TIME LORD

 I was finishing my lunch with some scoops of avocado-based ice cream when he walked into the dining area in his nightgown, without his glasses, sat on one of the new chairs and started talking about building something, but he wasn't going to keep working once he went back to school.  He kept talking about organizing "things" and how the windows were really good for the house (I could tell he meant a selling or buying point).  Then he mentioned going back to work again and I reminded him, kindly, laughing in that "we're all in this together" way, that he was retired.

"You must have been dreaming that you were still at work, " I lied.  "You get a pension!  

 He began talking again about "getting things together" and then said, in a very loud voice and looking at me with gigantic blue-grey eyes, "I came here from Chicago!"  

Downtown, Minatare, sometime in the present

I was baffled, as I was during much of this conversation, although whenever possible I was smiling and nodding enthusiastically.  The he asserted that he "comes back here every summer" and pointed at the deck and called it "the porch."  Then he mentioned his siblings, saying something about how something we had done or were doing was better than the things they were doing.  

And I didn't tell him they were all dead, that he is the sole survivor of that big three family family.  That rivalry is still alive in his mind. As he spoke, wearing his red plaid nightshirt over red plaid flannel pjs, he looked a bit like an L.L.Bean Lear, his white hair wild, his big-boned once 6'2" frame now shrunken to 118 lbs.

Downtown Bend, sometime in the past

 

This is the first time he's confused Bend with Minatare.

His eyes were watering, either from emotion or allergies.  He was looking out at the overcast sky, heavy with clouds, but occasionally lit through the cracks with patches of bright sunlight.

He's back in bed now.

Happy Anniversary

 It's an unreflective cultural practice to write "Happy Anniversary" when someone posts an announcement of their wedding anniversary on Facebook.  So I wasn't upset with my friends when they left that comment on my feed after I re-posted an old newspaper announcement celebrating Will's and my previous anniversary.  In my mind's ear I hear each anniversary in the voice of Paul Harvey:  "Karen and Wilbur Huck - 48 years together (pause) on the road to (pause) forever."

Monitor publicity shot of Bob and Ray with Tedi Thurman

I listened to Paul Harvey in my youth, even though I knew his right-wing political opinions didn't link with my Dad's leftish views.  Anytime I was doing a physical activity that didn't require mental concentration, I listened to talk rather than music AM radio. When traveling in the car on the weekend, the folks would play Monitor Radio (NBC) which offered a mix of talk and popular (non rock) music.  I remember sitting in the back seat behind Dad and hearing the weekend mix of news, celebrity interviews, and music.  (Sitting behind Dad was better in the winter when the car windows were closed.  If the windows were opened and he wanted to smoke a cigar, he bit and spit off the end and it would come in through the window beside me.)  The best thing about Monitor was that it introduced me to Bob and Ray.  These brilliant comics were also regularly featured on Comedy Time on KGO.

Memories of radio, the Hot Medium.

I've been marinating in the past as I get ready to go to my 50th high school reunion next week.  Fortunately, my younger sister is willing to stay here and oversee Will's care for the time I'm gone and our regular caregiver has shifted her other clients so that she can be with Will for 4 hours in the morning and 4 hours in the evening so my sister can go out or just hang out downstairs, should she so please.  Today I'm finishing building a twin bed for her (no, not Ikea -- Target) so she can inhabit the room next to Will's.  Winston is going to stay with his former carer.  I'll have to tell her that he now sings a lot.  Maybe that would be a good nick-name for him, Sir Singsalot!

This week I've been online with 27 other new students at my Canadian graduate school as we listened to several of our future teachers introduce themselves through zoom.  As an old, white person, I am in the minority of the new students.   I feel rather nervous and very excited to be taking two semesters of Hebrew Bible with a scholar who is also the new dean.   I think she looks like Bibi Andersson from the early Ingmar Berman Films.

That I have much to excite me doesn't alter my experience of everyday grief whenever I take full cognizance of what's going on in my life and all around me.

Life is so strange.

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.