The Middle

Oh what the hell--Harvest Moon through the front window of my mother's car.  Since I started the car series, the Leica is always sitting on the passenger side seat when I drive. I saw this leaving a parking lot of a strip mall and stopped to make a picture.  Not romantic. Sans lakes and oaks and cyprus, but this is my life right now. It's not a great or good picture, but it is the moon.   

"They"promised fall-like weather, and as with most promises lately, it was false.  The temperature did dip, but the sun was still sharp and the air humid.  It was relief from extreme heat, but it wasn't fall-like.  Still, as my mother and her hillbilly clan like to say, "better than nothing."

That was the theme of my early life and now, once again, at this late stage.  It is not the life I aspired to and for quite a long while was able to eschew.  Once I had a car, my friend Tommy (who lived in a trailer in a rundown trailer park with his mother, stepfather, brother and sister) and I determined it would be all or nothing, not better than nothing, and as much as I could, I began living above my means.  I spent my money living as I wished or I swilled the dregs.  I did not want to live in the middle ground.  I chose the expensive and the exotic, alternating between rooms at The Breakers and eight dollar a night rooms on Duval.  I ate in the best restaurants in Key West but mostly at El Cacique with the best cheap dinners I've ever had.  I'd skip meals so I could eat with friends in high places.  

I was Hillbilly Chic.  

Now, I'm back to the middle which is deemed to be "better than nothing."  

It is definitely something. 

But there are breakfasts and dinners and there is air conditioning and premium t.v. and whiskey.  

Mom has had a few hallucinations lately.  She got out of early bed and came to the tv room wanting to know if everybody went home.  

"Who?"

"Dorothy."

Dorothy is dead.  

Then in the morning, she was adamant that she got up in the night and there were giant cockroaches all over the kitchen floor and she was killing them.  My mother cannot move any faster than a three-toes sloth and I am certain she would lose that race, but she insisted she was killing them.  

"Where'd you put them?"

"I put them in paper towels."

"Where did you put the paper towels?"

"In the garbage."

I showed her the garbage.  No paper towels. No roaches.  

"You just dreamed it," I said.  

Nope.  Absolutely not.  We are going to need to call an exterminator.  I can't convince her.  

She's having a hard time remembering the neighbors' names.  

Whenever I see people now, it is always the same conversation.  

"How's your mom doing?"

Then people try to commiserate by telling me the terrible things their parents or grandparents went through.  This is really, I have come to realize, the entirety of my human interaction now.  I've taken to saying "good talk" when the conversation is through.  

Yea.  Fun.  

I took a long walk yesterday, long for me now.  Three and a half miserable miles.  My knees were killing me, then my hips.  I caught glimpses of myself in the shop windows as I came back by way of the Boulevard.  

Hideous. 

I do not like my hair cut short.  It just isn't me.  But from what I saw in the shop windows, the rest isn't either.  Who is that stranger I see?  

I used to be able to escape in sleep, but now my nights are terrible.  I've lost the last refuge.  

I'm reading a James Salter biography by Jeffrey Meyers.  Have I told you?  I can't remember.  I've written about it, but I don't know if it is here or elsewhere.  We met in my academic heyday.  Had dinner.  I told him I liked his Hemingway biography then asked him why he hadn't included some things.  

"How do you know that?"

Meyers says he knew Salter during the last ten years of his life.  The biography is confirming some of my feelings about Salter, and I think Meyers feels much the same.  There are admirable things about Salter, and then there is a lot of the other.  I will write to Meyers when I finish the book to tell him what was missing from the bio.  I knew people who knew Salter, too. 

Meyers says of Salter's writing style that it is a merging of Fitzgerald's elegance and Hemingway's brevity.  This has been denied by others many times, but I think that is absolutely true.  Salter is a stylistic writer who was caught between eras.  He was publishing in the high-modernist style just as postmodernism was becoming the critical and academic rage.  He was the apotheosis of that style, and it cost him.   

It took thirty years and the end of postmodernism for his writing to be critically recognized on a large scale.

Style is a difficult thing to articulate.  Here is the best I can do right now, three ways of saying the same thingl 

"Her hands were white. . . ."
"Her white hands. . . ."
"The whiteness of her hands. . . ."

The last being the more poetic phrasing.  Qualities become tangible.  Salter's writing is object laden.  He favors gerunds, infinitives, and fragments.  But his style is not simply linguistic.  That can be easily imitated.  The artistic vision comes from what is seen and how it is seen, and that quality is much more difficult skill to acquire. 

But there is so much more.  That was just a bit of reminiscing.  

I hope I have not told you this before.  It is true that I no longer remember what I have written here and what I've written elsewhere, and it is beginning to scare me.  

I have many chores I have put off that I need to begin, but I have no desire to do them.  I must force myself or pay others.  Others want more money than they used to.  

Reading Salter, I think of you, any of you whose successes are greater. . . but mine has been the adventure.