My Story Place

Twenty

Twenty

 

   Otis broke his tailbone when he hit the black-top.

   He sat there, upright, stunned and sad. His old truck continued into the nearest barbed wire fence,w here it paused, wheels churning, paint scraping, for a time. Then, for some reason he did not immediately discern, the old truck coughed three times and died.

   Otis sat on the black-top in his blue bib overalls and white tee shirt. He did not want anyone to see him, just then. He felt like a fat old man with a broken bone in his sit-down, stranded in the middle of a one lane road out in the country between Lipan and Brock, his truck dead, his dignity deceased and his spit cup all over him.

   "This is shore a sorry way to end up," he thought and started to tear up around his eyes. The pain was not so bad he could not stand it but the comination of dead truck, drying spit and broken behind were a bit much, even for him.

   He found he could not actually get up off the ground. He was going to need some help but this stretch of road was mostly unoccupied during the busiest of days. 

   "I may set here awhile," he thought and the thought dried his tears right away.

   After a moment, Otis decided he might better get up from his stomach. He could push himself up with his stubby arms, if he could just roll over to his stomach and give himself one good hard shove.

   "I got one left in me," he told the sky.

   The error in this thinking was the spit cup contents, splashed all over his bib overalls. Otis got to his stomach without blacking out but then the smell of the tobacco cup hit him full in the face, triggering his gag reflex.

   Otis vomited, then some more, then again and dropped his face with the last effort. The sick, sweet smell overcame him. He had to roll over again, this time with his bare, red neck and head stained with vomit. When he hit his back the pain of his broken bone hit him again.

   This time, Otis really cried.

Nineteen

Nineteen

 

   Otis did not always close the door to his old truck hard enough. He almost never wore his seat belt.

   So, it was inevitable he would one day fall out of his own truck.

   If he had worn his seat belt the day he fell out of his truck he almost certainly would not have fallen out of the truck  because it was the seat belt catching in the door that kept it from closing. The combination of an open door and a knotted belt were too much for the Muse of Transportation, whenever she paid attention to the School of Old Trucks on One-Lane Black Top roads. She put a cardboard box in the road.

   Otis would not run over a cardboard box. Not a small one or a large one, not one in-between size, like the one the Muse of Transportation dropped off just beyond the ill-placed curve in the deep grade turning up after the one lane bridge. 

   "What in the..." Otis grunted when he saw the box, swerved hard, lost his grip on the wheel with his left hand, which was the only hand he had on the wheel, the other being occupied with his half-full spit cup, full of the heady broth of spit and tobacco. He lurched left, the door flew open, he lost his grip on the cup with his right hand, grabbed for it clumsily with his left and fell out the door of his old truck.

   He should have worn his seat belt.

   He hit the road pretty hard, rolled a couple of times and came to rest next to the cardboard box. He was stunned, shocked and sore. He was also a bit sad. He had made it all the way through his service and not fallen out of a truck. Now, here he was, an old man on a hot day, lying in on a black-tar road with his spit cup all over him and his truck churning through a barbed wire fence.

   Otis laid in the road for awhile. 

 The road was not much, anyway, one lane black-top, part of the crumbling American infrastructure; bridges falling into polluted American rivers, roads filled with pot-holes, hungry, overweight people who didn't know how to use carbs and couldn't get protein.

   The one lane asphalt road trailed off from Otis' double-wide over toward Lipan, down to the Farm to Market Road connecting to President Eisenhower's inter-state highway system. Otis did not like the inter-state, for there were too many semis and vans with alien drivers and people running drugs up from the Southwest to the metroplex. They drove at 80, though the speed limit was clearly marked at 65 most of the way Otis would have come. 

   Otis did not want to drive 80, anywhere, least of all on the inter-state with the drug runners and the illegals. He had to drive fast in the service, what with people shooting at him all the time. He bad to crane his head around so much he had a permanent crick in his neck. Otis never went to the VA to get his neck checked out, no sir. If everybody went to the VA with a sore neck, he thought, no one who really needed treatments would ever get them. He preferred to take Advil and turn his head more slowly.

    He had done his service in Quang Tri, a little hamlet in the now defunct Republic of South Viet Nam, up near Hue, in the north. There were roads with pot-holes up there, too, back in '70.

   "They did not have to draft me, neither," Otis liked to remind the slackers around him. "I stood up and signed up. I served."

   The other Super Patriots around him would hang their heads. None of them had served a lick. Most of them had never left the country, let alone gone in country. Their service to the country was mostly paying taxes, which was mandatory, anyway, and hating the Democrats, which was voluntary, but an obligation they gladly performed. 

   They listened to Right Wing radio in their big trucks. Otis never turned on the radio in his old truck. He only liked Country and Western music, which no one ever sang anymore, not really. He could almost forgive Alan Jackson and accept him but the rest were just hippies in big belt buckles and straight leg jeans. The girls singers were pretty enough but they just sang folk music, not real C &W. 

   "Not a Tammy or a Loretta among 'em," Otis would snort.

   So, the day he fell out of his truck, Otis was paying good attention. He did not fax or text or make calls from the cell phone his grandkids gave him for Christmas. He did not take pictures on it, either, or try to email anything from it. 

   "I jump ever' time the thang rangs," Otis would drawl. He performed a heavier drawl, put it on thck and molasses sounding, when he spoke about technology, to show his compelte disdain for new things in the world. 

 

Eighteen

Eighteen

I found a bench, 

set in the sun

and set myself upon it.

The February wind lashed at my face

and harshly stung and burnt it.

It was the winter, though,

and winter cannot be trusted.

For even in the sunny day

the cold, north wind blusters it.

 

Seventeen

Seventeen

If the only thing interesting about your life is the start of it,

with all the pictures and the smiles,

or the end of it,

with all the singing and the tears,

what does that say about the middle?

 

For most of us, the middle is where we do the most living,

share our smiles,

sing our songs,

shed our tears.

 

Love the middle.

Sixteen

Sixteen

 

I wish there had been someone there to do for him

what he did for so many others.

He freed the slaves, saved the Union and won our worst of  wars.

 

At the end none one was found

not his Mars, not his Mary, not his Myth,

who culd do for him

what he did for so many others.

 

A former slave says she saw him walk up to her house

in 1887.

A Jew says he saw him walk through Dachau

in 1944.

A White House fellow says he walks through the hall there

every night

in his long night-shirt, carrying a candle and moaning,

unable to sleep,

still.

 

I wish someone could be found, even now,

today,

to do for him,

what he did for so many others.

The greatest thing he ever did was change his mind.

How good it would be if we had leaders now

who could change their minds

and so do for others

the kinds of things he did for so many.

 

Then, maybe he could just wave at the former slave

with his sad, droopy-eyed smile

and leave off the extermination camps, 

and, whispering over his candle,

go off to bed, to calm, to sleep.

But there still seems no one to do for him

what he did for so many others.

 

Thoughts on the death of President Abraham Lincoln at 7:22 am on April 15, 1865.

Fifteen

Fifteen

   A cow-licked boy

looked up at a droopy-eyed old man

and wondered if he should tell him

he was not afraid.

The droopy-eyed old man

hunched over the cow-licked boy,

thinking he had had cow-licks just them

back when he had hair in those places.

 

He wondered to himself

if the cow-licked boy

would ever think of him

after that day

or again. 

And he wondered, 

the droopy-eyed old man wondered

if he should tell the cow-licked little boy

that he should be afraid.

Or, given time,

that he would learn fear

if life had its way.

 

Fourteen

Fourteen

Regret

is a soft malady,

not like resentment,

which is flnty-hard.

 

Regret 

hurts

but does not maim or kill. 

Regret can be the shot that circled the rim

or lipped the cup but did not fall.

 

Regret can be the first kiss that did not thrill

or the last word that echoes still.

   But regret is a soft pain

of things we wish we might do again.

 

Resentment is a flinty-hard,

hatred, bigotry, jealousy, ill-feeling.

Resentment wishes someone would fall

and everyone would see him fall.

No one prays for resentment

as a God gift

or wishes he could relive the moment

he learned to dislike

another man.

 

Regret hurts.

Resentment hurts everyone.

Thirteen

Thirteen

 

   She got roses and a small bag of chocolates from him on Sunday, complete with a card. She did not want the card or the chocolates but the flowers were nice.

   She made a little altar of the gifts on the bar above the kitchen counter. She put the flowers on the high altar and then arranged the chocolates on top of the card below. She turned the card sideways to face her, with her name written on it in his clumsy handwriting. 

   He hardly wrote at all any more, at least not with a pen or a pencil. He gave up on journals, so the pain in his wrists subsided a bit. He still hit the keyboard too hard when he typed. And he still called his keyboard work "typing" though he had not carried a typewriter around with him for two decades. 

   In fact, he had lost track of the word processors, the desktops, the laptops, the notebooks and smart phones and tablets that had replaced his old Smith-Corona. He would not have known where to find carbon paper, or wanted to use it for his early morning ramblings or his late night binges. He could not really remember what paper felt like in the days when he used to drop it into a typewriter carriage and folded it up, one clean sheet after another turned around the cylinder and under the arm of the typewriter, holding it all in place so he could see what he put there.

   Writing had changed so much since he started. In the old days a few people made millions and most made nothing. With the democratizing effect of the internet, fewer people made millions but more people made something and editors started to die out. He had loved some editors but he did not mourn their passing, much, since they usually took his most loved phrases and parsed them out of existence. More often they missed his humor, being humorless people, and they all needed him to be a bit more commercial, since the whole purpose of the magazine was to make money, sell copies and gain subscriptions.

   "I have never been able to stomach the way you do this for free now," one editor had told him after he started to put his stuff up on a blog. "Why do for free what you could do for money?"

   He started to try to explain the difference between eros and agape but the man had seen his career become less important to the whole process, so the Free Writer just shrugged. Later, he wondered if the Old Editor had been using humor on him. Perhaps he had failed to catch a sly look or a wry grin. Writers all think they are adept at seeing things but mostly they see what they want.

   She arranged the gifts, flowers on the top of the bar as the centerpiece of worship. The chocolates she put on the card, turned sideways to face her so that she could read her name when she made her coffee early on the morning before she went to her office for the day. She ate the chocolates, which she did not want, one a day, for each of the days it took the flowers to die.

   When the flowers finally gave up the ghost she threw them out with the garbage, washed the vase he had gotten from his daughter and took it back home. She thanked his daughter for the kind use of the vase, which set off the redness of the six roses just right. 

   She gave the rest of the chocolates to the pudgy girl in her office, who thanked her with a big smile on her smooth, plain face. The pudgy girl ate the rest of the bag that day but did not count it against her diet because there were not many chocolates left in the bag when she got it.

   Sometimes, she wondered why she got a half empty bag of small chocolates, anyway.

 

Twelve

Twelve

 

The kind of grave dug by machine

is deep

and straight

with sides so clean.

 

A resting place dug with a shovel

is shallow

and rounded

and more like a hovel.

 

Of the two I prefer

the machine for depth

and the shovel

for its homeliness.

Eleven

Eleven

 

I don't mind a talk with Death,

or, if She is not there,

a conversation about Her.

She is a Person of Substance,

Trinitarian,

Birth, Life and Her,

with Her watching over all.

 

The diseases of living

are the things I do not want to visit,

or, in their absence,

to visit about them.

They do not have me

nor will they

nor will I have them.

Those Men are just things set to open the conversation

with Her

and I have already said

I do not mind a talk with Her.