4 February 2018 • diarist a29
Everyday life in Middletown in 16 Words
Sing. Dream. Wake. Play.
Die. Fuch. Look. Stuff. See. Eat. Write. Hear. Read. Watch. Tend. Sleep.
SING
Everyday Life in Middletown
in 10,250 words
If you’ve ever thought, “My life should have a sound track,” perhaps this will give you pause.
At any rate, I come by it honestly. My mother was forever singing as she went about her work in the home. Her mother sang without ceasing, also—and was regularly invited to
do so at weddings and funerals. I wonder if my grandmother’s mother sang all the time, too. I sing often, sometimes softly to myself, sometimes at full volume. Sometimes the same song over and over. And over again. Ask my coworkers.
It’s taken me a long time to realize I sing to process reality—to build awareness of what I’m thinking, feeling, experiencing in the moment. If I pay attention, I can usually
connect a line in a song to its catalyst. I plan to be on the lookout today.
When I wake up Husband is in the living room doing a crossword puzzle, an empty coffee cup in front of him. His first words to me, even before we kiss good morning: “What’s the Russian name for John?”
“Ivan,” I say. “Really? Huh.”
“Ivan in Russian, Iain in Irish. What is it in
Spanish?” “Juan,” he says. “Oh, that’s right.”
We kiss and I take his cup with me en route
to the kitchen to get him a refill, a first cup for
me. I sing.
Oh, you take the high road and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Loch Lomond afore ye. For me and my true love . . . .
Last night I sequestered six roosters in the granary and promised them water first thing this morning. I remember this when I awaken. I’ll get out there soon, I tell myself. And I
do mean well, but I get distracted working crossword puzzles with Husband. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions,” my mother often said. I think of this when the waterless roosters come to mind. I jump up, rush to
fulfill my obligation, and remonstrate,
Now time has took your time away; time and contraption have whittled you down. And all of the time that you thought that you had, has took to its heels and gone . . . .
I talk to the granaried roosters and cooped chickens, put food out for the feral cat we’re trying to sweet talk, honk along with the geese, and am almost back to the house when
Husband meets me. He’s been inside; heard me
call his name. Looked around but didn’t find me in the house. Thought perhaps I had fallen out in the barn and needed help. He’s coming to check on me. Dear man. I assure him I’m
in good health and thank him for his watch care. We return to the house. I follow in his
footsteps, and sing,
All the way my savior leads me, what have I to ask beside? Can I doubt his tender mercies who through life hath been my guide? Grandest peace, divinest comfort . . . .
A glance in the refrigerator shows we have limited leftovers: a little vegetable beef soup, some baked squash. I put the soup on the stovetop to heat, the squash in the oven at
350º to warm. The soup is ready first. I ladle it out. It’s a gloomy day, I note, as I bring the steaming bowls to the table.
And the darkness shall turn to the dawning, and the dawning to noonday bright, and Christ’s great kingdom shall come to earth, the kingdom of love and light.
Later, I skin chicken thighs and put the meat on the stove to boil. I’ll make a big pot of soup for the week ahead. Husband presented me with a four-gallon stock pot—a beut—as a Christmas gift. I chop a cabbage, several carrots, a head
of celery, toss it all in the stock pot. As I chop, I sing.
Mine is the morning, mine is the evening. Born of the one light Eden saw play. Praise with elation, praise every morning. God’s recreation of the new day.
By the time the squash is ready we’re watching a 1958 episode of Gunsmoke. Miss Kitty Russell is kidnapped by two bank robbers who threaten to kill her if U.S. Marshall Matt Dillon or anyone else gives chase. Too scary for me. The show is on dvd, plays on our computer
in the living room. I watch for a while, then absent myself to get the squash, return to serve and eat it, leave to check on hot water for tea, come back, leave to sneak chocolate chips out of the bag in the refrigerator. I’m in the kitchen when I hear shots ring out. Surely Miss Kitty survived. I venture back into the living room, learn she did, exit relieved, chop two onions
for soup.
From this valley they say you are leaving. We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile. For they say you are taking the sunshine that has brightened our pathway a while.
Show over, I sit down at the computer to write. I’m working on an assignment for a class, part of a memoir project. The smell of soup wafts into the room. I get up to check if it’s boiled over.
I need thee every hour, most precious Lord. No tender voice like thine can peace afford. I need thee, oh I need thee, ev’ry hour I need thee. Oh, bless me now my savior, I come to thee.
I write. The fire dies down. I get up to stoke it,
add more logs, coax it back to life.
Come, thou long expected Jesus….
Husband is working another crossword puzzle over on the couch. I leave off writing to pee. When I come back I plop down beside him, offer a hint or two for words he’s stuck on: Carefree, the clue. I sing, “I’m so happy and merry and ”. It doesn’t click for him. Later, I’ll realize this is because the actual words to the song are “I feel pretty, and witty and .” I try a different song.
Deck the halls with boughs of holly . . . .
When the answer remains elusive, I tap his chest. “You, of all people,” I say.
He looks at me. “Gay?!?”
I return to writing. Time passes. He stands. “I’m going to bring wood in so we have enough to take us through the night.”
“Here, I’ll help you,” I say.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea, my Bonnie lies over the ocean . . . .
Why this song? Then I reach the line,
Oh bring back my Bonnie to me. Bring back, bring back . . . .
Ah, “bring.” I could as well have chosen, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”
As I fill my arms from the woodshed a log rolls off the pile and knocks a few of its brothers to the ground.
Roll on, roll on, roll on you little dogies, roll, roll on . . . .
I pass the man I love in the dining room, my arms full, his just emptied and heading back for more.
Joyful, joyful we adore thee . . . .
“I’m going out to lock the chickens in for the night,” I tell Husband.
While shepherds watched their flocks by
night, all seated on the ground . . . . Flocks, I think. Of course.
I tell Husband I have energy toward watching for a second time Les Roseaux Sauvages, or “Wild Reeds,” a film by French director André Tèrcinè. “Then we….”
He finishes the sentence for me: “…can send it
back. Okay, sure.”
We rented this film on dvd. When we send it back we’ll receive another. We keep a list of movies we’ve seen, record our reaction to and rating of each one. I scored this one higher than he did. It’s a coming of age movie with
a coming out story wrapped in. Generally these are among our favorites. But this is a
French film; there will be no happy-ever-after
Hollywood ending.
In fact, it’s shot through with references to the Algerian War, of which I know little except that my first-ever lover’s parents were caught up in the turmoil there. They fled Algeria and
he was born in Morocco. Later they made their
way to France.
The first character we meet in the movie is a soldier who soon dies in the war. Later, we are introduced to Henri, whose father was killed
in a bomb blast. As viewers, we’re expected to know why this puts Henri, an OAS supporter, at odds with Maite, a Communist, like her mother.
If I don’t follow the politics, I do understand the turbulence of adolescence portrayed and the difficulties of finding oneself and one’s way in the world. And there are shots of sensual Serge. He leaves his brother’s funeral, heads for the river, goes swimming in his underwear. His progress I follow closely. This is something I do understand.
I’ve downloaded film reviews (quite positive) and the 39-page Wikipedia article on The Algerian War. I took a break from writing this afternoon and read these in preparation for seeing the movie a second time. It’s a two-hour movie; I want to get started before the hour
gets too late. It’s nigh onto 8:00. I leave off peeing, call to Husband, “I’m going to put the movie on now,” and march to the living room.
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country’s battles on the air and land and sea . . . .
The story unfolds. In a scene fraught with emotion for me, François comes out to his friend Maite. “I slept with a boy,” he tells her. And when she is silent, he adds, “You have to say something.” Incongruously, they are on the dance floor at a party. Music is playing, people moving about them. But François’ world stands still. Maite simply looks at him.
“You have to say something,” he tells her. I hear the anguish in his voice—apprehension, fear.
I came out as a gay man to a friend in the
midst of a religious revival service—a Promise
Keeper’s rally—during the invitation hymn calling men to repentance/salvation. I had to shout my news to be heard above the crowd. My world hit pause whilst I awaited his reaction.
The ending credits roll. Time for bed. Opportunity to lay close, snuggle up to the man I love most in the world, he who holds my heart. Been more than 20 years, and while I may have grown old in that time, the joy of going to bed with him has not.
“Ready?” I ask. He nods.
Hallelujah, hallelujah, give praise to the risen Lord. Hallelujah, hallelujah, give
praise to the Lord.
DREAM
In which I suspect child abuse and don’t know what action to take.
In the wee hours this morning, I waken from a dream in which I have to pee.
The dream is a short one: I return from a trip, enter the dormitory, go into the group restroom, stand at the urinal at the far end of the wall. “A little sorrel bay,” someone says.
I blink my eyes in the dark. The dream is already fading, the urge to pee is not. Without
turning on lights I climb out of bed, slip feet into slippers, walk to our bathroom, stand in front of the basin atop the back of the stool, hold the metal grab bar we attached to the wall as an aid for getting in and out of the tub, pee
in the basin. Each morning we bathe our feet in urine as a preventative for athlete’s foot. I pad out to the living room to check the fire, stir the coals, add three pieces of wood, trundle back
to bed.
I’m vaguely aware when Husband gets up, but since I want to sleep on, I don’t rouse. Later
I waken from another dream, also a short
one: a little girl is being abused. She lives
with her mother. Is mom abusing her? Mom’s boyfriend? What am I to do about this? I meet her birthfather. Do I tell him of my suspicions?
WAKE
Including a weather forecasting tip from my late grandmother.
The sun is up. I sense its glow through my closed eyelids. A sudden stabbing pain in my right side doubles me over. Lasts only a moment or two. Aging, ugh.
My penis is fully erect.
I roll over and glance at the clock. 8:47. What does time matter? Why are we so bound to our clocks? Measuring time is a human construct,
a human activity we’ve been engaged in for a long time. But then, even potatoes have a sense of time, respond differently to daytime,
nighttime. I remember reading about scientists trying to disorient potatoes by putting them deep underground, setting them on a spinning disk, flying them across country to another time zone. Still the potatoes responded to the transition between day and night. You can’t fool a potato.
I’d like to record that I bound out of bed.
Doesn’t happen. Instead, I creak my way up and out, aching sensations in my hips, back, knees, arms, elbows. After-effect of yesterday’s exertion—cutting downed trees, hauling the wood up to the house in a orange wheelbarrow, using muscles unaccustomed to this level of service. This, plus that little thing called aging.
I note we have only a skiff of snow. We were
hoping we’d have enough to sled up the wood we cut yesterday, rather than having to use the wheelbarrow again.
This winter is the first in memory I’ve grown tired of snow and cold. Somehow it’s hit me differently this year. Gone bone-deep, made my joints ache in ways they never have, especially my neck and left shoulder blade. Then there’s my wrenched elbow. It’s afforded me excruciating pain that’s taking a long, long time to ease up.
“Is this what it is to age—these sharp pains, these deep aches?” I put this question to my husband recently. He has a 12-year head start on me.
“Yep,” he said. “You’ll feel them intensely for a while, then they’ll go away until the next time they come back.”
“Where is the instruction manual that details what to expect?” I asked. “And where do I go to lodge my complaint?”
Outside, snow falls in large flakes. “Big snow, little snow,” I say, quoting my grandmother who lived on the Leech Lake Indian Reservation in northern Minnesota and was
herself quoting her Native American neighbors. Big flakes mean small accumulation, little flakes, a large quantity on the way. “Big snow, little snow. Little snow, big snow.” These big flakes mean we won’t get much.
The bedroom is chilly. I arm myself against the cold. As I pull my socks on, I note the broken toenail of my right big toe has a jagged edge.
I examine my second toe. It curves off to one side, arches over, the way my mother’s did. I’ve always liked this anomaly.
And I think of my acquaintance “Sterling’s” toes. I caught sight of them on several occasions last fall during our volunteer efforts when he doffed dress shoes and socks in
favor of workwear. Privately, I refer to him as Sterling Hayden, given his resemblance
to the curly-haired, sandy blond billed as the “Sexiest Man in Hollywood” during the 1940s. Mmmm. The Sterling I know has lovely, long straight toes crowning a size eleven-and-a-half foot. Had I a foot fetish, I would have been in eleventh heaven, I’m sure.
I pull on grey Indiana University sweats, swap out my long-sleeved sleep shirt and hat for a purple t-shirt, grey Texas Tech Raiders sweatshirt and a pillbox hat of mouse-grey fleece. I’m changing out of my sleepwear now, not waiting until I shower, because I may skip that chore and don’t want to wear pajamas all day by default.
The German wall clock in the living room strikes nine as I pad out to the kitchen. The light over the stove is on. I shut it off. I have become my father. I’m sure the kitchen was dark when my husband turned this light on, poured his coffee.
I take my medicine, see there are empty pill bottles stacked up in the front of the cupboard. I save these spares because I cut
my prescription medicine tablet in half, use an empty bottle to store the half I’ll consume later in the day. Too many empties accumulating in the cupboard makes Husband antsy. “Can we throw some of these away?” he’ll ask. Sure as
we do, I’ll leave my spare at work and have
nothing to put my extra half-tablet in. Then I
get antsy.
This morning I artfully arrange the spares in a line stretching to the back of the cabinet so it looks like there is only one navy blue pill bottle topped with a white plastic child-proof lid.
PLAY
In which the French national pastime is revealed.
I start my day by reading from the Standard
Book of British and American Verse, then
Carl Jung’s The Red Book. Talk with Husband about what strikes me in the two passages. After our discussion he returns to his newspaper sheet.
He’s doing a crossword from The Star Press,
18 December 2017. Must have been one of the last editions we got before we quit taking the newspaper, if you can still call it that. Dotted with six, seven local news stories, unless you count the obits printed in huge type to fill space. No editorials, no letters to the editor anymore, except on Sundays. Notice of upcoming local events? Only if their sponsors have forked over money for an advertisement.
“What is Verne Captain?” he asks.
“It’s from Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, but I don’t remember the captain’s name.” I stare into space. At last it surfaces.
“Disney made a movie about an orange and
white clown fish by that name.”
“Ah, Nemo.”
We’ve watched this video with our grandchildren. Most generally we’re stumped by references to pop culture—actors, singers, movies, television shows. In over 20 years together we’ve never owned a TV. Seldom go
to the movies. Listen to WBST, not WERK. No internet access at home. Kitchen wall phone,
no cell phones.
Today other clues prove difficult, as well.
Sound thinking (2 wrdS) becomes “horsesense.” Been a long time since I heard that term.
family yaCht? eventually gets filled in as
“kinship.”
grimaCe is a “moue.” New word to me. Must be French, so it’s probably pronounced nothing like it looks. When I consult one
of the dictionaries on our living room book shelves I learn it’s pronounced “moo”—I’ll remember that by imagining a cow making
an “I’m disgusted face” or moue as she moos. According to the dictionary, moue means a pouty grimace. “See also “mow.” I do and learn this, too, means grimace, albeit archaic usage. Also spelled “mowe.” My expression when I cut grass?
So, moue: pouty grimace, of French origin. Figures. My first love was a Frenchman, and a champion pouter. During our second summer together he’d go quiet for a few days at a
stretch. If I noticed at all, I’d think he was depressed. Later, he told me he’d grown angry with me and had been sulking. “It’s the French national pastime,” he said.
gritting of teeth? Husband asks.
“You who grew up in the King James world,” I
say by way of offering a clue. “Oh, gnashing!” he says.
“[They] shall be cast into outer darkness,” I intone, and together we finish the Bible verse, “there there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
DIE
In which I realize the road to perdition runs through our backyard.
This talk of hell reminds me I’d promised to visit the house of the damned first thing this morning. And I’ve forgotten. I need to bring them water. I get my husband another cup of coffee, then run hot water into a bucket, carry it outside.
Last night under cover of darkness I removed six roosters from the chicken coop and relocated them to the granary in our barn. A
1:10 or 1:12 ratio of roosters to hens is ideal for a barnyard flock. Nine randy roosters have proved far too many for 30 hens. Two days ago Husband saw a low status hen trapped, bloodied and gang raped by three young roosters. Past time for me to take action.
Four of these roosters hatched from eggs laid last fall on the day of the total eclipse of the sun. Of our six “ecliptical” chickens, the four red-browns are cockerels (young males); both the black and the white are pullets (young females). The cockerels have matured now
to the point where sex is foremost on their minds. I’m forcing these four and two others
to take vows of chastity by locking them in the granary until I can get around to butchering them.
We don’t have an extra electric water heater to keep water in the granary from freezing, so I’ll need to cart warm water out to the sequestered roosters each morning. I meant to get out here
with water first thing. Sorry, dears.
I set two pans atop the stack of nest boxes, pour water in one, feed in the other. The roosters pay no attention. There’s an empty bowl on the floor. I put some feed in that, watch to see what happens. Does one rooster already occupy the top spot in the granary
pecking order? Will he knock the others away?
Nope. Four roosters can easily fit around
the bowl. A fifth crowds in without struggle. The biggest one of the bunch—he who will probably captain this exile band—seems uninterested in eating. He investigates the water pan.
I watch and ponder.
This is the house of the damned, way station on the road to perdition. These six are slated for the stewpot, though they don’t know it.
Or do they? What do chickens sense about an untoward development in their lives? Do they know it spells trouble? What does this enforced separation from the flock mean for these
who are sequestered? (Tomorrow I’ll see the smallest of the ecliptical cockerels get chased, pinned down and mounted sexually by one of his bigger brothers. Poor thing. He’s going to have a rough time of it in here.)
FUCH
In which I use what sounds like an especially colorful word and give Carl Jung the credit.
Wir fucht…. Wir fucht…. Wir fucht….
Wir fucht…. This repeated refrain from my morning’s reading of Carl Jung comes to mind. These are the German words Jung sets down on page 60 of his illuminated
manuscript Leiber Primus or The Red Book,
as it’s popularly known. “Wir fucht” translates as, “we looked.” I understand this, but it sure looks like something altogether different to me.
To accompany this passage Jung paints a white egg resting on a gold curlycue-handled platter. His illustration could accompany a passage in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”
my poetry reading of this morning. Jung’s egg on a platter with curved handles could be the single star gleaming within the twin horns of
Coleridge’s crescent moon:
From the sails the dew did drip— Till clomb above the eastern bar
The hornèd Moon, with one bright star
Within the nether tip.
These heavenly bodies appear at an inauspicious moment. The seafaring narrator of the poem kills the albatross, bird of good fortune, that has been following the ship. At first his shipmates curse him, but when a fair wind begins to blow they applaud his deed. Not for long. The wind ceases. The ship is
becalmed. Stores of fresh water are exhausted. Dire thirst sets in. “Water, water everywhere,/ Nor any drop to drink.” (This is the first time
I’ve read these words in context. I’ve heard sailor tries to alert his fellows, but can’t speak. and (mis)quoted the line all my life as “Water, His mouth is too dry. He bites his arm, sucks water everywhere and nary a drop to drink.” his own blood, sounds out the happy news. Not Never knew from whence it came. But back to so happy when what approaches is a skeleton the poem.) A shape appears on the horizon. The ship piloted by two ghastly figures, one male,
one female: Death and Life-in-Death. As the latter whistles thrice, the cloven moon and star appear. The two specters play at dice—with the seaman as the prize. Life-in-Death wins. One
by one the sailor’s 200 shipmates drop dead until only he is left standing. Game over.
Wir fucht.
In Jung’s illustration, the egg is flanked by two blazing urns. From the intact egg sprouts a blue flower with green stalk and leaves or flower- shaped smoke, incense, essence. Blue smoke billows above all. It’s a more comforting image than the one Coleridge draws.
LOOK
A demonstration of perception’s stranglehold on reality.
Do we ever know what the world really looks like? I scatter shelled corn on the ground in the chicken yard this morning, call “chick, chick, chick…” and open the door to the chicken
run. Birds tumble out into the snow, anxious
to get first dibs on the yellow kernels. I go
in, gather five eggs, throw corn to the lower status hens. They’re staying put, perched on the roosts, determined to avoid contact with
roosters they don’t yet realize have been barred from the barnyard. Their situation improved dramatically overnight, but they don’t know it.
The feral black cat skitters across my path. I put some dry cat food in the doorway to the barn, call, “kitty, kitty, kitty….” We’re trying to convince her our intentions are honorable. She’s not buying it. Friendly human beings
do not square with her view/experience of the world.
The geese and I discuss the current state of national politics. Although we reach agreement
more quickly than members of Congress are able to do, emotions run high. As I head for the house they’re still honked off, hollering about the country going to hell in a hand basket.
Husband meets me before I reach the back yard. He was indoors when he heard me call his name, looked around, couldn’t find me inside. Wondered if it was a sign I was in distress, came out to check on me. Dear man.
STUFF
In which I discover why, in the absence of a house cat, our furniture has scratch marks.
As we approach the house we discuss where we’ll put two bookshelves we’re soon to acquire. We’ll have to move an old lumberyard storage cabinet out of Haverford West, clean the room up if we put them in there. Originally conceived of as my writing space, our back room serves as a collect-all for books, papers and magazines. It’s organized much like the storage room my father added to the house
I grew up in. My mother referred to it as the Wreck of the Hesperus until she painted its walls a sea foam color, decided to christen it something with more panache. “The Green Room,” she called it ever after. Didn’t change its internal disarray but did make it sound more posh. Following suit, I named our Green Room “Haverford West.”
We could move my books upstairs, Husband’s
quilting operation downstairs. This would
mean getting rid of a Victorian bed. Would any of our kids want it? It’s a gorgeous piece, one of several antique items that daily nurture us. But the next generation shows no affinity for things vintage.
I feel sad about this. Some day other hands will dispose of the items we now treasure: marred dining room table from one of our annual
trips to North Vernon, Red Wing cereal bowls from my grandpa and grandma, hand-woven coverlet from the founding family of Indiana weavers, a collection of etched Cambridge glass, Chantilly pattern, the long low workbench that serves us as a coffee table once belonged to two artists in Ladoga, and served
as my bed after I moved out of the house and marriage. These and other items will be
gotten rid of without regard for or knowledge of the stories they contain—the course of our relationship, imprint of our lives. How do I make my peace with this? How do I release
that which has nurtured me? Says Rachel
Remen in Kitchen Table Wisdom, “Anything I’d ever let go of had claw marks on it.” I hear myself in this. Maybe I’ll eventually succumb to dementia and this will free me from my
attachment to things. We shall see.
SEE
In which I berate myself for not seeing. And twice manage to use the term “hard-on.”
’Wonder what forest I’m not seeing today for the trees, I muse, and by way of answer let my imagination run free:
Two, three, four hundred years from now I read these notes, want to upbraid this author. What is he on about? I scour his writing, look
for clues he was not altogether oblivious to the grinding mill wheels of fate but had some sense of what was happening under his nose. I conclude he was one more cockerel in the
company of the damned, yammering to get his rocks off while ignoring impending doom.
I mean, come on. Why didn’t this guy mention global climate change, its dramatic effects, unforeseen consequences? Wakey, wakey,
you sleepyhead in Middletown! Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane. How can you be so relaxed about it?
And as if that wasn’t enough, Diarist A29, you were witnessing the unraveling of the F.A.D. (Failed American Democracy). So many parallels to the last days of the Roman Republic stared you in the face. Yet you were more concerned with singing little ditties,
stroking hard-ons, befriending feral cats. Four hundred years of hindsight makes clear how muddled you were.
What else? You were living the last gasp of reliance on biological organisms as sources of intelligence. How quaint it seems to have had human organisms record their daily
activities—guess back then you non-corporate types pretended people mattered.
One thing more: as usual, you ignored your prophets. A certain Joseph Campbell foresaw the coming revelation of what we now understand as the One True Religion. It must have glimmered in the volcanic ash raining down on the heads of Middletown-Pompeii residents back when you wrote this. But did you notice? Nah.
Enough of this. Off goes the imagination. But on goes the musing.
This (present) world is not my home. I was born before computers, social media, cell phones, internet. My grandmother was born before cars, telephones, nuclear bombs. My great-great-grandparents were born before the War of Secession, penicillin, novocaine, when enslavement of human beings was
accepted practice, as was the extermination of indigenous people groups.
My grandchildren have been born into what unfolding world? Before what inventions, practices, developments? I’m seeing some
of their world and it scares me. Saddens me. Offers possibility, promise, some reason for hope. Of course, there’s a great deal of it I’m not seeing, don’t understand and never will.
Whatever the world that awaits my grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I bet some of it will be the same ol’, same ol’. There is that in human nature that does not change,
no matter how the world around does. There are those experiences that are part of the human condition across time and space.
Growing older, for instance, is nothing new, yet the phenomenon is fresh for us who experience it in our own bodies. No way we can know ahead of time. Try explaining to a two-year-old what it’s going to be like to be a teenager. Or to a teenager the ins and outs of middle age. My grandmother lived to age 103.
I listened closely to her, watched her like a hawk. Even so, there is much I will never truly understand old age unless and until I see it for myself.
Hmph. This not knowing everything is part of the human condition—as is thinking you know more than you do.
So, too, experiences of the natural world:
sunshine, snow, rain, wind, weather.
Then there’s love. My heart leaps when I see the man who holds mine, kiss him good morning. Bonds of affection, caring, warmth and regard are touchstones of human existence.
As are the simple pleasures of food and drink. Today I sip coffee, then black tea. We top Husband’s homemade persimmon bread with cream cheese. Enjoy truly farm fresh eggs scrambled with hamburger for breakfast. Have homemade beef vegetable soup, baked acorn and butternut squash for dinner. Homemade chicken vegetable soup for supper.
The list goes on. I awoke today to morning wood. Had a hard-on. Who knows how many times my great-grandfathers, and their great- grandfathers, woke in similar straits? Who can guess how many times my great-grandsons and their great-grandsons will?
EAT
In which the proper etiquette for eating soup is presented, along with a handy mnemonic.
Time to make soup. My long-dead mother is present to me as she often is when I work in the kitchen. I trim carrot tips and think of the vacation she and Dad took to volunteer in a soup kitchen in Washington, D.C. The chef there told Mom not to trim the ends off the vegetables. “By the time the soup cooks, you won’t be able to tell the difference.”
I know this pleased my mother. Bet she instituted this practice in her own kitchen.
Child of the Great Depression, she was allergic to waste. Wanted to squeeze the good out of everything.
I thought of her last night after supper. We’d eaten baked butternut squash. As I cleared our plates and dumped squash peelings into
the compost bucket, I noted Husband had not scraped every tidbit of squash from his peels, whereas mine were clean as a whistle. I took
a fork and scraped his leftover peelings clean, ate the squash and thought of my mother. I know where this compulsion to not waste food comes from.
Chop, chop, chop.
We purchased this antique cutting board some time ago from a neighbor’s garage sale. The
couple had been married over 50 years. The young husband had made his new bride this cutting board, painted its slump-shouldered edges a bright green, drilled a hole at the top so it would easy to hang.
If my husband were cutting these vegetables, he’d slice them thin, dice the celery, make everything look like something out of Bon Appétit. Me, I slap a handful of carrots on the cutting board, saw through them all at once, make manageable hunks. I’m not going to spend my time making The Carrot Beautiful. I’m making soup.
Soup.
My dad grew up in the midst of the Great Depression, too. His first words were not “Mommy” and “Daddy” but “bean toup.” Bean soup and oatmeal comprised his childhood diet.
Husband and I get all fancy, eat dinner in courses. I warm leftover tomato-hamburger soup atop the stove, leftover squash in the
oven. The soup gets hot first. I carry two bowls from the kitchen. Although I like to look down my nose on folks who eat in front of the TV,
I’m planning to commit that very sin right now. I’ll slip a dvd into our computer—an episode
of Gunsmoke or 1960s Batman (& Robin). But Husband sees me coming, clears space at the table, saves me from myself.
Good. We can present ourselves in the best
possible light for these Middletown Diaries.
Let the record show we dined at table using the most fastidious of manners; our pinky fingers stood at attention throughout the meal.
My mother again comes to mind. She attended a one-room grade school a few miles from her house. The county’s sole high school was many miles away and there were no school buses.
For four years she boarded in town during the week, as did other rural children. The matron who supervised the lunchroom was a stickler for manners. She taught her charges the fine art of eating soup using the mantra, “I dip my
spoon away from me like a little ship going out to sea.” My mother passed this lesson along to her children who, alas, studiously ignored it.
We’re done with soup, thick into Gunsmoke before the squash is ready. Husband sits tight, watches the episode straight through. At an exciting part I get up and head for the kitchen.
“I’ll pause it,” he says.
“No, that’s OK. I’m managing stress.” Making soup is more relaxing than seeing
people killed. I’m chopping carrots when two orange rounds roll onto the floor. I’m tempted to throw them directly into the pot but as I’m recording these goings on for public consumption, I wash the carrot pieces off first. Now I chop one large, one small
onion. Two pieces of onion hit the floor. Hang public consumption. I toss them into the pot
straightway. Husband comes in. I confess nothing. He asks how he can help. I request he
add salt, dried bay leaves from our potted bay
tree, plus oregano, marjoram and thyme bought
in bulk from E&S Grocery in Shipshewana,
Indiana.
WRITE
Or go fishing, whatever floats your boat.
I spend several hours this afternoon writing at the computer. I have a 2000 word assignment due. I put down words, then go back over
them time and again to refine, clarify, reveal. I sidetrack into recording events of the day for this Middletown project. I don’t have much to show for the time I spend at it this afternoon.
But it is my own story I am telling and this takes some thinking. It takes courage, too, to feel back into emotions I’m not proud of, to remember the person I was, my ways of being in the world. I reflect on painful times, put myself back in the moments I’ve never quite left. Muddle through.
The tea kettle whistles. I make tea for me, a pot of decaf coffee for Husband.
Back to writing. Slow progress. Yes, I enjoy it. Yes, it’s a pain. Yes, I have a way with words. Yes, it’s a talent I want to nurture, refine, honor. Yes, I am easily distracted. Yes, I’m writing a book. Yes, I’ve been writing
that book for years now. Years. Yes, I’ve published my work here and there. Yes, I could
do more if I had more gumption, more stick-
to-itiveness, more self-discipline. Yes, I am sometimes afraid of what lurks beneath the surface of the vast still pond into which I cast my little line. Yes, some days I get a nibble. Some writing days the fish aren’t biting or I am too distracted or choose to leave too soon. Some days I hook something big, get pulled in, taken down in and under the water. Once I
ripped my sole on the jagged edges of a broken bottle half-buried in the murky depths.
HEAR
In which I recount meeting a dead woman in our woods who wouldn’t leave me alone.
The fire dies down. I pause to slip three more logs into the high-efficiency fireplace insert we had installed last spring after the bottom
burned out of our previous one. We’re burning hardwood logs today. Good stuff from a fallen tree along the path in the middle of our woods.
Staying warm this winter takes some doing. We didn’t get our winter wood supply cut and stacked this fall. I got involved in a volunteer project last fall that required much of my free time throughout our traditional lumberjack season. For a while we lived on borrowed time—used wood left over from last winter. This took us into early December. ’Been living hand to mouth since then. Go out of an evening and cut on a downed tree for wood to burn that night, the next day. Get out on the weekend
and cut enough to last a few days, maybe a week.
Back in December Husband was down sick for an extended period with a severe head cold. This put the kibosh on our woodcutting. By virtue of a safety pact we made, neither
of us will run the chain saw without the other present. My Uncle Ed, a veteran woodcutter, bled to death after a chain saw accident. We want to avoid such a fate, if possible.
I couldn’t cut wood solo, but I could split the big logs we had set aside under a tarp. Except that our log splitter leaked gas soon as I turned it to “start.” Not a good sign. I shut it off. But not before wrenching my elbow pulling the
rip cord. Probably pulled a tendon—maybe
tore it, given the acute pain. I reported on the condition of the log splitter, not my
elbow. Carburetor needs work, Husband said, impressing me with how butch he is. As we couldn’t split and I couldn’t cut until he was up and about, we let the oil furnace come on,
kept the house at 56 degrees. Drew the curtains to the living room, used a kerosene heater for localized heat.
Yesterday we spent much of the day cutting already-down trees, ones that were up off the ground and therefore dry. Ones small enough in diameter we can burn the logs without splitting them or can split them by hand with a sledge-hammer and wedge. By
late afternoon we had six stacks of wood. We wished for snow to be able to sled the wood
up to the woodshed, but in its absence we used the orange wheelbarrow. Husband held the handlebars whilst I grabbed hold of the side and pushed with my good left arm. The last load I wheeled up by myself, at first pulling it
as if I were a horse and it the cart, then pushing it from behind.
The best wood we found was also the furthest from the house. Last summer a tree fell across our woods path. We cut a piece out of its trunk so we could continue to use the path. We
left the tree there to dry. Probably it’s maple. Maybe hawthorn. Big enough around that we split the pieces by hand. And well worth the effort. The wood burns hot and long.
We’re burning these favored pieces today. As
I add another to the fire I think of my Auntie V. She died at age 16, long before I was born. But I met her in our woods once, several years back. Right where these logs came from. She spoke to me often that summer.
I was using our push mower to create a walking path through the woods when a sudden sharp pain in my right foot stopped me
cold. I’d stepped on a hawthorn spike, ran it up through my shoe and deep into the sole of my foot. Immediately I thought of Auntie V.
It was as if she were there beside me. Better make sure my tetanus shot is up to date. Don’t want to die like she did.
When I was a boy my mother often told my siblings and me about her sister V. who had died before Mom was born.
“My sister V. died after she stepped on a rusty nail. She got blood poisoning. It went right up her leg, into her heart and she died. You kids be careful when you’re playing outside.”
If pressed, my mother would elaborate. “V. was buried on your Uncle W.’s birthday. He and your Uncle B. spent the morning of his birthday digging her grave. I have a photograph taken at V.’s funeral. My parents look very, very sad. When your
Auntie I. and I were little, my mother would sometimes show us a wreath of dried flowers from V.’s funeral. She’d always cry.”
I checked. My tetanus shots were up to date,
my foot out of commission for a couple weeks. But why did I keep hearing Auntie V.’s voice? She wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept whispering words I couldn’t quite make out, tugging at my sleeve, nudging my elbow.
Finally I called my youngest sibling, the brother with whom I was on speaking terms. “Do you remember Mom invoking Auntie V.’s name when she’d warn us about rusty nails?”
“No, I don’t remember Mom ever talking about her,” he said. “No.”
Sheesh. What family did he grow up in?!?
I called my mother. “Mom, remember how you used to warn us about rusty nails? How you’d talk about Auntie V. dying of blood poisoning?”
Long radio silence.
What, had my mother forgotten, as well? Did I
pull this memory out of thin air?
Finally my mother spoke. “Well, that’s what
I always thought. That’s what my mother told me had happened. That V. had stepped on a rusty nail.”
“But she didn’t?”
“When I was a little girl my mother would reach up into the ceiling and take down a wreath of dried flowers. She’d show them to me and [auntie] I. ‘These are from your sister V.’s funeral,’ she’d say. ‘Poor V.’
When we asked, she always said V. died of blood poisoning. From stepping on a rusty nail.”
“But no?”
“Well, not exactly. After my sister E. died your dad and I lived at her place for a couple years. In the upstairs hallway I found a brown paper sack full of old letters she’d saved. She and W. wrote each other about V. I learned V. had gotten pregnant, went to see some guy in Grand Rapids she had been told could help. His equipment must have been dirty. She got blood poisoning.”
Long pause. The air goes out of me. My mother continues.
“I always thought my parents looked so, so sad at her funeral; now I understand.”
I hung up the phone surprised, saddened, angry. And had no more visitations from Auntie V. Was this revelation the reason she had pestered me?
I slip a log into the fire, wonder if it’s hawthorn. Wonder if the spike I stepped on came from this very tree. Wonder if Auntie V. is now at rest.
Wonder what I’ll say (and to whom) if I come
back postmortem.
READ
Being an account of people who pretend to write about their own lives when they’re really
writing about mine.
If reading isn’t more important to me than eating, it rates high on my list. Hardly a day goes by that I don’t do both.
A copy of the current Harpers sits on the back of our bathroom stool. I read it cover to cover in increments as I pee, poop, soak my feet in urine, brush my teeth. Generally I finish the magazine a few days before the next month’s issue arrives in the mail.
Today I work my way through “Maps and Ledgers,” a fictional story by John Edgar Wideman. I’m not familiar with this author, and am surprised by similarities between
his writing voice and mine. We both eschew formal rules of grammar. Write short, now long sentences. Write about power and our lack of
it. Write from the perspective of minorities. He might be telling me about myself. Probably is.
Majority rules,we learned.Except, since we spent most of ow time talking among ow own kind,talking,interacting only with each other, slippage occwred naturally. REinforced by the presence
of friends and family,we considered ourselves the equal of others.Or considered ourselves better. Considered ow status as minority, as inforior, not to be fact.
In coming out as a gay man I came under fire from wife, children, family, friends, church, employer, legal system. I have learned to insulate, isolate myself from the wider society. Most of my friends are gay. I socialize little. Keep to myself, distrust straight people and their institutions. When I first came out gay I attended a monthly coming out support group led by a therapist. He eventually moved on; those of us in the group carried on. We’ve met once a month for over 20 years. These men know me inside and out. We bare our souls to each other. Discuss nearly every subject we
can think of. Share a variety of experiences. Support each other in good times and bad. When we get together we can almost pretend the rest of the world does not exist. That we are valued citizens, respected, honored, esteemed. That our lives count as much as anybody’s.
Wideman’s narrator says when he and his friends congregated they badmouthed members of the majority as a way of fending off the
sting of rejection, a way of surviving in the face of institutionalized prejudice. Meanwhile, he says, “…the other group survived by
arming themselves, by erecting walls, prisons, churches, laws. By chanting, screaming, repeating, believing their words for us.”
Scary, the implications for any minority group. Awful, the way this dynamic plays out in
the lives of many who do not meet societal standards for sexual orientation and/or gender expression. In countless ways small and large most members of our society police and punish
gender variance.
Back to Wideman. His narrator reminisces about his mother’s supportive care for him: “Take my hand. Hold it as I hold yours, precious boy, and let’s see what we shall see.”
I underline this passage in red ink. These might be the words Husband says to me, or that I say to my own inner child when I meet him on the plains of imagination.
Another underlined passage: “Silence because we’ve already plunged, already groping in the chill murkiness, holding our breath, dreading what we’ll recover or not from the gray water.” Here Wideman describes what the writing process is for me, my dive in to murky chill waters, not knowing, dreading what may turn up.
And again, “Don’t even know what you’re looking for except it’s bad. Gonna get you if you’re not careful.”
I read into these words my childhood and youth. Knowing I was different somehow. That there was something inside me that marked me as outsider, evil, reprobate. I didn’t have words for it. Knew only that it was bad, would get me if I weren’t careful.
And so I read a story about a black man and read myself into the account, read about my own experiences of life.
When I turn the page I find an article by
Lidija Haas which includes this: “Inequality,
domination, and cruelty are unavoidable in stories of any kind of love between a human and an animal, which just may be to say that they are about the hazards of human love and human caring in general.” She points to my affinity for chickens.
Haas and Soviet writer Isaac Babel are not
so far apart. If Wideman shows me dynamics I recognize in coming out and subsequent interactions with the world around, Babel shines a light into the darker recesses of
my psyche. Gary Saul Morson writes about Babel’s work in The New York Review of Books.
While a soldier, and later a war correspondent, Babel observed perpetrators and victims
of extreme violence. He wrote about them in his diary, stories and a novel titled Red Calvary. According to the novel’s protagonist, Bolshevik soldiers resemble their enemies.
“The hatred is the same, the Cossacks just the same, the cruelty the same, it’s nonsense to think one army is different than another…. There’s no salvation.”
War is hell. There is none righteous, no not
one. But Babel goes beyond this when he looks inside at the violence in the human heart. This
is where he gets me. I see this violence come out in my interactions with chickens. I play
at being their god, hold over them the power of life and death. Right now have six roosters awaiting execution. Company of the damned.
Babel saw the impulse towards brutality as a key to human nature. He wrote in his diary, “Must penetrate the soul of the fighting man, I’m penetrating, it’s all horrible, wild beasts with principles.”
What the wild beast in me? What its principles?
WATCH
In which a fictional character describes the reality of my experience.
Our favorite movies deal with the process of coming out gay. Often, teens are shown navigating these waters, but as Husband and I know, middle-aged and older adults are
not immune to the surprise of waking up to learn they are not who they’ve been telling themselves they are.
A sacred passage, this, and one fraught with danger on every hand. Exhilaration, too. Teenagers are not the only ones to experience the ups and downs of sexual awakening.
In Les Roseaux Savages, François comes out to his best friend Maite. “I slept with a boy,” he says. She looks at him. Just looks.
“You have to say something,” he says. And I nod. I know this holding-your-breath feeling, this wondering how she’s going to react. I know the courage it takes to formulate such words, to share them with a friend.
“It makes no difference,” she tells him at last. He and I both sigh in relief. This movie touches a place in me, a tender, hopeful, happy, wounded place. I’ve had conversations such as this go south. Way south.
“But you are born on the edges of the kingdom of storms,” the mighty oak tree says to the
wild reeds of the movie’s title in an old fable
François reads aloud at school. Born on
the edges of the kingdom of storms. An apt description of the coming our process for many. And the sad reality: not all who are
birthed there live to tell the tale. Some are done in, uprooted, drowned. I’ve watched it happen.
I grew up living the paradox of firmly believing my church’s assertion that our congregation knew the answers to life’s ultimate questions, that we had the handle on what it’s all about. We didn’t say it aloud, but we knew this made us better than everyone else. We congratulated ourselves for being among the elect, the elite, and pitied the poor sods who yet lived in darkness and desperate
ignorance in need of our enlightening message. Paradoxical, I say, because at the same time
I knew I was better than everyone else, I was also aware there was something deeply rooted in me that made me worse than anyone. Something shameful, wrong. I couldn’t define it. Didn’t know the term “homosexual,” didn’t know the alternate meaning of the word “gay,” but I knew there was something deplorable about me, about who I was. Something rotten at the core. So at once I believed I was better and worse off than everyone.
The movie stirs these memories and others. François is at boarding school, coming to grips with being gay and bowled over by his
first experience with another boy. A friend and fellow student guesses his secret, tells him such an escapade is no big deal, this kind of thing happens at boarding school all the time, and if François is himself gay, that’s no big deal either.
But for François it is.
Later, François offers his cavalier friend some
advice and receives this retort: “Give blow
jobs instead of sermons. You’d be more honest and useful.”
Ooooh. That’s the advice I needed to hear when I was 16, 18, 21, 32, even though it would have fallen on deaf ears.
François is at wits end. My heart aches for him as he seeks counsel from the only gay adult he knows of, a local shopkeeper. The man is busy with a customer when the lad asks to see him. “I’m queer like you,” he tells the startled man. Worried about his future, hopeful, despairing, inexperienced, François lets the words tumble out.
“I met someone who doesn’t want me. I should give up. That would be smarter. But I’m not smart. I have no chance but I can’t give up. I don’t get discouraged. We made love once— only once—in the beginning. He doesn’t want me any more. Since then, I’m like a thief. I
steal moments. Once I held him tight on my bike. Another time I slept near him.”
How like François I am with my schoolboy crushes on a co-worker, a passerby, an acquaintance. How very much the coming out process is a lifelong one—there is always more to learn, more to be said, more of the story to watch unfold.
The shopkeeper fidgets, ill at ease. Tells the boy it’s been too long; he doesn’t know, doesn’t remember what it was like for him
when he was young. Besides, he must get back to his customer.
Merde. How often our pleas for help go unheeded. Perhaps we ask amiss. Perhaps we don’t know whom to ask, or what, or how.
TEND
Including a true and accurate census of our chicken coop.
I sing, “This is My Father’s World” as I go out to put the chickens to bed. I check on the granaried roosters first. Five tails point toward me, only the younger black rooster faces the door. The four ecliptical cockerels huddle on
the south end of the roost, the younger black one next to them, then three empty spaces, then the largest black rooster. I remove their water
so it won’t freeze overnight. I see they have food left.
Sixteen eggs today; 15 yesterday. I count noses—beaks, rather—tonight in the coop:
28 hens, two guineas, one large red rooster, one bantam rooster, one Polish rooster, six granaried roosters. Sold seven dozen eggs at work this week. This helps with the feed bill.
I help carry wood in. Husband tells me to be careful of ice on the sidewalk. It’s slippery. Moisture was dripping this morning. Now it’s spattering very fine granules of snow or ice.
The temperature has dropped from 34 earlier to something much colder now.
I take a moment to reflect on my dreams of
this morning. A trip, return to the dorm, group
restroom, far urinal, little sorrel bay. Where in my life have I been away from home base, returned to the fold, gone to tend to basic needs at a remove . . . and what inner voice speaks to me of small, proud, wild contradictions in my animal nature?
A little girl abused by mother or mother’s boyfriend; what am I to do? Do I tell the birthfather? Is there in me a young feminine energy that’s being harmed by the adult in me who should be offering love and nurturance? If I identify such inner dynamics, what am I
going to do about it? To what part of me will I
appeal for direction, cure?
SLEEP
Offering an insider’s view of the bedroom activities of two gay men.
Vitamins taken, teeth brushed, I finish
pooping for the third time today. As I leave the bathroom I sing, “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee
. . . ” and as I crawl into bed, “Oh, they tell me of a land where no storm clouds roll, oh they tell me of a land far away.”
Husband pulls on navy blue sleep shirt and brightly colored sweat pants. (These latter are a sight to behold: warm fleece in swirling hot pink and sky blue, sunshine yellow imprinted all over with grinning black sugar skulls with heart-shaped eye sockets.)
I look around and affect surprise to find myself alone in bed, first to arrive. “Oh. Well. Looky there.”
In 20-plus years together, we have developed several going-to-bed games/rituals we can select from as the mood hits. Generally, whoever gets to bed first chooses if and what transpires next. Some nights it’s the race to see who gets in bed first. Husband likes to tempt fate. He’ll stand bedside, hand on the covers, all innocence while I approach the opposite side acting as if I don’t know or care
what’s about to happen. Just as I start to lift the blankets, he dives into bed, then exults at his prowess in having arrived first. Those nights he fumbles the sheets and I slip in first, I crow my triumph loud and long.
Success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed.
Tonight it’s no contest. I am the undisputed claimant to the title of First In Bed. I opt to crow about it. I clear my throat, assume a high and mighty tone.
“If I were keeping a written record of my activities today, say for some Everyday Life in Middletown project, documenting for posterity the minutiae of my day, I would find myself forced to recount my troubled sleep tonight, for as the saying goes, ‘Heavy lies the head that wears the crown.’”
I adjust my imaginary headgear. “This crown, encrusted with all manner of precious jewels, crafted from purest gold, filigreed with care by the finest artists in the realm—well, you can
bet this crown is going to sit heavy on my head all night long. I feel its weight already. Oh, the pain.”
“Say no more,” Husband says, gets in bed, douses the light.
“Do you want to kiss the royal ring?” I ask. “I want to kiss your lips,” he says.
We suit action to the word.
Everyday Life in Middletown in 50 Words
Sing, sing, sing. Little sorrel bay. Big snow, little snow, Ivan Nemo Moue. House of the Damned, dead albatross. Skeerdy-cat, Green Room, forest for the trees. Cabbage and carrots, murky waters deep. Dead woman talking. Black and young like me. Care for those you love, wear a golden crown.
photo credits: Diarist A29, free stock images at pxhere.com