Imagine the being

He never was present, never thought he took part. He was always distant and passing through on his way to some undefined destination. He was one of the actors, but stood a ways back, off to one side, an observer. More so, when he was fighting or pretending to make love. The closer to the action the more remote he became. All became a blank, unthinking blackness that did not restrict his hitting out.

His thoughts were bar room brawlers who calmly without verbal threats surprised with fist the all talkers. “What did I do,” the fools demanded as they were dragged by foot or by the scuff of neck out doors into graveled back lots. “What did I do,” they begged to know as hypocritical mouths were bloodied and noses twisted out of joint.

Can he make up for past neglects? He knows to repent fully will be impossible, but he will confess. He believes public confessions are for weaker men, but decides his confessions can hide in fictitious truth.

Small boy, teenage, and recent dreams haunt him. They are unwelcomed guest who have stayed too long.  Before dawn, a keyboard exorcises old and new torments. Fiction disguises the most unforgiving events. Humor lightens the darkest truths. The pronoun he hides the truth of the worse of him.  

The Portrait

Today, I drew my self-portrait. It was a simple line drawing with charcoal pencil. To draw the portrait, I looked in a mirror I leaned up against some books placed beside my drawing tablet on the small easel on the dining room table. My back was to a large picture window, and the light that flooded the paper was natural and harsh.

I drew the portrait quickly without thinking and without erasures. I was surprise that the proportions of my face were not distorted in my usual fashion of drawing a face with one side shorter than the other—lop sided.

The thing that I had not counted on was how wrinkled and sagged my face had become. How could I have not noticed? I shaved its jaw every morning.

 The portrait hid nothing. The skin under my chin was loose and drooped. My neck was not fat, but the skin hung down and formed a triangle running into my shirt collar. I drew my nose with pores and larger than I remembered. Under my eyes were lines, and there were wrinkles radiating from the corners but perhaps not from laughing too much.

My forehead was exaggerated in the drawing too, or had my hair receded that much? How could that be?  My hair was thinner too. Where did that brooding look come from? Who was this man I had drawn?

I looked at my work, at the portrait I had drawn. Was this the man everyone sees? I wanted to tear the paper, to shred it, to hide the truth drawn so clearly—the truth I had become.  

The Neighbor

I was sitting at my desk thinking about my neighbor. I saw her today before dawn. She lived across the street on the second floor—the top floor—in the building directly across from our third floor apartment.

The room we use as an office faces her bedroom window. Our office has two desks, freestanding and built-in bookcases, and some of our artwork—mostly mine—covers the walls. The room wields a creative energy.

The wall facing the street to the north—Calle 25B—has a large picture window, which lets in plenty of light and gives a panoramic view of the neighborhood. There’s a bakery, a laundry, and some small shops down the block to the left, and my wife’s best friend’s house is across the street to the right. The neighbor’s second-floor apartment’s across the street. The neighborhood is not ritzy by American standards, but it’s peaceful—Colombian middle class.

Daylight starts in Bogotá at the same time every day. My wife leaves for work just before it starts getting light outside around five thirty. Today, after she left for work, I went into the kitchen and poured myself another cup of coffee. As I walked back into our office carrying my coffee, I gazed out through the big picture window at our neighbors building. I could make out everything in the second floor bedroom. The overhead light was on, and the vertical shades of the large window facing the street were open.

A young woman walked naked into the bright room. I had my hand on the light switch by my office door. The young, naked woman reached and grabbed an almost transparent robe and threw it over her shoulders. It did not close and did not cover her large breasts. I stood in our dark office holding my cup of coffee in my right hand with my left on the light switch and stared into her brightly lit bedroom.

The young woman bent over, stepped into a pair of thong panties, and wiggled them up over her hips. She turned and walked over to a dressing table pushed up against the far wall of her room. She stood with her back to the window. As she applied deodorant under each arm, the short robe rose up, and exposed her thong panties, and the shape of her ass. Her breasts were visible in the mirror on the wall above the dressing table. She picked up a brush and began brushing her hair. 

My wife got home from work around two o’clock and came into our office. She was excited.

 “They published my poem,” she said. 

The Party

The back yard was large and fell away from the house toward the lake. The back patio was decorated for the party. Big red letters spelling out Happy Birthday two feet tall hung from a rope stretched from the large oak diagonally across to the corner of the house and barely cleared the grownups heads. Two picnic tables pushed together end to end were being loaded with food and place settings. Off to the side, a smaller table held a big chocolate cake with eight candles.

“My mother dirties every dish in the house when she cooks,” my mother said standing in the kitchen at a sink full of sudsy water. “I end up having to clean the kitchen every time we have a family gathering.”

“I don’t mind helping,” my mother’s aunt Eunice said. “I like coming to the lake. It’s is so beautiful here. Birthday parties are always fun for the kids.”

“Birthdays are a lot of work,” my mother said. She looked out the window over the kitchen sink. “I hope that cake survives until time to cut it.”

Hal, my first cousin, was nine years old. He was circling the cake and testing his luck with his index finger. The icing on the cake was too hard to resist. His mother finally caught him chocolate fingered and hauled him away.

My grandmother brought out a big platter of fried chicken. “I love weekends and birthday parties. She laughed. “It’s so wonderful to be able to cook for all my family.”

“Your house and yard are so beautiful,” my uncle from Oklahoma said. He’d driven up to Illinois with his family and arrived two days ago. “You must love living on here on Lake Decatur in the summer.

“Yes, I do. I love having the family come and stay on weekends.” My grandmother would make pallets for everyone if she didn’t have enough beds. “Of course, the boys love staying with us all summer.”

The boys, my brother and I, liked the weekends when all our cousins came, but during the week we were isolate with my grandmother all day. We worked beside her in the flower beds, cleaning windows, and painting lawn furniture. She loved hugging, and kissing, and buying us presents, but also believed idle hands were the devil’s work.  From the back yard, we could see cars moving across the bridge that connected downtown Decatur with our side of the lake, and every day around four o’clock in the afternoon, we watched for our grandfather’s blue Cadillac.

When we saw his car on the bridge, we would go and change into our swim suites.  After he got home from the office, and as soon as he changed clothes, we ran down to the dock and lowered the Chris-Craft down into the water. The best perk of spending the summer with the grandparents was water skiing and driving the boat. On weekends, when family came to visit, we got to spend the whole day out on the lake.

 “It must be wonderful to get to come down from Chicago and enjoy the summers here in Decatur with you parents on the lake,” Georgia, my father’s sister from Oklahoma said. She was sitting in a freshly painted lawn chair.

“Oh yes, but it’s a lot of work helping keep the place up,” my mother said. She placed the large bowl of mashed potatoes on the table next to the fried chicken.

“I wouldn’t mind hanging out at the lake all summer,” my aunt said.

“Come everyone,” called my grandmother. “Lunch is ready.”

I would be glad when lunch was over, and we’d lit the candles and sung happy birthday to my brother. He was eight-years-old today. I wanted some of that chocolate cake before my cousin, Hal, swiped all the icing.

Full of Promise

The afternoon was warm but not hot. Spring time in Oklahoma was windy but a pleasant time of year. Flowers were staring to bloom, trees were budding out, the grass was green, and nests were full of baby birds. It was 1961 and everything was full of promise and reborn. I was nineteen-years old and suited up for my second spring football practice at the University of Oklahoma.

A small group of us were doing drills with Coach Bobby Ward. Everyday all the varsity players gathered around the head coach, Bud Wilkinson. He would read out the name of an assistant coach followed by the names of the players who would be with him for the hour of drills before we would gather for the days practice scrimmage.

After their names were read, each group would cheer and run off behind their coach toward a section of the practice field for their workout. Coach Ward’s name was always read last. There was no need for the names of the last fourteen of us to be read aloud. With our heads bowed, eyes casting about for some way to escape, we knew we were condemned. 

“Let’s go girls. Time to play,” Bobby said every day, and we all followed him at a reluctant jog to a far corner of the practice field to begin our hitting drills by the numbers. No cheering from our small ill-fated bunch as we ran off to hell. Bobby was unforgiving and relentless.

We had been at it for about 30 minutes when I saw out of the corner of my sweat filled eyes a tall guy approach Coach Ward. After a short conversation, Bobby walked over to me, and for the first time, he had a look of something other than a fiery intensity about him. He put his hand on my shoulder pad.

“I am deeply sorry,” he said. “You brother and cousin need to talk to you. You can go and change. Don’t worry about football practice.”

I took a deep breath and headed over to where my cousin Hal and my brother Michael were waiting. I knew immediately why they were there. My father had been ill with cancer for a long time.

On My Own In Chi-Town

Four years ago, almost fifty years to the day after my father died, I got big royalty check from British Petroleum. The check was my part of four years of royalties from the sale of natural gas from wells drilled on the land my father bought during World War Two.

With winnings from poker games aboard ship when he was in the navy in the South Pacific, my father and his father, Carter Southard, bought up almost 700 acres in Southeastern Oklahoma. My two brothers and I along with my mother all got a share when he died. When she died, we three brothers got her share too.

Yesterday, I got another monthly royalty check from BP, and my younger brother called to say he thought the checks would keep coming and probably get bigger over time. He said one day all the cars and trucks would be converted over to natural gas. For a second I wanted to be rich, but why? At 71 my wish list was very short.

The royalty check reminded me that my father was only 45 when he died. We buried him on a bright sunny spring day. My mother’s ashes and her stone are at the foot of his grave which is next the graves of my Oklahoma grandparents.

One hundred and sixty miles south of Tulsa sits the town of Quinton, Oklahoma. East of town is the Quinton Cemetery. We boys, my brothers and I, and our mother stood beside the freshly dug hole in the ground. My grandparents from Illinois, my father’s two sisters and their families stood with us and watched the casket lowered into the grave. The backhoe and two grave diggers in overalls waited a short distance away.

From his grave, my father’s ghost would have a perfect view of the Sans Bois Mountain Range and Tucker’s Knob eight miles away. Shaped like a volcano, Tucker’s Knob was the highest peak in the state. He’d been born at the foot of that peak. My father was a long way from Chicago and Aurora, Illinois where he’d died five days ago.

We all gathered at my aunt’s house after the burial for a lunch of fried chicken, mashed potatoes, sweet iced tea, and all the other stuff that goes with southern funeral cooking. Her house was on the same street and five blocks north of the First Christian Church. The church was a low single story long white framed building with a steeple. Inside it smelled of furniture polish. From time to time guest preachers came, tried to save the few souls that remained in Quinton and baptized innocent children and last minute repenters hoping for a reprieve and a chance at heaven.

One of my father’s brothers-in-law was a lay preacher. He did the honors at my father’s funeral. He did a good job. My cousin sung the hymn Be Not Afraid. I didn’t remember my father ever stepping inside a church, but it didn’t matter. His funeral was not for him; it was for all the rest of us.

My mother and we older sons did not speak of the future after the funeral. I only thought about getting back to football practice and making the University of Oklahoma football team. I was in my second year, and we were in the middle of spring practice. I had dreams of playing in the fall.  

After my father’s death, my mother sold everything and moved to the ranch in Oklahoma, but I was an uptown guy and couldn’t imagine not living in the Chicago area. Oklahoma had a great football team, but what about putting on a suit and taking a girl out to dinner and to the theater or a jazz club, or going to a White sox baseball game, or the Chicago Bears and Lake Michigan? I couldn’t imagine not living in my Chi-Town world.

After classes at Oklahoma University let out in May, I packed up and headed north. I had a job for the summer waiting for me in Chicago. At first, I got a room at the Y in downtown Aurora and drove into Chicago to work.

Another college kid, who was working like me for Geneva Construction, was staying at a Frat House at Northwestern University in Evanston. Most of the members of the fraternity were gone for the summer, and they had rooms to rent. I went with him one day after work and got a bed there too. Thirty days later, I celebrated my birthday with a girl I met. I was nineteen-years old and on my own in Chicago.

                      

Legalized for the Better

Old guys like me have some funny ideas and are opinionated for sure, but at least I ain’t a stick in the mud. And, no, I ain’t dead yet. To prove it, I got myself on an airplane and few off to South America a few years back.

I got me a new wife and live in Colombia part of the time. I like the idea of taking risk and setting foot into unknown territories. Sometimes, new places have a lot to offer an old guy. I’ve never feared starting over, leaving all my stuff behind, and striking out headed for something new, but moving to Colombia was a stretch even for me.

One of the biggest reasons I like Colombia is you can walk into any drugstore and buy most drugs without a doctor’s prescription. I have Glaucoma and have to put a drop of Lumigan in each eye every day for the rest of my life. In the USA, I have to go pay a doc to do an exam and write a prescription at least once a year. Here in Colombia, if a guy knows the name of the drug he needs, he can buy it, no middle man needed.

Oh I know you may be thinking that we need government to protect us consumers, but the fact is we need to take responsibility for our own health. We need to do the research. Read about all the side effects before swallowing a pill or getting an injection. We need to make educated choices about what we put into our bodies, and those decisions don’t need to be made by big government and multi-national companies.

Americans in particular have given up on thinking and taking personal responsibility. Look at the result. We are the richest overweight and unhealthiest nation on the planet. We have given control of our lives to Uncle Sam, and he’s been bought by big business.

I get a Social Security check each month. It is about a third of the money I need to live a simple life. Oh, I know you don’t believe living in Bogota, Colombia and traveling back to Oklahoma to work from time to time is a simplistic life style, but outside of the travel, when I am in Colombia or Oklahoma I live a very simple daily life.

As I divide my year equally between Oklahoma and Colombia, I can compare the two worlds with some authority. Like I said, prescriptions drugs are a good example. Most in Colombia are at least 50 percent cheaper and you don’t have to have a doc write a prescription to buy them. Food is also cheaper and healthier and fresher. Of course, I’m talking about vegetables and fruit mostly. You can go to fancy, big supermarkets and buy imported food and pay through the nose, but every neighborhood has fruit and vegetable markets, meat markets, you-name-it markets where a guy can buy cheaply.

Don’t buy electronics in Colombia. You’ll pay way too much. Imported cars cost a third more in Colombia. Almost anything you plug into to a wall socket is more expensive. The government is screwing with everyone and the country is extremely inefficient, but if you don’t have to dick around with trying to make a living in the country and can afford to live in a safe neighborhood, Colombia has some very good parts.

I like the idea that prostitution is legal in Colombia too. I don’t know exactly why I do, but I’m glad it’s legal. Oh, I know you are going to bring up exploitation of women and pornography and all that business, but still, I like the idea of legalize prostitution. I have never gone to a prostitute in my life, but if I did get the urge, I should be able to have sex with a beautiful young woman at a reasonable price. After all, I won’t take all that much of her time, and I’m mostly all talk.

Same thing with marijuana, I like the idea of legalized marijuana. I don’t smoke it and don’t intend to smoke it, but if I did want to, I think I should be able to walk into a drug store or supermarket, buy a pack of marijuana, and light up. They just legalized marijuana in Uruguay. I don’t know about buying meds without a prescription down there or if prostitution is legal in Uruguay or not. I’ll have to check it out.

Bottom line, a 71-year-old should be able to buy his meds without a prescription, afford good nutritional food, buy fifteen minutes of sex with a pretty, young woman, and smoke marijuana if he wants to without fear of some cop arresting him and hauling his old ass off to jail. None of them should cost him an arm and a leg either!

I’m thinking about hiking on down to Uruguay and looking that place over. Colombia is okay, but maybe still a little too violent. Uruguay might just be the ticket, but it’s a hell of a hike from Oklahoma. I do know the women are beautiful down there, and that might be enough reason to take a look at the country.