Sunday, December 29, 2013

You’ve heard it all before.


From Cindy Lou Who, when she told the Grinch and all of Whoville. From Jimmy Stewart every year, trapped in his black-and-white wonderful-life time warp. Charlie Brown said it. Even totally lame shows on the SyFy Channel try to get the point across.

I don’t think any of them succeed for more than a few seconds. About the time it takes for viewers to pretend they’re not a little choked up—or that they are—and get off the sofa to hit the head or pour some more eggnog. Dad grabs another beer and Mom dabs the corner of her eye with a tissue while Sis rolls hers and fires up the smartphone to check her Facebook. Little Bro wants to know can they watch a movie now. And those are the people actually tuning in to the yearly Ho-Ho-Jingle-Bell Blah, Blah together, in the same room. Imagine that.
So there’s this little moment where something tries to sink in. Then it passes, and it’s business as usual. Another year and another big glitter-ball set to drop in a near future we almost have the foresight to envision. Almost. I suspect if they did away with the Super Bowl a big chunk of America would lose their año nuevo compass altogether, drift around with zombie eyes like folks north of the arctic circle in January, their needles pointing in all directions and none. Stars and moon and seasons don't cut it any more. Got to be big and gaudy and well-lit to be seen over the horizon these days. Otherwise Miley’s tongue might eclipse you.
Who cares, says a large slice of population. It’s all marketing. Get real. And in a way they’re right. It is. But, like a lot of marketing, it’s actually trying to sell you something good. Unfortunately, we’re so inundated with people trying to sell us bullshit that it’s safer to just assume it all falls into that category.
And it must fall into a category. That way you know what to do with it.
But I digress. The category in this case is Holiday Cheer.
Snappy, huh? Pulling Your Head Out Of Your Ass And Seeing What Really Matters, not so much. Honesty makes shitty marketing, for the most part. This isn’t anything new. Even Jesus had to market his teachings to the masses, and I’m pretty sure he understood that meant selling out to human nature. I could list all the adjectives covering that, but you probably get it. People who show up at the ER with a candy cane stuck in their rectum. Or worse. Jack Ass goes to Washington, with stops in L.A. and New York along the way.
The end result is that we pay the obligatory lip service to what this “season” is supposed to mean. But looking around makes it pretty clear it’s just that.
Us blowing ourselves.
Oh, there are always people who get it. One of my favorite authors had his first post-surgery radiation treatments to battle brain cancer around this time last year. He sits down with family and friends, dude gets it. He probably did before all that, but he's an exceptional guy. Most of us aren't. 
So I’m sitting around in my slippers and fleece pajama pants writing this post. I can’t go back to work for a few more days due to mechanical issues, and that’s going to kick my ass financially. Been off since Tuesday evening, and you know what? I love it. Yesterday, I did some major surgery myself, on a peach tree that broke under the strain of wind and ice. Then I pruned its little cousins. Four days and counting of being with my wife and our little family of fuzzy-butts, cooking good food and watching good movies and listening to good music, doing chores around the place, smelling the earth and fallen leaves and wood smoke and feeling the sunshine or the cold wind on my face.
And yet I got up this morning worried about how taking a week of is going to affect us. Then Victoria asked what was wrong, and looking at her with the covers up to her neck and a puppy on her head, I realized nothing was, and it didn’t matter. We'll get through like we always do.
So I think I’ll go see why our bathroom plumbing is backing up, prune an apple tree, maybe prep some beds and plant next summer’s garlic. Nothing like getting your hands dirty with someone you love to celebrate the days.
All of them.    
How about you?



SR       

Monday, December 16, 2013

She was dressed like a lumberjack,


and she made it look good. Black and blue checked flannel tucked into tight-fitting Wranglers, long black hair and not much makeup, an easy smile as she sidled up to my table and asked if I wanted to dance.

I did, and we did, one of those slow Eagles numbers, Lying Eyes maybe. Apropos, though I didn’t know it yet. She sat with me after the song ended, bought us a round, and I thought, okay then. It was Friday night in Bozeman, Montana, and I was a cab ride away from the K-Mart. Freshly showered and shaved with a lot of time to kill, I’d told the driver to take me somewhere with live music. An hour later I was three beers into a hell of a night and no longer alone, twenty-two and stupid, but who isn’t at that age?

Her name was Robin, and she was older than me. Quite a bit older, she told me later, when we were naked and sweaty and spent.

 Forty. And married.

Knowing none of that at the time and glad to have a woman to talk to about crazy shit like coyotes howling to make you cry and the way the stars move in a circle that's too big for us to see all of, and to sway to the music with, our respective holds growing tighter as the night wore on, I felt pretty good. After we closed the place and the cab took us back to the K-Mart and she bounced me off the walls of my Kenworth, I felt even better. Then, like a dumbass, I started asking questions. Too curious to just have fun and take the moments as they came. I’m still that way, I guess, only these days I ask the questions up front. Maybe there is some benefit to growing older.

She was from Cody, Wyoming, and her husband was back at the hotel with the friends they had come with and the other friends they had all driven up to see. He was probably fucking somebody, she said. I had no idea if that meant they had some kind of open thing or he was just a shit and she was getting even. In the end it didn’t matter. I was doing someone’s wife, or she was doing me. Both, I guess.

I felt like a piece of shit.

But I felt really good too, because of the way she clung to me as we danced, the way she looked into my eyes as we moved together, and the way she laughed and nodded her head in four-four time while Bonn Scott wailed from the juke.

Forty, I thought the next morning as we ate biscuits and gravy and drank gallons of coffee, both a bit fuzzy around the edges but not too bad, considering. Wow, I thought. Looking back I still have to wonder what was missing from her life. She seemed to have it together, a lot more than I did, if the conservative gold bracelet and matching necklace and hundred-dollar hairstyle were any indication. I wondered where her wedding ring was, and how long it had been since it had graced her finger. No mark there, not like the one on my finger now, engraved into the flesh after almost ten years.

When the cab pulled up to her hotel I expected to see some grizzled biker-type waiting at the entrance, pissed as hell. He would rush over and yank open the door and I’d have to put up or shut up. That didn’t scare me much, I knew a little about fighting, real fighting, not that movie shit or even some on-the-mats sport kicking. Down and dirty, short and sweet. I’d fought a guy in his forties when I was fifteen, and come away without a scratch. Not that I’d kicked the guy’s ass. But he hadn’t been able to land anything, and I figured I eventually would have. Like I said, twenty-two and stupid.

But there was no husband waiting to jump us, only the cold wind and the blinding sun and the long miles between both of us and the places we had to go next. She kissed me and got out of the cab then leaned in the open window and handed me a slip of paper with her phone number on it. Call her when I got to Cody, she said. Then she was gone, and a half-hour later I was rolling east on the interstate, headed for the high-line and North Dakota.

I got to Cody a lot with that job.

All these years later, I still wonder what I had that she was looking for, beyond the obvious. Did I make her feel young again? Was her old man cold or distant or broken? Was I a fool?

Sure I was. We all are at that age, and maybe at any age.

The night I met my wife, Victoria, at a little Texarkana dive bar behind the Flying-J, I recognized something in her eyes, though I didn’t understand it at the time. She was slinging drinks and her smile lit the place up, her crazy mane of flaming hair drawing my gaze as though it were a moth. But she had to ask me twice if I wanted to hang out and shoot some pool after her shift was over. Older and wiser maybe, or just more scarred, and therefore more scared.

But I agreed that second time. I’m glad I did. No one else could have gotten me playing air-drums on their dashboard while doing my best Diamond Dave doing Ice Cream Man.

I still feel like a piece of shit every time I think about Robin and the husband I never saw. But I also feel good, just like I did twenty years ago. Because that tall redhead with the kind eyes and the sexy shoulders peeking from her blouse cut-outs directed her room-lighting smile toward me the night we met, and thinking about that one day I realized what it was I saw in her eyes, and in Robin’s.

It was them seeing something worthwhile in me, and not being afraid to grab hold of it. And if you ask Victoria, she’ll tell that the good ones don’t let go.

She's right.
 

 
SR

Saturday, December 7, 2013

The doe in the the road was dying,



huddled upon itself the way they do, curled around the pain. As I got closer it tried to stand, its broken back legs folding before the deal was done. I grabbed a gear and rolled on past, the deer collapsing, a median-strip planted with something that was probably colorful in the summer momentarily screening it from view. Through this neat row of skeletal symmetry, a pair of oncoming headlights burned.

In my side mirror, steam was rising from the deer, marking its position, right in the middle of the passing lane. It saddened me to see. I couldn’t help wondering if the poor creature understood what was happening. Then I was eyes-forward again, my mandatory second’s worth of checking my six complete, telling myself I wasn’t rubbernecking. Then I looked again. The doe stayed down. The headlights came on.

It was one of those minivan taxis, the kind that makes you shake your head and wonder how it came to this. The driver was running in the left lane, him and me the only traffic for miles, jumping puddles of sickly sodium glow.

I shook my head, hating the nature of a fabricated world. My eyes flicked the mirror, searching for brakelights and not seeing them.

Asshole, I thought.

Too late, those twin red eyes flared, and the minivan lurched and veered right and swerved left and yawed back again, and did the exit stage left thing, making a drunken beeline for the trees, all in less than two seconds.

That’s how fast it happens. 

Unless you’re the doe. I guess it drags out a bit longer from that angle. No smartphone to distract you, no tweets to keep you entertained on that long highway crossing, just the cold and the sudden glaring noise and the pain, and in the end, the same confusion as us. The same futility. It comes at you in plain sight, and you miss it every time, and it rolls right over you.

I wondered if the great green pasture in the sky was a reality now, no wolves and no deep snow to bog down in. Then I wondered if the stupid taxi driver was okay. Half a mile ahead, a possum waddled across the road, one twentieth the size of a hunkered doe, and I marked its passage.

Hard to miss. Lots of things in the road are.

But we drive blindly toward whatever demands our attention, we try to hold in our hands the things we tell ourselves are important, make them real with the press of a key or the swipe of a soft finger across a touchscreen, and we miss what’s in the road.

Sometimes the movie has a fast-forward button, and if you hit it because you aren’t paying attention you go right to the end.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for that.

And from most places on the road, it’s a long way home. So I topped the hill and grabbed another gear.


SR