putative non-sucky post for FTSD 2001: A Sensorium
Kent Paul Dolan
The time was nine in the morning, and the rain had begun two hours
earlier. For a while, it had let fall heavy drops straight down in a
breezeless plunge, to "splat" heavily onto the pebbled cement patio
where I sat, droplets flying up again to leave a halo of wetness a
thigh's length inside the protection of the overhanging, beam
supported roof. Now, it had gentled, to become an occasional ring of
brightness impacted into the skin of water caught, here and there,
where the imperfect camber of the cement had baffled its drainage into
the nearby lawn or flower garden. Accumulated rain, dripping from the
decorative wood railing which extended horizontally another half body
length beyond the protecting solid roof, provided the aural illusion
of continuing heavy rainfall. Out of sight, but not far away, crows
scolded to one another, in calls similar to the flight calls of their
dawn migrations from where they slept, to where they spent their days
gathering their daily nourishment, in their simple, money-less
economy.
With the bladder weakness endemic among men my age, I made several
journeys, from my wood slat and cast iron legged and armed outside
bench, to the nearest restroom, three minutes away at a fast walk.
The first trip, I saw gray mist or fog reaching down to the slick,
black streets, and guessed the sky was hidden. The drone of a
twin-engine, twenty-passenger airplane overhead drew my eyes upward,
disabuse me. It was more visible than not, a quarter mile high and
half a mile away, presenting a clear profile against and among the
soft gray of the clouds. It was back-lighted whitely by a hidden sun.
Sitting or walking, I heard the tire noises of passing cars on
streets at either side, too far away to be more than barely noticed in
peripheral vision, but dominant in the soundscape. The lower-pitched
engine noises predominated when the cars were at a distanced, but the
hiss of squeezed water where the pavement was merely wet, and the
"shoosh" of displaced water where a rolling tire found a greater
accumulation, filled the ear as the cars came nearer.
On my second excursion, I looked down instead of up. Some of the
sidewalks were pebbled cement with thin edgewise board spacers,
installed to accommodate expansion on warm days. Others were made of
decorative bricks, which were held slightly apart by swept sand for
the same reason. The parking lots were asphalt, edged with cement
curbs. On each, the orphaned leaves of tulip poplars lay wedded to
the pavement by the wetness. The distribution in which they lay was
complex, mixed child of their random fall from tall trees now half
denuded of foliage, and of the winds, steered in directions different
from those prevailing higher up, by the loosely spaced large
buildings. The leaves ranged in size from coin-sized to hand sized.
They ranged in color from dark coffee through tan to a few still the
brilliant butter-yellow of their first October color shifts, and some
mixed, with yellow-gold centers complexly outlining their veins, and
brown-tan margins bleeding into black where capillary force welded
them to the substrate. They ranged in shape from nearly circular,
birch-like leaves, to that characteristic distinctive mirror-symmetric
lobed form. In my mind, it resembled a pattern for cutting one face
of mittens designed for space aliens, arrived double-thumbed to earth.
In the near foreground as I sat again after yet a third voyage, the
slender leaves of a lily, bushed to the size of a circular card table,
and nipple high at its crest, moved softly in the impalpable breeze,
bringing reminders of the animation of sea anemones deep beneath
passing waves. The white and mint green of a large clump of alyssum,
the purple, maroon, and white blossoms of a recently planted cluster
of giant pansies, now grown nearly touching, the rich green of azalea
leaves long bereft of companion blossoms, the faded pink beauty of
blossoms on a more distant tree rose, all tried to deny the season.
Their hopes were defeated by the evidence given by a distant tulip
poplar whose remaining leaves drooped, heavy with moisture, brown and
dead, seeking release, only a few yellow or startlingly green leaves
still mixed among them.
I stopped to sharpen my pencil with my pocketknife, a black,
two-bladed imitation of one long lost from my sailor days, then wrote
more of this epistle.
On usual Thursday mornings at nine, I would have been entering the
public library at that minute, but the librarians were on holiday that
American day of Thanksgiving (in that year which those of us with a
faith in the Arabic give of the zero call the second year of the
third millennium), and so I stuck mostly to my bench, on which,
reading in a collection of short stories since six, I had been
variously amused and entertained by some, then filled with disgust by
the meaningless slaughter in Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard
to Find", then reduced to great, racking sobs, as always by heroism,
at David Quamman's "Walking Out". That depression which is my
constant non-bonny companion leaves me much too vulnerable to any
sentiment.
Preparations for the feasting to come had begun early the night
before. Workers, provided by the Salvation Army, but resembling less
living saints than sweaty, hard-working kitchen help anywhere, roasted
four large turkeys at a time in the Senior Center's two large ovens,
or chopped vegetables for stuffing mix on cutting boards atop the
stainless steel counters. I had intruded to mooch my usual evening
quart-and-a-third of leftover coffee. Because these were not my usual
victims, on entrance, I asked permission of a "blond with a touch of
strawberry" curly-haired woman in slacks, a blue sweater and blue
apron, at the back kitchen door. On exit, I gave a praise of thanks
for her efforts to a black-haired, shorter, plumper woman similarly
stiflingly dressed for that steaming kitchen. I also noticed one man,
more sensibly garbed in jeans and a dark-blue, short-sleeved shirt
extracting two turkeys from one oven, while another man prepared a
next turkey with spices and stuffing for roasting.
Throughout the night while I slept, and again in the morning when I
arose, industrious sounds of food cleaning and building floor
cleaning, or the occasional muffled voice raised a bit in
conversation, escaped the brick, wood beam, and glass building.
By eleven, as I continued to write, I began to hear more voices.
Guests arrived, some striding, others hunched over their inexpensive
aluminum walkers and creeping slowly. They were visible to me through
a window to my left and across an interior office area beyond that
window.
The calls of the crows had stilled, though the voices of smaller birds
in a variety of whistles, complex songs, peeps, and squawks, were
still audible. The density of the traffic noises hadn't changed much
since they first woke me at a quarter to six.
The fog, now lifted, left the day in greater clarity. The skim of
water, now mostly escaped from the pavement, had released its grip on
the edges of the fallen leaves, making them loose things adrift on the
pavement rather than embedded gems a part of the pavement.
A warm meal awaited, with conversation and longed-for human contact,
for in my two hours of writing among five hours now of being awake,
not one person had crossed the usually frequented sidewalks and lawns
before my gaze. "Freeing my muse of her bondage", I prepared to add
my atheist viewpoint to a Christian celebration, to be a participant
in the mass of humanity from which my circumstances so often held me
isolated.
An older couple exited the Center through the one-way-locked door to
my immediate left, and I knew my time for writing was done.
When I stepped outside a few minutes later to fetch the notepad on
which I wrote this, the sun had succeeded in pushing a few scattered
sunbeams through the close packed clouds, and the mood of grayness was
lifting, aided by the wafting smell of warmed-over turkey.
xanthian, well-fed.