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.