Because one day, getting ready to go off to college, waiting tables at the Boston Pizza, and there is Cynthia, from grade three, but now...well it is not grade three anymore.
She is leaving for the same college too.
Why did Trevor want to go?
Who knows?
All the socialist types I met at York said our soldiers were war-crazy or had no choices.
But, you know what, that is bullshit.
It's just bullshit.
Like it or not Trevor wanted to make a difference.
It's true, he didn't have a job on Bay St lined up, but it wasn't about that.
When he told us our mother was furious. To him that didn't matter; he wanted to serve his country.
He wanted to serve in Afghanistan.
Smarter people than me, years from now, will decide if he was wrong or right. But this is where we all, it would seem, were willing to send him.
Dusty roads in Kandahar, laughter on patrol, coming around road's corner, children waving from just off-centre as the final wave of light rushed in at him. Did he have time to see his arm gone? To look over at those children now dead? To feel the pressure of the blast?
Floating, floating, slowly.
First in the cargo hold.
Then across the highway to the ceremony.
And finally to home.
To mother. Older and beyond sadness.
To the streets and yards and greasy spoons and treehouses and schools and hockey rinks that he briefly graced.
An impression. Ephemeral.
It was only a month after Cynthia and I married that my mother died.
Her heart just stopped. Forty-nine years old.
Clearing out the house, Cynthia now seven months along, moving slow.
Trevor's room untouched.
Leaf's posters.
You know, he had said laughing at Dylan's just five winters past, I will never live to see them win a Stanley Cup
Girly mags under the mattress. Country CDs.
I was stunned to find a dog-eared copy of The Plague by Camus in his top dresser drawer.
But I was even more surprised, digging through piles of sweaters and shoes, to find the Genesis.
Buried at closet back. Carefully all the games stacked beside.
The Christmas card from our grandfather taped atop.
We had not played it in many years. Yet Trevor had kept it hidden here pristine. Almost a subconscious shrine to fond memory.
So there we are.
All huddled together, flesh-on-flesh.
Waves crashing astride the landing crafts.
Hearts full of trepidation and fear.
The sounds of death and terror about us and the violence of this meager existence near surreal.
The future on unknown beaches.
Waiting, as we all ultimately do, to meet a fate not foreseen on a childhood's Christmas mornings.
Air still, Trevor, two-years older is ahead.
Bicycles racing down Bethune, early summer morning, heat gentle, not yet oppressive.
1993.
Eight and ten.
Before...well before everything.
Trevor was one of those kids everybody liked. Brown hair, freckled face and toothy grin.
Just a nice guy.
Trevor would make the old ladies at the donut shop laugh.
He would make the OPP guys smoking on break out front of the station house laugh.
He could make our mother laugh, and no one did that.
Even when I was a kid I knew my mother was beautiful.
She had, I later understood, those wistful, country-girl looks that made the very worst men weak in the knees.
And she never made a personal decision that she did not regret and she never met a man who didn't, in the end, walk all over her.
But I couldn't know that then.
She was just mom and she'd hug Trevor and I each day home off the bus with her happy face and sad eyes. Standing, waiting at the top of the stairs of the house that her father bought when our dad left.
1999, just before the new millennium, and the phone call comes from Texas..."Mrs. Ridell, were you once the wife of...
I guess summer city folks would have thought our house quaint or even idyllic, but it was just a home.
God, we never had any money. Sort-of makes me laugh now, you know?
Good thing we had that house because the rest was all Kraft Dinner and Hamburger Helper.
Not that Trev or I cared. KD was OK by me!
She tried. What can I say?
When Trevor was twelve, guess it must have been '95, the Second Time Around got one of those Genesis systems. All our friends had one, or a Nintendo, or so it seemed. I am sure it was not really true, but you know the perceived injustices of childhood are the deepest injustices of all, right-or-wrong.
Trevor wanted it so badly.
He would wander up outside the store window and simply stare, slack-jawed, trying to dream the fifty dollars into existence.
I do know that when Christmas came around and Grandpa made sure it was under the tree it was the happiest day of Trevor's life.
Grandpa mad, mama crying in the kitchen, goddamn it Jennifer, not again, why the fuck would you let him...sudden silence as I walk in unexpectedly.
I can't even begin to count the hours we spent in front of that fucking thing.
I loved the fighting games. All that martial arts shit.
Not Trevor. He would play them, but for him it was Sonic or sports or even Bugs Bunny stuff.
He was a gentle guy, you know?
Remembering Grandpa dying, mama almost stone faced in shock, Trevor's head on her lap, tears streaming down his face, long lines of neighbours anxious to pay respects and there, in the front yard, I see the cardinal, high tree-top, gazing intently into my eyes.
Years-and-years-and-years.
All a kaleidoscope.
Colours blending as do memories, swirling together and then apart.
Girls, then young women, then women.
The kisses. The hands held. The break-ups and...
All the friends moving away, taking that one-way ticket to Toronto.
Shannon, hugging Trevor, big eyes and honest smile, I am sure I will only be gone a few months...
Somehow you stumble through, right? You make it through.
And you know why?
Because one day, getting ready to go off to college, waiting tables at the Boston Pizza, and there is Cynthia, from grade three, but now...well it is not grade three anymore.
She is leaving for the same college too.
Why did Trevor want to go?
Who knows?
All the socialist types I met at York said our soldiers were war-crazy or had no choices.
But, you know what, that is bullshit.
It's just bullshit.
Like it or not Trevor wanted to make a difference.
It's true, he didn't have a job on Bay St lined up, but it wasn't about that.
When he told us our mother was furious. To him that didn't matter; he wanted to serve his country.
He wanted to serve in Afghanistan.
Smarter people than me, years from now, will decide if he was wrong or right. But this is where we all, it would seem, were willing to send him.
Dusty roads in Kandahar, laughter on patrol, coming around road's corner, children waving from just off-centre as the final wave of light rushed in at him. Did he have time to see his arm gone? To look over at those children now dead? To feel the pressure of the blast?
Floating, floating, slowly.
First in the cargo hold.
Then across the highway to the ceremony.
And finally to home.
To mother. Older and beyond sadness.
To the streets and yards and greasy spoons and treehouses and schools and hockey rinks that he briefly graced.
An impression. Ephemeral.
It was only a month after Cynthia and I married that my mother died.
Her heart just stopped. Forty-nine years old.
Clearing out the house, Cynthia now seven months along, moving slow.
Trevor's room untouched.
Leaf's posters.
You know, he had said laughing at Dylan's just five winters past, I will never live to see them win a Stanley Cup
Girly mags under the mattress. Country CDs.
I was stunned to find a dog-eared copy of The Plague by Camus in his top dresser drawer.
But I was even more surprised, digging through piles of sweaters and shoes, to find the Genesis.
Buried at closet back. Carefully all the games stacked beside.
The Christmas card from our grandfather taped atop.
We had not played it in many years. Yet Trevor had kept it hidden here pristine. Almost a subconscious shrine to fond memory.
So there we are.
All huddled together, flesh-on-flesh.
Waves crashing astride the landing crafts.
Hearts full of trepidation and fear.
The sounds of death and terror about us and the violence of this meager existence near surreal.
The future on unknown beaches.
Waiting, as we all ultimately do, to meet a fate not foreseen on a childhood's Christmas mornings.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Fragment 34: Thermopylae
Laughing...together.
It is Monday morning with flags unfurled.
Children gone, last one out today.
An empty house.
Mandy the years just slipped by. It wasn't a conscious road, this road that led me away from you.
It was never what I wanted.
But then life is never what we want.
The dreams of fifteen that dull to the ache of fifty-five.
When I saw you, sunglasses on, by the boardwalk at the end of Brand St.
Before Balfour's, before marriage, before the mortgage.
You had that inscrutable smirk.
Sly, quizzically flirtatious face.
Darling green eyes.
You know these summer things never last...
Well you were wrong before you were right.
All great relationships, like civilizations, leave monuments to decay in their wake.
The bungalow on Miles Ave. with its multiple extensions.
Debbie, Jake and Joseph, too grown up now.
The memory boxes of shared joys and pains that are a garage and basement plump with the detritus of lives joined.
Fragments of junk sale daydreams.
These vaulted and echoing cathedrals that we ourselves erected but can only now visit as if tourists being guided through our own past.
It is, I guess, as was Stonehenge after the Druids left.
But what is this then, this compulsion so many of us have?
This desire to stand shoulder-by-shoulder as if against the tide of the world?
Knowing as we all must that we are sure to fail.
I suppose it is that the failure matters less than that, on those many days that littered our battlefields, you would whisper ever so softly to me. Touch my fingers with yours.
So find me Xerxes and Leonidas,
And to this brink and pass do draw me near,
Loose these quivers full of expectations,
And deliver me into this valley of tears,
And then go tell it to the Spartans,
Stranger passing by,
That in faith with this fleeting fairytale,
We tried.
We tried.
It is Monday morning with flags unfurled.
Children gone, last one out today.
An empty house.
Mandy the years just slipped by. It wasn't a conscious road, this road that led me away from you.
It was never what I wanted.
But then life is never what we want.
The dreams of fifteen that dull to the ache of fifty-five.
When I saw you, sunglasses on, by the boardwalk at the end of Brand St.
Before Balfour's, before marriage, before the mortgage.
You had that inscrutable smirk.
Sly, quizzically flirtatious face.
Darling green eyes.
You know these summer things never last...
Well you were wrong before you were right.
All great relationships, like civilizations, leave monuments to decay in their wake.
The bungalow on Miles Ave. with its multiple extensions.
Debbie, Jake and Joseph, too grown up now.
The memory boxes of shared joys and pains that are a garage and basement plump with the detritus of lives joined.
Fragments of junk sale daydreams.
These vaulted and echoing cathedrals that we ourselves erected but can only now visit as if tourists being guided through our own past.
It is, I guess, as was Stonehenge after the Druids left.
But what is this then, this compulsion so many of us have?
This desire to stand shoulder-by-shoulder as if against the tide of the world?
Knowing as we all must that we are sure to fail.
I suppose it is that the failure matters less than that, on those many days that littered our battlefields, you would whisper ever so softly to me. Touch my fingers with yours.
So find me Xerxes and Leonidas,
And to this brink and pass do draw me near,
Loose these quivers full of expectations,
And deliver me into this valley of tears,
And then go tell it to the Spartans,
Stranger passing by,
That in faith with this fleeting fairytale,
We tried.
We tried.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Fragment 33: Mantis
The morning after, I am greeted by chamomile and vanilla bean, the faint fragrances of your hair.
Running my hand tenderly down your side, so as not to disrupt the sublime movements of your sleep, but rather just incrementally induce that involuntary twitching of your body against mine.
In the face of this personal peril, what is it that we have done?
Through the window, slightly open, sounds of a summer countryside as it slowly awakes, the gentle symphony of the lake springing to life.
Thinking back on how Peter said it, Sunday night at Balfour's, the look of distressed comprehension creeping across his face.
As the sun, newly brilliant, blazes now furiously, bathing the room in its daily ritual of renaissance, I feel you stir just so slightly.
In these moments, these seconds, before thought translates into the catharsis of action, eternity lies.
Running my hand tenderly down your side, so as not to disrupt the sublime movements of your sleep, but rather just incrementally induce that involuntary twitching of your body against mine.
In the face of this personal peril, what is it that we have done?
Through the window, slightly open, sounds of a summer countryside as it slowly awakes, the gentle symphony of the lake springing to life.
Thinking back on how Peter said it, Sunday night at Balfour's, the look of distressed comprehension creeping across his face.
As the sun, newly brilliant, blazes now furiously, bathing the room in its daily ritual of renaissance, I feel you stir just so slightly.
In these moments, these seconds, before thought translates into the catharsis of action, eternity lies.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Fragment 32: Concerto in F
You know what I always loved?
It was that outward pulse, that sense of anticipation, as I would stride down those long hallways that inevitably seemed to lead to the stage, blinding lights blocking out all identity except the profiles, the cheering cacophonous and growing louder until...
Exploding out onto the platform, they are chanting "Steven...Steven...Steven"....
Sometimes fifty, sometimes a hundred, but when you got those twice a year crowds of thousands...there was nothing quite like that.
What happened? I don't really know. I just remember that when I was young my Dad took me up to shake hands with Melvin Steven after the union meeting. Melvin had on an old suit, and he looked tired, but after watching over two hundred of the guys (and in those days they were all guys) go crazy about him for nearly two hours I thought he must be some kind of star.
These guys fucking hated rock-and-roll after all, so Melvin must of had something going on.
He just looked down at me, tie a little too low, breath a little too...
"So your father tells me you are named Steven..."
Fifteen years later and he is doing election number seven. This time the atmosphere is electric.
I did the phones and organized signs. Melvin hit every house in the riding.
"Putting People First". We loved the slogan. No socialist had ever won in South County but we knew that this was our time.
It didn't happen.
Cigarette smoke swirling near ceiling fans as four a.m. rolls around and the office is empty save the three.
Melvin, Cassandra and I.
I had been tapping Cass since campaign day five. We went to the Briar's Edge, drank a few C.C shots and next thing I woke up, no idea where I was till I saw her lying there, snoring lightly...so tiny cute.
We just kept it going.
Mel looked over. Sad. Drunk.
"Its to you Steven. This is my last"
I suppose I should have felt bad for him. He was so close, but it was over.
In truth, I kind of thought that this was the time. It was mine, not for any legitimate reason maybe, but it sure felt right.
Many years later, after all was said and done, I remember that I was at some stupid fucking thing held by the Youth Socialists and they were trying to honour "my life-long commitment to the cause".
After listening to some whole list of shit I had supposedly contributed to, this one little prick got up and asked me "Mr. Lawrence, if you could teach us one thing, as young people, what brought you to this fight for social justice?"
Well, asshole, who the fuck knows? It sure seemed a lot better than shoveling dirt at some construction site.
Twelve days after I won my first nomination for parliament Cass and I got married.
I remember we were on our way down to California for the honeymoon when they called the general election.
I just turned that Mustang right-back around.
There was always next year.
Victory speech blending to caucus meetings to protests to watching as the janitors would fold up the chairs after the rallies in hockey rinks across wine country.
Ivor Wynne blustery, wind brutal on an October afternoon, and there were fifteen thousand union members ecstatic over our new government. For all the good that it did them.
The air was harsh and my voice echoed oddly but as it all wound up I looked over to Cass, eyes down...
Hotels, motels, I made Days Inn my hometown. There was no easier way to be away from...
Nineteen years and I was done.
We had long lost power.
I had hung on somehow.
The fight was gone, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? This was it. This was my job...my career...I had nothing else.
They held some banquet for me as I was on the way out. Tables too close and three hundred fifty of them from across the province. Terrible wine and lousy dry chicken or fish. Speaker after speaker telling them what a great fucking guy I was, all the shit I had done for the working-class, my devotion to my wife...
(if only they knew, kinda plump, looking at me with those high-school eyes, make-up pretentious, thick, uniform issue stockings, stuttering as she said aren't you...)
So no more limelight. What to do?
I drank. Scotch, Vodka, Rye, Wine...you fucking name it I drank it.
That subservient little fuck-face they got to replace me trotted up one morning, nine a.m. and asked me what advice a man of my stature might have...I told him I had yet to meet a girl who didn't look better from the right angle.
Eventually Cass was done. She didn't even bother to talk to me.
Empty bed and a lawyer's note.
Years blurring....
I saw Daniel, as I learned his name was, by the riverside even before I knew what he wanted to do.
He looked sixteen, though he was actually nineteen, and he had on a basketball jersey and shorts, knee deep already.
I was on one of the many walks I took to kill time and trim fat (though why, there was little left to be fit for) when I saw him wading out. We had had the rains and while clear the river was running fast.
I yelled to him.
Turning back he looks at me, and then I see the dog, twenty yards off, on some tiny island of accumulated wood pieces and junk, clinging for dear life. Nothing save front legs and snout above water.
Frantic.
"What the fuck are you doing do you want to get killed?"
Its my dog...I can't just let him die....
Daniel starts wading out. He has a trim, aquiline face, bristling muscles, brimming with health.
The brush is thick on this part of the river so I push through to grab at him.
"Look don't go out there...just call for him...what's the dog's name?"
He ventures a little further, buffeted now by unexpected waves, treading more carefully...
I was sixty-two, hardly sprightly, and I knew I could not possibly intervene.
He didn't even answer, he just kept pushing towards the dog until, about eight feet out, he was suddenly lifted off his feet, cartoon like.
His arms and legs started flailing and he kept yelling "fuck...fuck...fuck...", repeating it as a mantra, more-and-more frightened. I was running alongside but the current accelerated.
I know what you all think. You think I was gutless, that I should have at least tried, but you weren't there. You didn't live through this. There was no fucking way...I would never have even...
It was a moment, I guess five minutes past, that he just stopped...well, he stopped everything. I could still see him, his form at least, but nothing was happening.
I was running the whole time through the brush and foliage, and as we got closer to the lake I started to dread that he would simply be washed out, lost, as if not so now, but I held to these slender threads.
Eventually he drifted in. Deadwood.
I had to try for several minutes to drag him onto the bankside, face purple bloated, eyes turned back.
Pulling him, this perfect manhood, and I so worn away.
As the water gushed out of his mouth, caressing his head on my lap, slowly stroking his wet hair, the ebb of the meaningful long past.
Promise. Fortitude. Strength.
The tragedy of circumstances unforeseen. Inevitable collisions with futures preferentially denied.
Kissing the forehead of a dead man. Wishing.
As the sun started to fade, night menacing, I heard the distant crackling first as his dog approached and ran up, soaked yet energetic, to happily lick the now drying leaves from his face.
It was that outward pulse, that sense of anticipation, as I would stride down those long hallways that inevitably seemed to lead to the stage, blinding lights blocking out all identity except the profiles, the cheering cacophonous and growing louder until...
Exploding out onto the platform, they are chanting "Steven...Steven...Steven"....
Sometimes fifty, sometimes a hundred, but when you got those twice a year crowds of thousands...there was nothing quite like that.
What happened? I don't really know. I just remember that when I was young my Dad took me up to shake hands with Melvin Steven after the union meeting. Melvin had on an old suit, and he looked tired, but after watching over two hundred of the guys (and in those days they were all guys) go crazy about him for nearly two hours I thought he must be some kind of star.
These guys fucking hated rock-and-roll after all, so Melvin must of had something going on.
He just looked down at me, tie a little too low, breath a little too...
"So your father tells me you are named Steven..."
Fifteen years later and he is doing election number seven. This time the atmosphere is electric.
I did the phones and organized signs. Melvin hit every house in the riding.
"Putting People First". We loved the slogan. No socialist had ever won in South County but we knew that this was our time.
It didn't happen.
Cigarette smoke swirling near ceiling fans as four a.m. rolls around and the office is empty save the three.
Melvin, Cassandra and I.
I had been tapping Cass since campaign day five. We went to the Briar's Edge, drank a few C.C shots and next thing I woke up, no idea where I was till I saw her lying there, snoring lightly...so tiny cute.
We just kept it going.
Mel looked over. Sad. Drunk.
"Its to you Steven. This is my last"
I suppose I should have felt bad for him. He was so close, but it was over.
In truth, I kind of thought that this was the time. It was mine, not for any legitimate reason maybe, but it sure felt right.
Many years later, after all was said and done, I remember that I was at some stupid fucking thing held by the Youth Socialists and they were trying to honour "my life-long commitment to the cause".
After listening to some whole list of shit I had supposedly contributed to, this one little prick got up and asked me "Mr. Lawrence, if you could teach us one thing, as young people, what brought you to this fight for social justice?"
Well, asshole, who the fuck knows? It sure seemed a lot better than shoveling dirt at some construction site.
Twelve days after I won my first nomination for parliament Cass and I got married.
I remember we were on our way down to California for the honeymoon when they called the general election.
I just turned that Mustang right-back around.
There was always next year.
Victory speech blending to caucus meetings to protests to watching as the janitors would fold up the chairs after the rallies in hockey rinks across wine country.
Ivor Wynne blustery, wind brutal on an October afternoon, and there were fifteen thousand union members ecstatic over our new government. For all the good that it did them.
The air was harsh and my voice echoed oddly but as it all wound up I looked over to Cass, eyes down...
Hotels, motels, I made Days Inn my hometown. There was no easier way to be away from...
Nineteen years and I was done.
We had long lost power.
I had hung on somehow.
The fight was gone, but what the fuck was I supposed to do? This was it. This was my job...my career...I had nothing else.
They held some banquet for me as I was on the way out. Tables too close and three hundred fifty of them from across the province. Terrible wine and lousy dry chicken or fish. Speaker after speaker telling them what a great fucking guy I was, all the shit I had done for the working-class, my devotion to my wife...
(if only they knew, kinda plump, looking at me with those high-school eyes, make-up pretentious, thick, uniform issue stockings, stuttering as she said aren't you...)
So no more limelight. What to do?
I drank. Scotch, Vodka, Rye, Wine...you fucking name it I drank it.
That subservient little fuck-face they got to replace me trotted up one morning, nine a.m. and asked me what advice a man of my stature might have...I told him I had yet to meet a girl who didn't look better from the right angle.
Eventually Cass was done. She didn't even bother to talk to me.
Empty bed and a lawyer's note.
Years blurring....
I saw Daniel, as I learned his name was, by the riverside even before I knew what he wanted to do.
He looked sixteen, though he was actually nineteen, and he had on a basketball jersey and shorts, knee deep already.
I was on one of the many walks I took to kill time and trim fat (though why, there was little left to be fit for) when I saw him wading out. We had had the rains and while clear the river was running fast.
I yelled to him.
Turning back he looks at me, and then I see the dog, twenty yards off, on some tiny island of accumulated wood pieces and junk, clinging for dear life. Nothing save front legs and snout above water.
Frantic.
"What the fuck are you doing do you want to get killed?"
Its my dog...I can't just let him die....
Daniel starts wading out. He has a trim, aquiline face, bristling muscles, brimming with health.
The brush is thick on this part of the river so I push through to grab at him.
"Look don't go out there...just call for him...what's the dog's name?"
He ventures a little further, buffeted now by unexpected waves, treading more carefully...
I was sixty-two, hardly sprightly, and I knew I could not possibly intervene.
He didn't even answer, he just kept pushing towards the dog until, about eight feet out, he was suddenly lifted off his feet, cartoon like.
His arms and legs started flailing and he kept yelling "fuck...fuck...fuck...", repeating it as a mantra, more-and-more frightened. I was running alongside but the current accelerated.
I know what you all think. You think I was gutless, that I should have at least tried, but you weren't there. You didn't live through this. There was no fucking way...I would never have even...
It was a moment, I guess five minutes past, that he just stopped...well, he stopped everything. I could still see him, his form at least, but nothing was happening.
I was running the whole time through the brush and foliage, and as we got closer to the lake I started to dread that he would simply be washed out, lost, as if not so now, but I held to these slender threads.
Eventually he drifted in. Deadwood.
I had to try for several minutes to drag him onto the bankside, face purple bloated, eyes turned back.
Pulling him, this perfect manhood, and I so worn away.
As the water gushed out of his mouth, caressing his head on my lap, slowly stroking his wet hair, the ebb of the meaningful long past.
Promise. Fortitude. Strength.
The tragedy of circumstances unforeseen. Inevitable collisions with futures preferentially denied.
Kissing the forehead of a dead man. Wishing.
As the sun started to fade, night menacing, I heard the distant crackling first as his dog approached and ran up, soaked yet energetic, to happily lick the now drying leaves from his face.
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