Memoir Class

 I'm taking a memoir writing class for "people over 55" - oooold people, in other words.  I share below a piece I wrote for the class.

 HE'S GOT LEGS

David Clark

@thethinblackframe

I fell in love with these legs almost fifty years ago.  My swift approaching fiftieth high school reunion reminds me that I met their owner just four months after I left California for college in Idaho.  He was a professor and long-time friend of my aunt, Huldah Bell, who ran the student union.  Before she introduced me to the tall, skinny, wildly-bearded professor, she told me, “He’s odd.  I think you’ll like him.”

 

In those days I knew I was looking for both sex and love, though they needn’t have been conjoined.  I followed the doctrine of free love and believed, as young people often do, that every individual I liked and respected also at least understood and respected the same doctrines I did.  In my newfound college freedom, more than 800 miles away from my parents, I was ready to try out my liberty under the liberal eyes of my auntie.

 

I assumed that when Aunt Huldah introduced us, she was giving me the AOK for whatever I felt like doing with him.  Only after I turned 19 did I understand that "Assume makes an ass of you and me."

 

Anyway, I was ready to give my heart and body to, well, whoever walked into them on the right legs.  And he’s got legs.  (Sound Effects:  Cue ZZ Top.) So when Huldah introduced us, I immediately crushed on the eccentric professor.

 

I sometimes watched for him from the window of the University News Bureau where my dad had wangled me a job.  Most of my time there I clipped stories about University students from Idaho’s myriad local papers.  And once I secretly looked up his news bureau file to find out his schedule so that I could “accidentally” bump into him.

 

But when I was left alone at lunch, I’d watch out the window at times I knew he would be between classes.  I hoped to see him walk across the great grassy rectangle centering the oldest campus buildings. He had a unique walk, his long back curved in a scholar’s stoop around an armload of books. My aunt called him a walking question mark. And rather than his whole leg moving out from his hip at once, his knees led the lower legs so each step ended with an almost invisible little kick.

 

It wasn’t long before I was wrapping my short legs around his, at first in deep secret, and then legally.  Once we let people see us together, we occasionally heard Mutt and Jeff comments because of the steep height differential.  But we fit together just fine horizontally.  And when we walked holding hands through Pocatello, Berkeley, Venice and the other places we’ve lived and visited, he never outpaced me, but matched his steps to mine.

 

And now I am washing shit off them.  He is standing, one arm on my back as I kneel beside him, wiping away another accident.  There is no fat left on these legs, just muscle and heavy bone beneath frail skin.  I knew to slide Vaseline under my nose before kneeling so I don’t gag.  And now I am wiping my old love’s ass, wiping bits of dry shit off his old legs as tenderly as I can.  He groans above me as I push on his thighs and think about how wrong I was at twenty about the meaning of Love.

Aaannnd he's up!

 So it happened again.

Anne Nygard @polarmermaid

 After two weeks of downturn he was up and awake from 11:30 am till 9:30 pm on Sunday and up a long time yesterday, as well.  He's eating a bit more.  He put on a pound.  After I came home from my evening off last night, we actually had a bit of a conversation!  It was amazing!  Although he looked really white and unwell, he was able to talk about his time at Idaho State University and instead of remembering it as a horrible place where people picked on him (which is pretty much how he presented it to me while he was working there) he said that "There were other um people like me?  Faculty and students who knew what I was trying to do."

He was remembering his years there with fondness. He couldn't remember how long he'd taught -- 33 years -- but he wasn't stressed about his lack of memory.  He was stumbling over words and his sentences were short, but we were actually having something like a conversation.  

I was happy to see him happy.  And I also feel like my kintsugi heart is just tired and heavy.  

It's a trip, I tell you what.

"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains, he still remains"

 

I Believe

If I had the energy, I'd craft a full parody of "I Believe" but instead use aspects of the particular brand of Christianity to which I subscribe -- high(ish) church Episcopalianism.  Or is Trinity middle church?  I don't know.

But really, all I could think of right now as ridiculous was all the stuff I find beautiful -- the costumes, the holy hardware, the belief in the holiness of the priest and that metaphorically bonking someone on the head with a wand that has been passed on from the guy who bonked the bonker on the head - well - yes silly.

And that's what makes it glorious.  We cannot approach the great Mystery directly.  Those who do go mad.  So we place art and structure around it.

Gavin Creel as Elder Price at the Olivier's

I can't approach.  I place art and structure.  Might as well fucking own my beliefs and feelings.

I'm at my office.  It's 5:21 am and the sky is just lightening.  In summer, I miss most of the morning spectacle because the sun rises further north.  But in fall and winter, the sunrises are spectacular from my perch at The Haven - scarlet fading to peach, reflected in the river.  

I am blessed to have the money to do this.  I would rather have my Will as he was.  I would rather be living poor again and have his full mind with me, even if his body were just as wilted as it is now.

He stayed up yesterday from 11:00 am through the afternoon and evening.  He ate a piece of toast and two glasses of juice with ensure.  He sat in the wingbacks all afternoon.  He had a mild fecal leakage in one of them that became messy pants and bathroom.  But I got both the chair, him and the bathroom cleaned up. He had shit down his leg and I used the wipes from the Hospice to get him cleaned up.  He needs a bath today.  When I went downstairs at night to watch a Bette Davis movie (TCM's Month Under the Stars) I heard him moving around upstairs and he finally came down to watch.  Then we went to bed.

I believe this is where I am supposed to be.

"The scriptures say that if you ask in faith,
If you ask God himself you'll know.
But you must ask him without any doubt,
And let your spirit grow!"

-- Trey Parker