I ordered a bowtie on the online. No returns. Looked like a good tie and the price was right, so there I was shopping for haberdashery on the internet.
His feet barely rose from the hard ground.
But that was when his hair was dark and thick and waving in the wind, when his back was straight and his eyes bright and his heart full of hope and love and promise for the future.
That was years ago. Decades ago.
The old man shuffled slow, now, puffs of dust rising from under boots worn and cracking and caked with the mud and dust of mile upon weary mile. His back bowed under a faded and patched sack, only half full. Strands of gray, thin hair escaped from his shapeless hat.
Now he came to a crossroads, where the dirt road crossed a paved highway. A truck rattled by, breaking the quiet. The old man paused, looking one way and another. He shielded watery eyes against the glare of the midday sun, to where the highway disappeared in the curve of the horizon.
The road was empty again.
“It’s the same road,” he said softly, looking at the ragged-coated dog at his side. “The same road, but it’s not the same, somehow. It’s all grown up…”
He trailed off. The dog whined. But when he looked back there was nothing there. Just dirt and weeds and sunshine and an abandoned stone house, crumbling back into the earth.
He crossed the road.
***
She sat motionless in the recliner in the front window, face turned full into the sunlight, hands resting in her lap. A blanket was tucked around her feet.
A clock ticked loudly from the mantel, beside a framed wedding picture of a girl with straight, black hair and a boy with piercing eyes. The picture was old, yellowed even under the glass.
“I’ll be fixing your lunch now,” the nurse called from the kitchen, but the old woman did not stir. The nurse watched her from the doorway, then reached for the phone.
Still the old woman looked into the sunlight with unseeing eyes, hands folded. She felt the warmth, but long ago she stopped seeing it. But as the world around her grew dim, things far away became clear.
How long had it been since she took up her post in the window, watching and waiting? But she was young then, the boy a child. Always she sat there in the afternoons, watching for him to come home from school, she told him, but everyone knew different. And the years passed and the boy grew into a man and still she watched.
“Either he’s dead or he found himself some far-away woman and isn’t ever coming home,” a young woman told her aunt one summer afternoon when the two passed on the street. “And there she is, still watching. It’s time someone told her the truth.”
But the older woman shook her head.
“He didn’t forget her. Never did a man love a woman the way he did her. Death took him for sure.”
And they did tell her, each in turn, walking gravely up the walk to her front porch. They told her it was their duty, that she was clinging to false hope, that it was time to accept what God had willed.
And she’d listen and nod with gravity and refill their glasses and show them to the door.
And she refused to wear the black of mourning.
But she never told them that at night she looked for him, running over far-away beaches in her mind, searching among the bleached bones half-buried in the sand. She searched through jungle vines, peered into vacant eyes of countless men on crowded city streets. And on some dark nights when her spirit was heavy, she searched lamp-lit homes in case someone had stolen his heart from her, too.
But she never found his bones among the others, and so she clung to hope.
Now she was old, and long ago she stopped speaking of him. But still she watched. Some people wondered if she even knew what she waited for.
But this day was different. Her anxiety was palpable. Even the nurse kept glancing out the window, wondering what the old woman knew.
She couldn’t see the robins scratching at the soft earth after last night’s rainfall. But now she saw him in her mind. And now she watched his slow progress, watched him pause at the crossroads, watched his foot catch on a rut in the old road. And with each step she willed him forward.
And when he turned off dirt road and his boots crunched on gravel, she stood, her feet following paths worn deep into her memory. She stepped out the door, down two steps, along the narrow walk, out onto the road. She stumbled forward, arms outstretched. The sun was hot on her face.
A car swerved around her, someone laid on the horn. And now the world around her was intruding, and she couldn’t see him anymore. She wavered, legs trembling. She couldn’t remember which way to go. She felt the tears come; she was too weak to stop them.
And then she felt his presence, smelled his sweat and heard his footsteps. And the old man’s steps were lighter, when he took her arm in his and turned her back, toward the old house.
“I told you I’d come home again,” he said the words soft.
***
The son walked quickly through the kitchen, to the front room where she sat day after day.
But her chair was empty and the front door stood open. And on the old porch swing he saw them, the old man’s arms wrapped around her. Both were smiling, and the years had rolled away, and he recognized his own face in the old man’s, and wondered how he missed his mother’s beauty all these years.
“Mother?” he asked, but she did not speak again.
“What did I tell you?” the older aunt asked her niece, now graying herself, at the funeral. “Such a wedding that was, years and years ago. I was just a child but even I could see the way he worshiped her.”
And when the sod laid back over the fresh-dug dirt and the chairs packed away and the flowers moved back to the house where he had played and grown, the son stood alone at their grave, reading words scrawled across pages of old and faded notebook paper, on the back of receipts and envelopes, on drawing paper and blank-paper books with the spines cracking: Words that told of a lifetime of coming home.
Some people swore that the house was haunted. Almost every day for three weeks, we'd find a dead one inside of it.
Bill wanted to chop it down, but Mother said no. "They need somewhere safe to die. Someplace warm and maybe a little dry. It stays."
The first one we found was a hoot owl. It lay inside the painted blue plywood walls, its face pressed firmly into the floor like it had been dropped from some great height.
Bill buried it behind his woodshed and we all said grace.
That night I saw the owl on a branch outside of my window. It was pale white and almost completely see-through like milk in an owl-shaped glass. It shifted from leg to leg and kept looking over its shoulder. I couldn't see what it was looking for. It was cloudy and the woods were dark.
The next one was a falcon of some kind. Shelby pulled an old bird book from the shelf and we all watched as he turned the pages until we found it.
"Peregrine," he said softly and looked up.
Bill looked closer. That bird shouldn't be around here.
We buried it and said grace, and that night it was on the branch outside of my window. The owl shifted and the falcon ruffled its feathers.
The next day we found three mockingbirds, and that night they were all there on the branch, facing my window.
"Shelby, come see." Shelby woke up, bleary, and blinked against the windowpane. "Trees," he said.
I looked, but the white birds were there. They were shining like moons and the dead leaves curled away from them.
We found a blue jay and a red-tailed hawk. We found a wood thrush, a scarlet tanger and an ovenbird.
We started throwing them in the creek. "Not too close," Bill said. "You don't want to get that stuff on you."
One night I found Bill sitting far away in the truck.
"Why are those birds coming here to die?" I asked. He looked at the keys in his hand and then looked at me.
"Here's as good a place as any. Maybe there's nowhere else to go."
Everyone stopped going out the birdhouse. Shelby would wait by the bird book and solemnly flip the pages for me until we found the right one.
The nightingale was the last one I found. I held it in my hand even though I knew it was poison. It was stiff, but the feathers felt soft and I stood there a while and stroked it. After I threw it in the creek, I turned and saw Mother watching me from the kitchen.
That night, I watched the birds in the trees shifting uncomfortably. As they moved, they left behind faint after-images and the trees flickered with them like Christmas ornaments.
When the peacock arrived, I knew it was the last time I would see them. It was magnificent. It glowed brighter than all the birds, and its tail feathers were as white and pure as flour. They strobed with electricity as it walked solemnly into the clearing by the blue birdhouse.
They lifted, one by one, from the branches and slowly circled overhead. I looked over to where Shelby was sleeping. Pale shadows flickered on the wall.
They circled through the trees like constellations. I wondered for a second if I would be lifted up with them and carried off into the woods. But I stayed.
Then they were gone and nothing was ever the same again after that.
I looked something up on Wikipedia today only to be immediately confronted with a Wiki rarity: a banner ad. Oddly enough, it wasn't intrusive. In fact, it's well designed, maddeningly so considering how little work probably went into it. Granted Helvetica font face promotes itself, being one of the easiest faces ever to read and utilize. Even so, the colorful photo with the grizzled looking mug just got my attention without revolting it away again the way most banners do. There is something to be said for the way the text runs left to right, terminating in Wales's name and pointing the viewer's eye right to his plaintive yet confident expression in what looks like an innovative working environment, albeit of nebulous nature.
The point of the banner is to drum up donations to support the unwieldy user-supported behemoth Wikipedia, founded by Jimmy Wales.
I've mentioned before that I love bands like Spoon, who use minimalism to great effect in their particular creative discipline. I will try to share more examples of "less is more" in the future. That phrase, as an ethic and aesthetic, greatly accounts for the poignance of some of my favorite art, and motivates some of my own work as well.
I separate the discipline of writing, and the art of writing, and I set them like two irons out to the horizon, to the inconvenient northerly direction of colder moneys. It's been a while since it was my job to write at work, but I find myself again pondering the keys as my fingers linger over their printed plastic concavities. Clicketty-clacketty, the keyboard goes, and I am a train running over the rails. Not one, single, wooden railroad tie is important in itself. Or perhaps each is, but I pass them, take them for granted.
This is business writing; I make business papers. I leave nothing to the imagination. I run everything firmly along the bolted ground. Are these clicking letters noteworthy? Why do I line up these words, like miles behind me, in neatness, in rows, toward a distinct end? They don't make someone think; the thoughts are all had. They can make someone notice but can't make them see. The information is placed here, to go directly there, without mystery.
Is this my creative time, when my words may go where they will go? No. Will more destinations be opened up to the mind than the number of places I am refusing to let it go? No. This is the time when I must write linear thoughts into rectangular formats, bolding the main words, and adding the figures together, till there's nothing left to be thought about, on the subject, no hope but to change the subject to something entirely more interesting.
It takes all the art I can muster not to create - not feel around for inspirations - not grow, not change. Stick to the rails,
clicketty-clack, click-clack,
for the rails go only one
(click-clack)
direction, only one
(click-clack-click) place.
Clicketty-clack, click-clack, click-clack,
and that's my reader's destination,
click-clack, click-clack,
and I will put him to sleep with the swaying (click-clack) of the rectangular four-walled boxcar, with its right-angled, locked doors, and its dusty, uniform furniture.
When my passenger wakes he will wish to step down to the platform and stretch his legs, and thank the sky and the air for still being merely there in every explorable direction. He will want to do anything but ride on a rail. He will seek any activity but reading.
But till said arrival, necessarily, I will clicketty-clacketty-clickingly tick out and away to the hard iron skyline of my business papers.
It’s hot, and I’m hot, my gray tank top is clinging to my back and my calves are spattered with mud from the water-logged trails of the forest I just left.
