The Accident

("Postcards from Nowhere")

My day off was odd and disappointing, but it served to make work worse, too. I'd become programmed, I guess, unable to do anything else and hating what I was doing. Was this what prepared us for life I wondered?

The construction site was beginning to look like a hotel. Oddly, the rooms were being dropped in by cranes, prefabricated, whole. The modular units looked strange and plastic, but floor by floor, day after day, a hotel was being trucked in. It was like building with large toys. But there were lots of mistakes. Cement floors were poured before the plumbers put in the pipes and had to be torn up. Walls were closed before the electricians were finished. The project fell further and further behind schedule and everyone was feeling the rush.

One day we were told to move a big pile of metal beams. Laborers were brought over to move them by hand. They were long, heavy beams and we stood around a moment trying to figure things out. We formed a row and put our hands to a beam and began to lift. It was too heavy and unbalanced and several men let go and jumped back. I didn't and strained fruitlessly to hold up my section. The beam fell to the ground trapping the fingers of my right hand under it, and immediately I made a desperate pull to free them. When they came out, the skin at the end of the nails had ruptured and blood and flesh and something else dangled in odd lumps from them. Gingerly and helplessly, I held my right wrist with my left hand and wide-eyed in panic looked around. I turned to a fellow next to me and said,"I think I need a doctor." And with disdain, the bastard turned away saying, "Then I guess you'd better get one, hadn't you." The son of a bitch had a slight grin on his face. It had happened to the hippie.

Donny's father sent word up to get Tommy. I sat on the floor leaning against a wall feeling sick, things pitching and heaving in slow waves about me. I heard voices without listening to them, thinking about my crushed fingers and nothing else. When Tommy got there, we went down the elevator, across the muddy lot, and got into my car. The numbness was leaving my fingertips now and they were really beginning to hurt. I wanted to puke.

But what can you do? Tommy drove me along familiar roads on the way to a medical clinic where all the injured workers were taken. "Well," I said, "I guess I won't be playing guitar any more."

The doctor who saw me gave me some pain medicine and cleaned my fingers. Two of them were crushed, he said, but they would heal. I may lose feeling in them, though, he said, but it might come back in time.

That night at home, I got a call from a fellow who worked for U.S. Steel. He asked me what the doctor had told me. He said not to come to work for the rest of the week. No shit, Sherlock, I thought.

When my father got home, he was angry. Why in the hell was I trying to pick up a beam, he wanted to know.

I kept thinking about the son of a bitch who hadn't cared that I was hurt. What sort of man was he, I wondered? I didn't remember having ever seen him before. I had never done anything to him. But he didn't like me at all. He sure didn't, and it was wrong. I felt that as deeply as the pain in my fingers. The expression on his face, the tone in his voice. I couldn't shake them.

That night, lying on the couch, I thought about Abby's apartment, the fabrics and the fragrances. I thought about her hair and the curve of her pale neck, and I thought about the rise of her breast beneath her thin white top. I wanted to call her and tell her I'd been injured. I wanted to lie on her bed and listen to music.

It was hot in the cracker box house, too hot to sleep. I lay there in a daze, sweating, the pain in my fingers coming in waves through the medicine the doctor had prescribed. Lingering on the borderland of consciousness, I thought that it had been a pretty shitty day.

Deserts of Vast Eternity

("Postcards from Nowhere")

Work, eat, sleep, drive, work. I decided to take a day off after one straight month of seven ten hour days a week. Saturday. I went to the record store I had worked in once. It felt odd to be in the world again, not surrounded by hardhats and rednecks. I felt like one of those fellows who comes back from basic training to see his friends before he ships out. Nothing is the same.

I had called Abby a couple of times but hadn't gone to see her. I decided to go.

Far away, over unfamiliar roads, I drove to her apartment. It was in a small town full of working people. There was an old town center, a short downtown street made of brick and depression era buildings. She lived upstairs above a store and was waiting for me when I got there.

She lived with another girl who was not there, and they had decorated the place with batik cloth and big pillows. The air smelled sweet with something, incense, yes, but other things, too. She did not look like the girl I knew at school. She wore a thin Indian cloth top and a big print pleated skirt that seemed to go with the apartment's cozy decor. I liked it all, but I felt awkward and out of place. There we were, two young working people, but I felt I had already taken a wrong turn. When she spoke, I was reminded of flowers and light breezes. When I heard my own voice coming back to me, I heard only a rough and dirty road. It was a terrible awakening there in the cool darkness. I stayed awhile, though it became painfully obvious that she had already outgrown me in the few weeks since we'd graduated, and when I knew it was time to leave, I thought to kiss her, but there was a warning in her eyes that I would take with me instead.

I drove home in the middle of the afternoon, my day off stretching out before me like Marvel's desert of vast eternity.

Drifting

("Postcards from Nowhere")

What madness, these lives we call ours? They are never ours, ours alone. One day it comes to us. We do not own them. Perhaps, we think, they own us. We struggle to dredge up meaning from the past, to put things into context, to make it all seem a solid, coherent entity. But we know only one thing. We drift toward some inevitable, certain future, unmistakable, unavoidable. In a cold panic, we try to stake our claim. Drifting, drifting, drifting.

Seven Days a Week

Sunrise on a rural, hilly road. A construction site. Working as the day passes catching glimpses of the world outside. Every afternoon, the storms come. Then the drive home. The theme park was a mysterious place, a seemingly endless labyrinth of construction, thousands and thousands of workers trying to piece things together. It was rumored that secret tunnels ran under the entire park. Large rivers lakes were being dug, sculpted out of the land. Anyone going near the water would be immediately fired, we were told. There were untold amounts of pesticides and other chemicals being dumped in. From the top of the hotel, you could look out and see other hotels, the beginnings of rides. In an odd way, it was breathtaking.

But the project was behind schedule. Top engineers were being replaced. One day, a big German showed up at the hotel. They had brought him in at a high cost, it was rumored, to get the project finished. He looked like a bulldog, like someone who lived to eat and drink. It was rumored, too, that he was very much for the women. I couldn't imagine a woman being attracted to him, but it wasn't his looks they were after. He was a celebrity, in a way, a superstar of the construction world, and he sparked my imagination as he walked about the site, the obvious center wherever he stood, all others standing around and to the side in obedient servitude.

It was another engineer, however, who made all the difference. He was young and tall and athletic and dark hair that fell to his shoulders, hair longer than mine. When he stood in a group, he looked half a foot taller than everyone else, and thicker and harder as well. I would watch him as he stood holding blueprints in his fingers, tracing out some mystery then pointing out to part of the hotel, directing the attention of the people in his group. The rednecks were befuddled by him, this striking, athletic boy, and they redirected their gaze when he was around. I wanted, I knew, to be that fellow.  

And so the days went by, me driving and working and sleeping seven days a week. I had no time to spend any of my money and it was piling up in a bank account. My week was divided only by time, time and a half, and double time.

But the pace was getting to Tommy. Some days when I went to pick him up, he told me he was not going. This happened more and more frequently as the weeks and months went by. He was beginning to look beat. But it wasn't just the work. A baby was on the way. The inevitability of that was setting in. Whether he got married or not, he was expected to work and support the family. I could see that in his dead brown eyes.

The Hippie

What I did required no skill set at all.  The work wasn't difficult.  I mostly picked things up and swept.  Most of the time, I tried to look busy so that I wasn't asked to do something else.  It wasn't just me.  There were periods when there was work to do, but most of the time we were just trying to look employed.  I walked around a lot.  

I began learning the mythology of the working world.  For instance, excessively fat guys were usually named Tiny, as was the big fellow who ran one of the cranes.  He was so fat he barely fit in the lift's cab.  Short guys were always named Shorty, as was the fellow who operated the elevator.

I found out that I was called The Hippie.  I had been seeing messages written on plywood walls and chalked on cement pillars that said, "Fri. at 5 we kill the hippie."  

"Who's the hippie?" I asked one of the other workers on my floor.  

"You are," he said.  "You're the only one with long hair."

It was true.  I worked with rednecks and hillbillies and they all had short hair.  After high school, I swore I would never cut my hair again.  I was amazed that no one ever sent me home and told me not to come back until I got a hair cut.  At other jobs, they might have.  I wasn't sure because this was my first.  But they didn't here.  I was a Union Man.  And so every week, my hair hung a little further out of my hard hat.  

I found out, too, that they thought I was a drug addict.  It was my hair, of course, but it was also that I wore long sleeved shirts tucked in and buttoned at the wrists in the middle of the summer.  I only did this to keep from itching from the fiberglass that was used everywhere for insulation, but Tommy told me that he heard some fellows talking who said I was a junky and that is why I kept my sleeves down.  He said that they were afraid of me for this reason.  But they didn't like me.  

One day, Tommy and I got on the open lift that Shorty operated. It was a big box that could carry equipment, but just then it was crammed shoulder to shoulder with workers.  Shorty knew everyone and everything that was going on.  All he did all day was stand and work the elevator and listen to people talk.  He was a bit of a wise cracker, too, a personality of sorts.  

And so we were standing all together when Shorty said, "Man, your hair sure is pretty.  How do you keep it so pretty?"  Everybody in the elevator looked at me and began to laugh.  I guess they'd all been wanting to say the same thing.  I could feel the blood rising up my neck.  Feeling emboldened, Shorty went on.  "I might just have to come over there and fuck you."  With that, the crowd exploded with hoots and hollers.  I was stymied.  I didn't know what to do.  But quick as thought, Tommy said, "Shit, Shorty, if you fucked him you'd never go back to fucking dogs."  

Tommy's retort got an even bigger laugh, and just then, the elevator stopped and we got out.  Shorty looked as if he'd stepped in shit on a first date.  

"Man, that was quick," I said to Tommy who couldn't stop laughing at his own joke.  "What the fuck caused that?"  

"Shit," he said looking at me shaking his head like I was a special needs kid.  I guessed that I would avoid taking Shorty's elevator for awhile.  I was lucky I was only working on the forth floor.  

  

Damocles Sword

"How was the new job?" my father asked me when I got home. 

"We got off early.  A fellow was killed by some falling I-beams."  I told him the story.  I wondered how often things like this happened there.  It was already hot in the house, so my father and I decided to go out for dinner.  We would get chicken and eat it down at the docks on the big lake.  

But the death of the man was there, something that you could ignore, and it was this that directed our conversation.  My father told me stories of accidents he had seen at work over the years.  He had seen a man crush his hand in a machine, had seen another saw off all of his fingers.  But he had never seen a man get killed.  Hell, I thought, this was only my first day of work.  But it was good sitting by the lake eating with my father again and talking.  I had enjoyed being on my own, but my father was not an impediment to anything I wanted to do or be.  He was always a good guy to be with.  

That night in my sleep, I saw the man getting killed again and again, but in the dreams, my vision zoomed in on the man telescopically just before the beams came down.  He looked directly at me with wide, hopeless eyes, the two of us staring through the distance knowing there was nothing I could do.  Each time, he looked a little bit more like my father.  

My dreams were interrupted, mercifully, when the alarm went off at four.  I had to get up then to get to work by six.  I showered and had some cereal and made three thick sandwiches for lunch and was just leaving when my father got up.  It was odd to be up before my father.  He was always an early riser.  

It was dead dark when I got into my car and nobody was on the road.  Work was a long way from where I lived, and I had to drive out of my way to get Tommy's since the ancient Mercedes that his father had given him as a curse was not running very well.  I picked him up in the blue-black morning and we drove onto work as the world grew visible.  

We always got to work a little early and joined the fellows hanging around the coffee carts.  Roach Coaches, the fellows called them.  Everyone was talking in low, morning tones and drinking coffee.  It looked good and I thought I might try one.  

"Coffee," I said.  "Cream and sugar."  

"You put your own in," the fellow said, nodding to the condiments.  

I put in two creams and three sugars.  It was pretty good.  I could see why these fellows liked it so much.  I ordered a sausage biscuit to go with it, and damn, that was good, too.  I got another.  This is what it is like to be a working man, I thought.  This is what you did.

Everyone was still talking about yesterday's death of the carpenter, and people were angry.  They'd had time to think about it and to ruminate, and the consensus was that the company was responsible.  They were driving us like mules, they said, because we were behind schedule.  The union reps were meeting with the company men today.  There would be more stringent safety practices, they said.  Hell, we may strike!  Their talk filled me with indignation.  Hell, these were grown men fomenting rebellion against tyranny and corruption.  I was in the Union, and I liked it. 

We worked and the morning went by with me becoming less skittish.  I found that a few of the fellows I went to high school with were also working at this site, though none of them worked on my floor, but I saw them around once in a while.  For the most part, however, the men who worked here had been doing this all their lives and were hardened by it.  There was a hierarchy among the unions, I learned.  The steel workers union was the highest paid and commanded the most respect.  Next were the guys who ran the machinery.  Then there were the plumbers and electricians and the carpenters followed by the guys who did the drywall. Laborers were plentiful, but we made the least amount of money by far.  Still, the money was good, better than you could get elsewhere, and we were working ten hour days with the option of working seven days a week.  Everything over eight hours paid time and a half for laborers and double time for everyone else, and weekends paid double time for everyone.  Workers were cramming in all the hours they could get.  Nobody knew how long this would last.  

I was happy when lunch rolled around.  Tommy came down to eat, and we opened up our bags and took out our sandwiches.  I had eaten one earlier at break, and now ate the other two with the apple and the thermos of milk I had brought.  I was tired and the food made me sleepy, and when I slid down and laid back against the the beam on which I was sitting, I fell into one of those waking comas where you hear everything coming from far away, dozing with a semi-consciousness, a body at rest.  

And too soon, we were back to work.  In the afternoons the rain came.  This happened every day.  Who would think of building a theme park in a place where it rained every day, I wondered?  The place was sure to be a failure.  How could people be so stupid?  

The first day ended without incident, but people were still saying that we might go on strike tomorrow.  The talk of a strike, I learned, was always in the air.  It added a sense of adventure to things, it seemed, this Damocles Sword.  

After dropping Tommy off, I went home.  It was six when I got into the shower and so hot that I could not get dry after.  My father and I opted for eating inside at a fancy French restaurant for the air conditioning, but stepping back into the humid heat was terrible.  Back home, I turned a floor fan on high and aimed it at the couch on which I slept.  It was eight when I went to sleep.  The sun had not yet set.  

Union Man

After six straight days of overcast skies and torrents of rain, the sun comes up bright this morning.  I've been in the dumps--bad.  Maybe that will change, too.  I was raised on sunshine.

It was summer now and getting hot in the little cracker box house.  Tommy's girl was still pregnant and starting to show a little, her mother having decided for her that an abortion in New York was out of the question.  Tommy's little brother was growing up and was a terrible little shit, a sociopath who did awful things.  I guess he'd had some good role models growing up.  He had vandalized one old woman's trailer so many times that the park's owner asked Tommy's family to leave.  Of course, to hear them talk, you would have thought it was their idea to move out.  The park was a dump, they said.  They were glad to go.  So Tommy's step-father bought a small piece of property in another part of the county, a desolate , treeless rural lot that would soon be surrounded by other trailer owners.  Tommy was moving with his family for the time being.  It was very unclear whether he would marry his girlfriend or not.  Her parents didn't seem to be pushing her in that direction.  Tommy suggested that once we began working, we should get an apartment out by our job.  My answer to that was always very vague.  

One day, Donny's father told us to meet him at the Union Hall.  The day had come for us to join.  We went early that morning to a dumpy cement block building in a shitty part of town.  Inside rough looking men sat on folding metal chairs waiting to be called for work.  The only other object in the room was a folding table holding a big metal coffee urn.  We walked up to a small teller's window and asked a gruff man if this was where we signed up.  He gave us some forms to fill out and we gave him money.  While we were filling out the forms, he would call out names and men would get up from their chairs and approach the window to get a job assignment.  The rest of the men would shuffle their feet in disappointment and grumble about not being called.  

Our monthly union dues would be automatically taken out of our paycheck each week, the fellow said when we handed back our forms.  We would be working for United Steel at one of the big hotel sites.  He slid slips of paper to us and said we should give them to the labor forman when we got to the job.  And that was that.  I had a new identity, I thought.  I was a Union Man.

"Hey, Al," one of the guys still waiting called to the man behind the window when we got our slips, "What the hell is going on?  I've been sitting here for three days. I'm paying dues, Goddamn-it.  I want a fucking JOB!"  

Donny's father, who had met us there and who had arranged things, herded us out the front door quickly.  There was trouble at the Union, he said.  Some of the members wanted to vote the union head out.  There were rumors, he said, of corruption.  

When we got to the work site, everyone was eating lunch.  We found the forman, a big guy who took our slips of paper and told us where we would be working.  Tommy drew the tenth floor and was told to look for the supervisor up there.  I would be on the forth floor with Donny's father.  Tommy gave me a look and hesitated for a moment.  I guessed he thought I had gotten the better shake.  Donny's father would be my supervisor.  

When lunch was over, Donny's father told me to clean up an area where the carpenters had just finished a job.  Carpenters didn't clean up, he said, nor anybody else.  Metal workers didn't touch wood and plumbers didn't touch electrical wiring.  There were representatives from each union to make sure that nobody made a mistake.  They were the ones who would pull the workers off the job if anything went wrong.  I was in the Labor Union, and we were grunts.  We cleaned up for everybody.  

The fourth floor was a big, open space that would be the hotel's lobby, and it was the better place to work, but I had never been on a construction site before, let alone a large high rise, and it all seemed surprisingly dangerous.  There were big holes in the floor and areas where you could fall a long way.  There were things to watch out for everywhere, to the sides, below and above.  It was the most hideously three dimensional place I had ever been.  

"Don't look at the arc welders," Donny's father had told me.  "You'll burn your retinas."  

Jesus Christ, I thought, what kind of place is this?  Just minutes before, I had come perilously close to falling into an open elevator shaft that was in a darkened corner I could barely see.  

I was standing with a broom in my hands, ostensibly sweeping, but really merely trying to stay in one place when I heard a shout from across the floor.  

"Look out!"  

Across the way, I saw a group of carpenters jump up and scramble as a bundle of I-beams slid out of their retaining strap high above where a big crane on the roof was raising them to the twelfth floor.  Quickly, they tilted and slid and began falling, twirling in the air like toys.  And just as they crashed to the floor where I worked, I saw an older man stand up, too arthritic and slow, I guessed, to get out in time.  And then he disappeared under the pile of metal beams.  He was just gone.  

Everyone stood for a second as the echo of the crashing receded, then all at once everyone was running to pull the man out.  Groups of men grabbed the heavy beams, moving them a little away from where the man lay, but there was nothing to do.  When I got there, I caught a glimpse of him before turning away. His eyeballs had popped out of their sockets.  Blood issued forth from his ears.  The man was dead.  

I walked away from the crowd, back to where I had come from.  There was nothing I could do,  and I did  not want to see anything more.  I had never seen a man killed before.  I had watched him as he stood, watched the first contact of the metal beams, seen the instant that his life had ended.  It had happened just like that. 

Some of the men began to talk.  One of them knew a little about him.  He had a wife and kids, he said.  How had it happened?  It was the crane operators fault, one said.  Why was he lifting the beams with only one tie?  You were supposed to use two.  There was too much pressure from the companies to get things done quickly another fellow offered.  We were way behind schedule.  

As we stood there, Donny's father came over and said we were done for the day.  We should come back tomorrow.  As the crowd was breaking up, Tommy came down from upstairs.  He had not seen the accident and wanted to know what happened.  

I just wanted to go home.  

Working Class Hero

Five straight days of rain.  So many plans vanquished.  Horrific rains in waves yesterday drove me inside.  I didn't even shower.  Spent the day scanning photos, listening to my station on Pandora.  I could share that with you, my station.  I'll have to figure out how to do that.  

It is cloudy but I see a small break where the sun is coming up.  Maybe I will get some exercise today.  Maybe I will shower.  I feel myself a shut-in, a recluse.  The cat likes it, though, likes me here with her, likes my funk.  She keeps rubbing her very rough tongue over me.  Hers is the roughest cat tongue I've ever felt.  If she licks twice in the same place, it is painful.  

My father was a tool an dye maker.  After the war, he had the G.I. Bill and a choice to make--trade school or college.  He chose a year of training in what was then a lucrative field, but he told me that he should have gone to college.  

He worked shaping metal his entire life and came home home with metal shavings in his gum soled shoes each night.  He was thirty-three when I was born and fifty when he got divorced.  He had always been thick boned and strong, remnants of growing up on a farm during the depression.  Over the years, though, working had left him tired in the evenings, and he came home and ate dinner and fell into a chair to drink a beer or two and watch T.V. like the other fathers in our neighborhood, and like them, too, he had grown a belly, the sort you could not see from behind, one of those hard, round bellies that makes a man look rough.  

Now, though, he had been crushed, his chest broken like a jigsaw puzzle, his once-famous breadth of chest shrunken.  He was suddenly aged, no longer the fellow you called when there was trouble in the night, and that was the greater injury.  He never said anything about it, and he wouldn't admit to any weakness, but I could see the story in his eyes.  

It had been months since the accident, the first ones spent in the hospital and the last one spent with my aunt and uncle in a wheel chair, but now he was on crutches and ready to drive.  He was liked at work, and though he could not stand all day at machines shaping metal, they brought him back as a supervisor.  He was, after all, the man they called on to shape the housing for the seismograph left on the moon by the astronauts on the first moon mission.  He was a tool and dye hero.  

And so we lived together now, two men.  I would have to work.  

Donny's father had gotten a job in the Labor Union, the first real union in our state, and he was working on the construction of the big theme park that was being built so improbably on thousands and thousands of acres of cattle ranches and wetlands nearby.  The companies were hiring, but you could not simply walk in and join the union.  You had to be sponsored.  Tommy asked me if I wanted in.  Donny's father was sponsoring him, and he would get me in, too, if I wanted.  

School was over.  I was now something else.  I would join the union.  I would enter the working world.  

Nathalie

(photos by Lili Roze)

I wrote my friend Lili Roze a few days ago to ask how she was doing and to see how she is going to handle not having Polaroid film much longer.  We're all in the same boat.  I asked her if I could post an image and she said sure, but I should choose.  She would be interested to see what I selected, she said.  Much is revealed about a person by his selection.  Ominous, really.

She is a new mother and is already turning her son into an icon.  The kids of photographers, you know.

Everything Seems To Take So Long

"One day you wake up and realize that your life hasn't been a lie, really, so much as a broken promise."

I liked that so much, I thought I'd quote me.  

I've been whining.  Nobody likes a whiner, so I will stop. . . soon.  Really soon.  But the rain continues and everything is sullen and blue-gray and I can't get off the mark.  And I don't know why I am complaining, really.  I took ten of these photos and they all came out great.  It excites me somewhere, and I am ready to do a series called "Swim Club."  Everything, though, takes so long.  

OK.  I'm done.  Let's move on, shan't we?  

On Sunday, everyone was going home.  Graduation weekend was over, and now, we were adults.  That is how it seemed, at least, and many of us were seeing one another for the last time.  We had just been freed from the greatest structure of our lives.  

Abby had gone home, too, to what was now her home, an apartment she shared with another girl, and she had given me her number.  "Call me," she said.  "Come see me."  

It was known that I had spent the night with Abby, and people gave me that look of greedy carnality, but nothing like that had happened.  How do you explain that to people, I wondered?  And, of course, I didn't really wish to.  Abby and I had talked and talked and talked, telling each other of what we thought of as ourselves, things you could not see by looking, things we hoped were true.  

I stayed all day watching as people pack their cars, saw John and his crew left bedraggled by their hallucinatory experience.  Their was a sadness to the way they looked, but there was a general sadness all around, I thought.  No, not a sadness, exactly, but an enervated melancholy that felt like the slow pull of an ocean surf, the dreamlike rising and falling of big waves before they break upon the shore.  

I stayed all day and watched until I was certain that everyone was gone.  It was strange to me, a silliness, I knew, for I had not enjoyed high school, had not really taken part, but here I waited like some maudlin overseer watching the last lonely moments of a fading era disappear.  

At sunset, I went to my car.  It was Sunday.  Everything was waiting.  

Whole Foods, Starbucks--Flowers, Music, and the Broken Promise

Third straight day of rain.  Gray, damp.  After a listless day of work, I went to Whole Foods to buy something for dinner and saw these Calla Lilies.  Years ago, I spent five weeks in Peru, and we kept the hotel room filled with them.  They will make me feel better, I told myself.  The girl at the cash register picked them up and commented on their loveliness almost breathlessly.  She looked me in the eyes and smiled.  Perhaps they gave me the aura of something, a poet or a painter, perhaps.  

After dinner, I took them to my studio to photograph them.  I need to work, I told myself, and I need to figure out how to make the Fuji film work.  Before I started, I went to Starbucks and bought some Kenyan coffee and saw the new Bob Dylan CD on the counter display.  I decided to by it without hearing it.  The girl at the counter looked at me and said, "Have you heard this?"  "No," I said, "have you?"  "No," she responded. "Do you think it is any good?"  "Has he ever done a bad album?" I asked her.  "Wasn't his early stuff better?" she asked back.  She was probably twenty years old or so.  "I'm more likely to think he is good than you are," I told her, considering her age.  "I read his autobiography," she said.  "He's a really good writer, all coffee shops and stuff."  I didn't know what that meant, but I liked the way she looked at me, too.  

Back at the studio, I put on the CD.  It sucked.  

It is nice to have a studio, I thought, but it was pretty lonesome there on rainy night.  I thought about the girls, the flowers and the music.  

At home, I found that I had won the Polanoid Shot of the Day.  I was happy for a moment.  I put the flowers in a vase and set them in the living room.  I poured a drink.  

All of this should make me happy.  It has before.  I do not need much, usually, beyond some stimulus for my imagination.  I have, I think, lived an imagined life in the main.  

But I could not get happy.  And I began to think this:

One day you wake up and realize that your life hasn't been a lie, really, so much as a broken promise.  

You can quote me.  

I Never Win Anything

It has been a bad, sad day, but I will whine tomorrow.  I just got this little tidbit in my email, though, and it brings me silly pleasure.  If you go to the Polanoid in the next twenty four hours, you will see my photo on the cover.  Victory is all too brief.  

From: the polanoid postal mule 
Date: Tue, May 19, 2009 at 7:23 PM
Subject: [ YOU WON polanoid.net SotD!! ]
To: cafeselavy@gmail.com


dear cafeselavy!!!

please have a short look at the cover of polanoid.net [ http://www.polanoid.net/cover ]

**CONGRATULATION**
you have won the worldfamous ShotOfTheDay award!

not only is your picture on the cover for the next 24 hours, generating endless fame and glory, but also you have won a shining 10 euros coupon for instant photofun shopping at polapremium.com! [ http://www.polapremium.com/shop/ ]


here is your very own special couponcode: sotd_090520_AIZQNS

again big congrats and thank you so much for sharing your polaroids and making this site such an unique place.

you rock

the polanoid team

Coming Soon

I am alone now, without distraction.  Even with the disappointment of the missed trip to Japan, I succored myself with the thought that I would be able to get some creative things going, would be able to concentrate and work.  I made plans, offers, schemes.  But the weather here would cripple a Life Coach, would make a Popular Psychologist weep.  It rains relentlessly, my world weighed down by leaden skies, unhappy colors, and a twist of fate.  A car accident and a meeting undone.  

Sushi on a veranda in the usual place.  Rain dissolves a crowd.  Empty streets.  Damp bones.  The rain is wetter here.  It is true.  I dine with frustrated desire and a notebook as companions.  I am bad company.  The sake warms me far too much.  I decide to call on the whiskey, a long forsaken friend.  

Desire undoes my monkish zen.  No contentment.  No happy surprises, no messages.  Only the rain, the quick gusts of wind driving it against the window panes.  Darkness falls.  

I wake on the couch and go to bed far too early, sleeping with whiskey, embracing zephyrs.  I wake in the dark, hours from light.  It is still there.  The rain.  

I want to tell you stories, give you art.  And all I have is this, the yawp of mundane demons, monsters of usualness.  I will tell you of it when I can, tell you the story of how I became The Human Compromise.  

On the Dock

Blue and a bit hollow.  The world is flat and made of cardboard.  I was supposed to leave on a trip to Japan this morning, but the agency could not book me on a flight.  A free trip, for I was to chaperone.  My travel life is cursed.  I am left standing on the dock, sadly waving, with all others unable to go.  Life compromised.  The weather changes from sunshine to rain.  Heavy, bruised clouds to dampen spirits.  Elsewhere.  That is where everything is. 

Abruptly

Walking on the beach at night, the lights of ships on the water, the hissing of the surf. I had done this with my father and my mother on vacations since childhood, but now, this. There was a scary strangeness to it, a promise of unknown events and emotions. It was easy to be awkward with a girl in the half-light, half-hidden, the rolling waves obscuring tremble that now resided  in my voice.  "Abby," I said, pointing to the rising sliver of a moon.

We walked in silence away from the hotel for awhile, then found a place to sit and listen and think. I asked her what she would do now that we had graduated. She said that she had already moved out of her house and had gotten an apartment with a friend in a small town thirty miles north. She was going to work and sort things out. She hadn't gotten along with her step-father, she said. I told her about my father's accident and how I'd been living alone the last few months. I didn't tell her I didn't know what I would do now, that I had not thought about it at all. And it was with a sudden shock that I realized I hadn't any plan for the future. Others had talked about going away to college or about starting work in the summer, and I had listened to them but had never thought. Now, on the beach with a girl who was already a woman, I was a befuddled boy full of nothing but fanciful dreams and impossible fantasies. "I'm going to become a diving instructor," I told her.

We talked for a long time until the dampness became uncomfortable, and so we rose and made our way back to the hotel. It was late, but it didn't seem that anyone was going to bed.  All about, kids were laughing and shouting, drinking and smoking pot.  I saw a few of the new hippies with whom I hung out a bit at school.  They had just dropped acid, they said with a dubious excitement.  John had taken it before and had brought it for the group, but there seemed a liquid fear in the dancing eyes of the others.  They would be up all night, peaking with the sunrise.  That is how they would greet the new day, their first out of high school, mystic seekers of a vision, of guidance for their new life.  John reached into his pocket then held out his hand to me.  

"No, thanks," I told him.  "You guys have fun."  

I looked at Abby who said she was tired.  I told her I'd walk her to her room.  

"Where are you staying," she asked me.

"I don't know. I was going to stay with Allen, but everybody is drunk now and throwing up. I may drive home."

"You can stay in my room," she said.   I have two beds. You can sleep in there."

My stomach clinched with fear and doubt. I had never stayed overnight with a girl before, let alone one I barely knew. I was unsure of everything. Falling, falling, a plunge with no end, gripped with involuntary spasms I hoped she would not see.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes. Of course."

Pomp and Circumstance

I had settled into my life alone when my father came home from my aunt and uncle's, and my life shifted once again. My father was still on crutches, though he was getting stronger, so I had to take care of most of the day to day things, my least favorite of which was doing laundry. Once a week, I would schlep up to the laundromat to wash, dry, hang, and fold.

My father and mother were coming to graduation together, which was queer to me since they were divorced, but I had learned that life was going to be full of such things. On Friday, June 6, I donned my cap and gown and drove to the big auditorium downtown. And there we all were, six hundred plus of us, giddy with anticipation and the new fear that was sinking in. We had spent the last week in a crazy frenzy of liberation, saying goodbyes to teachers and friends not knowing exactly what it meant. Standing outside waiting to line up, we watched thousands of parents and relatives enter the auditorium, stopping for brief hugs and kisses, proud or relieved. Then, for the last time, we lined up together and walked to our seats.

I was seated next to people I barely knew, to whom I had no emotional connection, and as the speakers droned on, I felt the absurdity of this, the pomp and circumstance even as I felt a store-bought, artificial nostalgia swelling in my breast as we sang the school alma mater and as we listened to the yearbook account of what we had achieved and the colorful remembrances of who we had been. And somehow, I seemed not to have been there, not to have taken part in the past three years. It all sounded like a television script or a movie I hadn't seen filled with familiar actors. I had not been to a homecoming dance nor a prom. When I went to football games, it was to smoke and talk and do something awful. I was not in any clubs, not part of anything it seemed. Their recounting of those years spent at the high school had already edited me out.

Finally, with faux-diplomas in hand, we filed out of the auditorium into the warm night air. It was over. We were done.

I saw my parents standing together, my father in an ill-fitting suit leaning on his crutches, my mother in a dress she wore to work, and awkwardly walked over. Everywhere, little knots of families--parents, aunts, uncles, siblings--were preparing to go to dinners, smiling, proud. Girls screamed throwing arms into the air, jumping and hugging this person or that, introducing friends to distant relatives, and making plans for the weekend. Most had already gotten rooms at the beach.  Graduation Weekend.  The First Weekend.  I had not made plans with anyone, but it seemed like the thing to do, so I told my parents that I was going, that I would be back on Sunday night. Then with an awkward wave, I turned my back on all of that and walked alone to my car.

I immediately drove over to Tommy's at the trailer park where it was a typical Friday night. Tommy's mother and step-father were sitting in plastic lawn chairs on the small patio well into their weekend stash of booze. Inside, Tommy sat with his guitar while his brother and sister watched the rabbit-ear images as they faded in and out on the black and white TV. I announced to everyone that I had graduated and there was a modicum of congratulations all around. I realized that I was the only one who had. I told Tommy that I was going to the beach for the weekend and asked if he wanted to come over and share a room. He hemmed and hawed about it, acting like he would come the next day, but I knew he would not, and in a little while, I got into my car and drove home to pack up some clothes.

At night, the beach was many miles of brightly lit hotels and restaurants lining A1A, and there were kids everywhere. I stopped at a particular hotel where some of the kids from school said they were staying and immediately ran into Allen. He had a room, he said, with his friends. It was fully loaded with liquor. They were going to be up all night, but I could stay in their room if I wanted.

And so I went up with them and watched them drink. It was their first time, I thought, or nearly, for they were drinking whiskey and cokes like they were bad tasting lemonade. I told Allen that they needed to slow down or they were going to get sick. Without heed. And so I watched them get quickly and miserably drunk, watched them lose motor control and listened to their rapidly deteriorating speech. Before midnight, the first of them puked.

I walked out to the pool to get away from their misery and to listen to the ocean and its promising dream. I sat watching the little lights of boats in the distance, thinking about being there, about being on the water at night, when a girl from my class sat down in the chair next to me.

"Hey. What are you doing?"

"I'm getting out of the room while a bunch of guys throw up," I said.

I knew her vaguely but we never had hung out. Like me, she had been a marginal player in school life. She came from a poorer family and had always been background, but there in the moonlight, with the sound of the ocean, I noticed that she had gotten really pretty. More than that. She looked grown up.

"You want to take a walk on the beach?" she asked me.

My throat tightened. My legs went stiff. I felt slightly dizzy.

Yes, I do want to walk on the beach with you, I thought. Yes, I do.

Senior Week

There was no doubt that I would graduate. I had finished the biggest stumbling block--the Senior Research Paper--and was passing my math class. I was on autopilot.

I was ready to be done with it all, of course, but there were people around me that I had gone to school with since the first grade. Though Allen and I did not hang out together, we had always lived in the same neighborhood and had spent countless childhood hours playing football and baseball and basketball on makeshift fields and courts and in the street. Herbie, who I barely ever saw even at school, had shared the same first grade crush on our teacher, early rivals for a pretty, young woman who would commit suicide that summer after our class had ended. Sherri and I had been rivals, too, but at spelling and math, each of us vying for top spot in our elementary classes. And Rita and Howie. . . . I didn't know them any more, but there was an unsuspected comfort in the familiarity. Of course, I wasn't the only one feeling it, and others had taken it to a sickening degree of maudlin, public sentimentality that served as a good governor to my personal nostalgia.

Graduation approached, and I thought that I would not go. But something happened that changed all of that. The senior class traditionally sat in a pattern of green and white gowns that formed the image of the graduation year. Our class, however, had decided to form the shape of an "e" to represent the new ecology sign. It was voted on and won. But the administration decided not to allow that and said that we would do the traditional thing which inspired talk of a boycott. This was interesting, I thought, something in which I could participate. And so as the day drew nearer, we grew more and more excited. Caps and gowns had been ordered along with class rings, and now they were delivered. And then, it was Senior's week, a week of no classes, a week of preparation to graduate, a week of liberation and hysteria, the first week to taste the new freedom that awaited us.

And in that week, the rebellion fell apart. It was all too much to expect, I guess, for people who had only come to consciousness in the last few months. And there were parents and grandparents to consider (as well as all those graduation presents) and invitations had been bought and sent. So by twos and threes, and then by the dozens, there was a silent acceding to the administrative wishes. But we had voted, we told ourselves, to rebel, and that was something. And then it was enough.

Heroic Retreat

"His life was a heroic retreat."  

"What do you mean," I asked?  

"He was handsome when he was young and got a lot of attention for it.  He wasn't handsome, exactly, but there was something striking about him and it shaped his personality.  As he matured, women were drawn to him to an unusual degree.  He was masculine enough, but the attention he got was the kind a pretty girl would have, and in some psychological or spiritual way, I think it kind of feminized him.  He got used to all the attention. 

"He was good enough with it.  He never acted out about it, but he came to count on it, I think.  But like everything else, the physical attractiveness faded.  It was like Warren Beatty after he began to look like George Hamilton.  And that is when the retreat began.  He went out less often and avoided people more and more.  Now, you can hardly get him to go anywhere.  He is still a great guy to talk to, but he just wants to stay home most of the time.  He didn't make a big deal out of it, really.  He just disappeared."  

That's a good story, I thought, but it doesn't me what I want to know.  What happens to a person who has been attractive when the beauty is gone, when someone used to commanding attention when they enter a room starts to be ignored.  Surely you would wake up thinking things are like they were some days only to find that the counter person is not susceptible to what used to be your charm.  What happens then?  There is the internal correction, I guess, the shutting off of old feelings, the numbing of one part of the sensibilities and the attempt to cultivate another.  

Beauty lost.  It must be a terrible thing.  

Old Enough to Vote

One day Gene said he was getting married.  His girlfriend had gotten pregnant.  She'd been pregnant for awhile, he said, but they'd kept it quiet.  She would have the baby around the time we graduated.  

I wasn't sure how this worked.  Would he be allowed to go to high school if he was married?  I mean, they pretended that things like sex didn't exist.  Were we to be allowed to walk about with a boy who could tell us about the intimate conjugal life?  Jesus Christ, I thought, life didn't get any less weird.  The beauty I saw and the heat I felt when his girlfriend touched me was probably the early stages of pregnancy.  Gene would go to work, have a wife who cooked bad meals and watched after a baby all day in some apartment or rented house.  He'd already taken an after school job.  He'd already made the change.  He was different.  

One day visiting my father in the hospital after school, I was told that he would be discharged soon.  He had been in the hospital for almost two months.  I guess I'd gotten used to it and half-consciously thought that this is how it would always be.  No, I hadn't thought that, but I hadn't thought otherwise, either.  

The day he was released, my aunt and uncle came to the hospital to pick him up.  My mother was there, too, which made me very uncomfortable.  They were divorced.  My mother was living with a merchant marine.  This was shit.  It was awful.  

But within minutes, they were all gone.  

Because of the tragedy, I guess, Tommy's mother had forgiven me for whatever she had blamed me for, and I was welcomed at the trailer once again.  But I had gotten away and she could not bring me back.  The life I was living was not the one I had lived, and though I visited from time to time, it was not the same.  For me or for them. 

One day Tommy looked sick.  His girlfriend, the one who had loved him no matter what, no matter that he wanted Adair, the one he'd had me stand in the shadows to watch get naked in her bedroom, had gotten pregnant.  Tommy did not look like a man who wanted to be a father.  

"What are you going to do?"  

"I don't know."  

Abortions had been legalized in New York.  There was that.  It was expensive, of course, but not as expensive as having the baby.  Tommy's eyes lit up, but he said Laura's mother wouldn't let her do that.  She was religious, a Seventh Day Adventist, and she was very conservative, too.  She'd always acted as if she was better than the life she lived and seemed distant and cold, and though she had been nice in caring for my father in the hospital, I could never warm up to her. She would not allow Laura to get an abortion, but it was not clear if she would let her get married to Tommy, either.  Tommy seemed alright with that.  

Somehow, in the middle of everything and without fanfare, I had turned eighteen.  A controversial new amendment to the United States Constitution said that I was old enough to vote.  

"What Do You Want To Do When You Graduate?"

We were required by the state to take a college placement test, The State Twelfth Grade Exam, whether we were going on to college or not.  Typically, the Department of Sadism and Misery had scheduled the exam in a big hall downtown on a Saturday.  All the county's seniors were required to be there.  

We had, of course, been tested for things periodically through the years, and it was always fun because we got out of our regularly scheduled classes, but going on a Saturday was terrible.  

When the day rolled around, I was sick with the flu--fever, runny nose, aches and pains--everything.  But if I chose to skip taking the test, I would have to reschedule and I thought since my day was ruined anyway, I might as well get it over with.  

When the results came back, I had scored in the upper five percent in the state.  This may have been a surprise to some of my teachers, for when they posted our rankings for graduation, I was in the bottom quartile.  There, posted outside the office, was a long list of the six hundred plus graduating seniors.  It was a pleasure for those on the first page, those with 4.0 averages.  But I had to keep looking and looking, finally finding my name on an anonymous page surrounded by some of the biggest dolts in the school.  At least it is hard to find, I thought.  Who's going to look for it?  

I was surprised one day to be called from class to report to the Counselor's Office.  I was nervous, of course, wondering what I had done.  Perhaps they had found out about the wine I took to Jill.  It could have been anything.  I went to an office I'd never been to before, one that I didn't even know existed.  It was the office of the Senior Counsellor.  I didn't even know we had one.  This was the first time I'd seen a counselor in three years of going to the high school.  

I was told to take a seat in a small, dim waiting area, then was called in to an equally small office where I sat across from a very large woman I'd never seen.  She sat looking through a manilla envelope on her desk.  Presumably, it was my records.  She was all business.  

"What do you plan to do when you graduate?" she asked.  

It was just that quick.  I'd never thought about it before, really.  I just wanted to get through.  

"I want to go to college," I heard myself say, the blood rising in my neck and face.  

She looked as if someone had just popped a paper bag behind her, eyes popping, startled.  I swear it.  She looked back down at the papers on her desk for a bit, and then looked up again. 

"Where do you want to go?"

I only knew of two colleges, the university and the state university.  I chose one.  It was a good choice, I guessed, for it seemed to make her happy.  She sort of sat back and smiled.  

"Have you thought about a junior college?" she asked.  

In truth, I hadn't thought about any of it, but I knew junior colleges were for losers who wanted to be nurses and firemen.  I thought about the names on the senior academic ranking list that surrounded mine, thought about sitting in classes with them while shiny others went away to school, to the university with the football team that I'd seen on T.V.  

"Nope," I said.  

"Well, you might consider it."  

And with that, I was excused.  There it was, my five minutes of career counseling.  The state had provided it.  They had done their job.  

The days rolled on.  My father would be getting out of the hospital soon, but he still could not walk.  My aunt and uncle on the coast said that he could come stay with them until he was on his feet again, and he had said OK.  I would remain alone in the little cracker box house for a bit longer, staying up to watch Johnny Carson, making my own meals, doing my own laundry, and reading in the afternoons.  And now thinking about what would come next.  There were happy, smiling faces at school who had already been accepted to colleges.  And there were the rest of us.  Most of us.  I was now lopped in with those who had gone to school half a day on the work/study program, with those who spent there high school days in shop and farmer's ed.  Misfits, miscreants, and other human oddities.  

It seemed sudden, though I guessed it wasn't.  It had just happened.  

A Darker Deep Down Thing

And so life returned to "normal."  Each morning I would get up to the alarm, shower, dress, make breakfast, eat at the metal dining table alone, and drive to school.  In the afternoons, I would go to the hospital to visit my father.  

This was my last semester and my schedule was easy.  I was a student assistant in the library and had Acting II with Jill.  I had gotten so far ahead in my other classes that I just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.  People were getting "senioritis" and the days passed without strife.  When the prom came around, I had no thoughts of going, but there was a movement afoot by others to avoid it, too.  An alternative prom was being planned by the "hipper" kids.  They would meet at the big lake downtown and smoke pot.  I was glad that people were "boycotting" the prom, but I would not go downtown, either.  It seemed silly to me, the excitement over smoking pot and rebelling.  They had come to it far too late, I thought.  I had come to it too early.  

I spent prom night hanging out with Tommy who had not been in school for over three years now.  It was getting more and more difficult to reconcile the various segments of my life.  Fragments.  Drifting.  

Gene, my friend from the pizza parlor job who had been shtupn the cougar, had gotten a girlfriend.  She was small and dark and pretty, and I liked her.  When she talked to me, she would touch me on the arm and look directly into my eyes.  I could feel the heat.  So one day, I went over after school and knocked on her door.  I knew Gene wasn't there, but that is what I asked.  I don't know why I did it.  Yes, I do.  

I felt much the same about Vladi's girlfriend.  She was a cute dirty blonde with eyeteeth like a vampire and the three of us would hang out at Vladi's at night watching TV in the dark, and my body would ache as if with the flu.  At school, when Vladi wasn't around, I'd sit with her and talk, perhaps too intimately.  

Alone in my car, driving, listening to music, dreaming.  I didn't think about those girls so much as feel them, feel their feminine presence, remember the way they smelled, the everyday poetry of just them.  

I wanted what I couldn't have, of course, living in that little cracker box, sleeping on the couch, reading, listening to "strange" musics, thinking, waiting.  

One afternoon, I went by Jill's classroom after school.  I wanted to give her an album that I had gotten from the record store where I used to work, from the owner's son who had gotten a job as a rep for a record company.  It was a strange album that nobody had ever heard of by a French musician, Michael Columbier.  It sounded like her.  That is what I said.  As we sat, awkwardly, but less so, I thought, she said to me, "You are such a sad boy for your age.  Why are you so sad?"  

I had never thought that before and was shocked deep down.  It wasn't a sadness, was it?  It was something else, I thought, some deep, emotional knowing, a way of knowing things without words like notes of a song, something you can put words to but cannot put into words.  But her saying it made me so.  I was sad, I thought now.  I was sad.  

Feeling Like Keaton

Writing interrupted.  It is Mother's Day following a full moon and a long day that ended at the beach and then with the drive home to cook fish and then to clean and to fall asleep in front of the television watching half of a rented movie.  It is warm here now, too warm for the time of year, and it brings the promise of a violent summer as the ocean waters warm.  I will take some mothers out to eat today and give flowers and presents.  I will try to make people happy.  It seems difficult, sometimes.  

There are too many days of recognition, I think, too many days when I am required to stand at attention and serve.  Other's seem to relish these times of celebration, but I always feel myself disappointed and a disappointment.  I am not even good at my own birthday.  I dread the day it rolls around.  

I do what I can and try to make up for it by buying expensive gifts, but you know how that goes.  I am simply not able to adopt the big, toothy smile of homecoming kings and game show hosts.  Not close.  I feel more like Buster Keaton (click for montage).  

Here is another image from the series.  I am too much in love with them, I'm afraid.  I told my friend CC that I thought they looked like the images on old Cigar Boxes a little, and he said that was a great idea, suggesting that I could present the images that way.  I looked online and found a place that sells raw cigar boxes, so I will try that.  Inside will be unframed pages from the series.  But I need to find some stamps and paper seals that are apropos.  That, I think, will be the difficult part.  If any of you have ideas, let me know.  

And so life returned to "normal."  Each morning I would get up to the alarm, shower, dress, make breakfast, eat at the metal dining table alone, and drive to school.  This was my last semester and my schedule was easy.  I was a student assistant in the library and had Acting II with Jill.  I had gotten so far ahead in my other classes that I just had to wait for everyone else to catch up.  People were getting "senioritis" and the days passed without strife.  When the prom came around, I had no thoughts of going, but there was a movement afoot by others to avoid it, too.  An alternative prom was being planned by the "hipper" kids.  They would meet at the big lake downtown and smoke pot.  Things had 

Planting Moon

Planting Moon tonight.  I read it is called the Buddha Moon somewhere.  For some reason, I looked up my horoscope.  There seems nothing but trouble for me just now.  Doesn't seem fair, does it, that a Planting Moon, a Buddha Moon should be trouble?  But life is trouble and suffering with wild moments of relief.  Why did I have to look at my horoscope, anyway?  It hasn't been good for years.  

When I was in college, my roommate was dating my girlfriend's roommate.  It was convenient because we changed residences all the time.  My roommate and I would stay together, then my girlfriend and I would stay at my place, then we'd go to her place.  I never stayed with my girlfriend's roommate, though sometimes we all stayed in the same place.  It kept things interesting. 

The university rented out garden plots near the agricultural college on a huge patch of land, and so each of us got one.  Together, the four plots gave us more food than we could eat.  We would go out in the afternoons and weed and spread chicken manure and talk to the other "farmers."  I decided to plant cantaloup one year.  When they came up, they flowered like crazy and I thought we would never be able to deal with all the melons we would have.  But they never produced any fruit.  I was flummoxed.  One day at the Farmer's Market, I told a real farmer about it and he asked me if I planted with the moon over my shoulder.  ??????  He said that I probably didn't and that is why the plants never produced fruit.  Superstition, I thought.  Crazy old country saws.  But my mother grew up on a farm in Ohio, and I told her about what the farmer had said.  She told me that on the farm, they always planted by the moon, sometimes working through the night to get everything in the ground.  

So tonight's a planting moon.  Go to the Farmer's Almanac for information.  They seem to know everything.  Plant corn now, it says.  I wouldn't doubt it.  I'm going to start reading it every day to see if I can't straighten my life out, though I've always been more romantic than practical.  

Transitioning

The old gives way to the new, the new becomes reality, the old becomes a dream.  I went to school one day to tell them that I would be out for awhile, that my father was in an auto accident and was still in intensive care.  I went around to my teachers and got my assignments.  Is this what I had been doing, I wondered?  It seemed like a cartoon joke, some predictable thing with a predictable punch line.  I felt myself a man in a diving suit watching through a pane of glass moving in that slow motion way while all about people flitted and darted around me just out of reach, silly, frivolous, happy.  I left campus as quickly as I could.  

Relatives began to show up to see my father, first my aunt and uncle from the coast, my mother's sister who had known my dad for thirty years, then my relatives from Ohio, my father's two sisters and his oldest sister's husband.  They each went to the hospital and saw my father and came away shocked and saddened, but they did not carry the sadness around with them the way I had.  When we went to dinner, they would talk about how horrible it was, then the conversation would turn on how lucky he was to be alive and the endless speculation about "if he had bee wearing a seat belt," and then, in a little while, to something else entirely, and there would be a casual comment that led to laughter.  My father was alive and he was being taken care of, and he would get out of the hospital one day and life would continue.  That is the way it was for them.  It had to be.

They came to see me in the little cracker box house, shocked, I knew, at seeing where my father was living, and they did not stay long.  It was odd for them, too, that I was suddenly thrust upon them as a person rather than as an appendage of my father, and there was a palpable awkwardness to deal with.  

And then they were gone and I maintained the routine, going to the hospital, sitting and waiting, seeing my father for moments at a time, then sitting again in the lobby.  I did my homework, but that did not take long and I was done with the semester in a couple of days.  I ate at the hospital cafeteria which was vegetarian since it  was owned by the Seventh Day Adventist, and  surprisingly, the food was good.  And for the first time, I began buying my own groceries.  There was a health food store near the hospital, and I went there to shop.  I bought all sorts of things I'd never known of before and loaded up on cans of Loma Linda products, especially the fake meats made of soybeans.  I had decided to become a vegetarian, mostly, I think, to make cooking easy, but there were other reasons, too.  I cleaned the house and did the laundry and began to pay the bills.  At night, I would go back to the little cracker box house and watch TV, staying up later than I used to, watching "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson who seemed to me to be the television equivalent of the life I had read about in Playboy magazine.  And I was enamored.  

Somewhere, I had picked up a copy of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, and one day sitting on my father's bed, I read it cover to cover.  I wanted to read more.  

In a few more weeks, my father was out of intensive care and moved to another room, and the old routine was ended.  The intensive care unit was always dark and close and serious and womb-like.  The people there were quiet and scared and even the nurses had talked in hushed voices.  But they had come to know me and they seemed to like my father with whom they had begun to joke as he got stronger and healthier.  And now that was gone.  

The new room had a big picture window that looked over a lake. There was a television in the room and people talking in the hallways.  The visiting hours were extended and noisy.  The rooms were a beehive of activity.  And as it turned out, Tommy's girlfriend's mother was a nurse on that floor, so she was taking care of my father every day.  

Then it was time for me to return to school.  I had been away a month, and going back was hard.  There were the puzzled looks and the questions and my reluctant explanations and the awkwardness of having been left out of things, but in truth, it did not seem as if anything had happened while I was gone.  Every day, in each class, they seemed to be where they were before I left, slouching along the educational highway at a snail's pace, the tired teachers praying for the year to come to an end.  Having done my assignments sitting in those hospital waiting rooms, I had gotten ahead of everyone else.  What a waste, I realized, all of this was and had been.  One more semester of school.  Just one.  

Veteran

There are so many worlds, one giving over to another. Suddenly--like that--I was on my own. I got up and looked into the cloudy mirror in the bedroom where my father slept. I had no color. I was white. I took my shoes off and lay down on the bed for a minute, slipping immediately into a waking sleep, thoughts transforming into dreams, and then I went down, deeper, deeper, underwater, moving in slow motion, light fading, colors turning blue.

When I woke up, I was thrashing at the covers, yelling, sweating. I knew I had dreamed something terrible, but I didn't know what. I sat up, not quite waking, the world remaining at a distance, almost within reach, lit from within, it seemed, translucent. I went to the fridge and got some milk, drinking it from the carton. I looked out the window at the sunshine and the shadow. The day was bright. The mail truck drove by, incongruous. There is tragedy, I felt without being able to form the words. I did not think words. What words could say this?

Sitting in the waiting room of the intensive care ward, I looked around. All the faces looked the same, eyes cast down, lips touching, flat. I could only see my father a few minutes at a time. His faced had changed now, from the fear and embarrassment and disappointment. Over the days, a slow acceptance would sink in, the new world, one replacing another. He would be on the respirator for a month, they said. But he had made it through the roughest part. The worst dangers were passing every moment and soon there would be just this, the injury and the healing and then the adapting. No, they did not say all that.

That night, I sat next to a woman whose husband had just been brought in. I watched her as she shivered and shook on the plastic covered couch. "Take this," I said, handing her my coat. "It's cold in here the first night."