Dear Patricia Plainsong,
As
the day rolls to a fold, and mother’s hanging the wash on the line, some
foreboding leads me to ask, “Are you very sad these days after what the fire’s
done?”
This
is not a question of arguing balls and strikes. It is luck’s handout. (Yes,
you’d say, hand it to the scratchers of lottery tickets; they’ve got a mold to
keep, and they keep it.) And this while folks like us sit here staring at Rorschach
blurs in the trees, doing less than something, shuffling thoughts and stifling
motivation for, well, escape. White socks and a forgiving temperament, we
strain (yes, my dear, this includes me at last) to youthier flights of
contemplation.
Famish
the flies and we shall dive less deep into the wealth of our circumstances.
Amplitudes
deceive me, less than charmed on an engaging frequency, so I take truck with
muskrat suppers, gorge on vole nuggets, elephant shrew stew, and rhinoceros
steak. There are those eager for material gain who would have you believe I
have taken an ill disposition, and that I am feckless in the defense of my
daily strife. But what fires be put out but those started by the selfsame fools
in the first? Though, well, I needn’t persuade you of any disquiet that may
still smolder hot-coal bright in your heavy heart. For, as of late, the green
grass of home is for all of us still a misstepped lunge clung to self-pity and
withering endurance. Remember not to be always shaped by what shadows you. If
mother taught us anything in the doomed cusp of her wilting willpower, it was
this.
Now
the hours spread out instead of reeling in, and I pause happily at the
interlude of calm’s shuttering, stumped and loping in place: a rare breed of insolence.
Mother
rolls her sleeves. The sunset dust settles. Somewhere somebody is frying eggs.
But not for me. Consider my fingers crossed.
When
was it that we knew how to hide our voices? Oh, but adults don’t speak to each
other like this, and we go on acting like little children. As complainers we
stay sturdy and corrupt, yes? Bashful as being stricken with laryngitis would
make us, it isn’t ordinary to be singularly fascinated by worn, unlit neon
bulbs. And yes, we are merely what our choices make us at times, and the chew
and call of missing things erodes a somewhat already fabricated existence, yet
we continue imagining our lives lived in other ways. In the past tense we were
washed out without a worry to our name. Dreary bastards of chance, we ran past
the king without any clothes. The crows didn’t want us then (not shiny enough),
until early rising left us glowing towards what we should’ve guessed. Remember?
It was song that went, “Make my bed only to wreck my dreams.” Something differs
to the iffy lurk of lost loves still, perhaps? Would it were so.
Beer
in the afternoon. Scotch in the evening. Bourbon highballs all through the
night. I am under-eating, as always, for the nights come upon me too quickly.
Laminate the sky with me; I am jerry-rigged with defeat.
The
cathedral bells are tolling Luck Be A Lady. A careful gust of courage escapes
me. Mother is uneven in her approach to roaches, and they seem to roam free for
the most part. Somehow the breezes here do not soothe me anymore. I am too departed
from the gentleness of kisses on the ear to be of any use to anyone. I do my
praying on the toilet.
In
the boxy sense of saying what’s on loop in my head until my number comes up, in
that citadel of anxious decambering, shrieking in nightshirts, apprehended with
a matronly sensitivity at last, I try on all the red dresses around and tiptoe
past the fireplace. Do not regret the timeliness of my ways. Do not shave the
recently deceased. Behave, if it is necessary. Mother is not curling her hair.
The ante is forever upped. All is sapropel of memory, and we do whatever it is
we must to chin-up our way to the finish line, and then past it, or over it,
and then farther, and then farther still.
Yours,
Hank
Mayberry Livingston III
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