IMPERFECTION
What I trust
is the cold. It doesn’t lie. It will kill you if you let it and it will show no
mercy. I take it like a narcotic or a reward that I think I deserve. I take it
after sex, either rolling over afterwards toward a window draft, or getting out
of bed and lighting out for other spaces.
I tend to
enjoy the cold alone, allowing myself to unwind, get lost and stay lost. It’s winter now, January, and
I’m sipping a beer on the back porch of my parent’s house. They’re in Hawaii
visiting my brother. I’m housesitting for them. I’ve never been to Hawaii. Not
interested. It’s not cold enough there. I prefer shivering in my sweatpants
under the stars, letting the air dimple my skin.
Out on the
ol’ back deck, the one my brother Frank built the summer before he enlisted in
the Coast Guard – more solid now since I’ve spent the last week re-enforcing
its support posts. Been a long time since I’ve seen Frank. He liked the cold,
as well, spent a lot of time in faraway spaces such as Newfoundland until
frostbite ate at his fingers once too often and he developed a degenerative
skin disease that can only be mitigated by living in a warm climate. So, he
moved to Florida. Not the place for me. Not hardly.
The deck is littered now with plastic children’s toys. More junk made in China. America’s drug of choice. My folks love being grandparents and can’t do enough for the new little ones, all of them adorable. Are my brothers’ wives sisters-in law, or sister-in-laws?
Who knows? Who cares? Well, I do. I should look this up once and for
all.
I let the
cold heal me of dread. I’m glad to be alone and I feel the night in a proper
way – glacially with no connections to anything – my ghosts aren’t returning
with baskets full of thoughts that a clear-headed morning might bring.
My ghosts and a little faith has served me well. Not as much, though, as my family has. I’d be nowhere without them. If God should love anyone for their diligent self-sacrifice, it’s both of my parents. I know this, but does God? I wonder if my parents do. I’m glad they’ve gotten away, for a change. Glad to be the only one still single and around more often, able to help out.
I suppose as one of their sons with all my
inconsistent luck, I prove to them that preparation only gets one so far. Luck
makes a difference. And who you know. I heard this from my parents constantly
while growing up. I’m living it now and prone to explaining my situation by
sharing with them what they already know. Laughable really, but I suspect all
part of the journey that’s parenthood.
I met an old
friend today and as I sit in the cold I start recalling how he told me that
after getting deployed in Iraq he knew God, and he’d lived a charmed life as an
Army mining engineer – his title – and he’d poked and prodded, done his job,
and he’d found an IUD or two fighting for Uncle Sam. He’d had his share of
close calls, but he’d made it home. He didn’t rank that high, but he still had,
as he said, “His nuts and all his limbs.”
I was
pleased to witness he was fully intact, though the look in his eyes suggested a
few screws had come loose. Maybe they’ll tighten up now that he’s a civilian
again. I don’t know what he was fighting for. I mean, I wish I knew, and I
appreciate his sacrifice, but I don’t feel any more or less safer, though I’m
sure plenty of Iraqis are pissed off that some foreign power occupied their
country and blew an ancient city like Baghdad to smithereens. I wonder if
historians will make sure we remember President Bush on TV calling it a “shock
and awe” campaign. God must love a bullshit artist too.
So, why am I
still alive? What have I ever done for others?
I don’t have answers. Wars will continue. I can trust these two points
as much as I trust the cold.
Earlier, I
was looking at a photo of my youngest brother, Joseph, the first of us five
boys to marry. He’s already divorced, though he has three daughters and is
still fighting a prolonged battle for custody and the house. All rather ugly
thanks to his ex’s ability to find the cruelest bitch on the planet as a
lawyer.
In the
photo, it’s clear at that time Joseph loved his wife and his newest baby
daughter. He’s holding that daughter high in one arm and he’s beaming as she
kisses him all over his face. Maybe
the only thing to trust more than the cold is a child’s unconditional love.
It’s a comfort to think this, but I’m rational, a doubter and I expect no
guarantees.
I close my
eyes and imagine my niece’s tiny hands pawing at my brother’s face. She has the
same blue seas in her eyes as Daddy does. It’s simple, I suppose. Be there with
children, support your own kin, make yourself happy. Yet even when I feel
happy, I feel like I don’t deserve it. As if I’ve done nothing special and have
no right.
Blowing a sigh, staring at the stars. Shivering in the cold. Stress,
nervousness about the future, but I like
being out here. I love the silence. I savor the adrenalin as it churns, my body
temperature plummeting.
Each day is
a form of deliverance, a chance to awaken and face who I am and to improve – to
draw back the barriers curtains of imagined and impossible equivocations.
Nothing is complete or fully realized. Imperfection defines us in the cold.
Money. Distractions. All of it tedious, mostly. Maybe I’ll join the French
Foreign Legion. Nah, too much sun. Besides, it’s all behind me, all that
adventuring about. Time to settle in and keep it dull for a while.
I’ve been
dating these women, spending all my money on them. None really want me, it
seems. I have to force my good graces on them. Have to work too hard. I need to
find one who likes the cold. I’m tired of the ones I’ve met, and there have
been many, of late, with their opinions and diets and pretentious
designer-label fashion choices. Some of them, and this isn’t a gender thing
though maybe it’s an American thing, have struck me as crybabies who’ve never
gone a day without enough grub to shovel down their gullets.
I do like women, though. I will marry one
day, I’m sure of this. I dream of her. She comes to my, my wife, an answered
prayer, a friend. Maybe she’s just not an American girl.
It’s right,
I think, to trust all links to the Almighty. I haven’t always felt this way. I
suspect time has been working its charms on me in a baffling unique way. It’s
opened me the way it’s opened my old man, my Pop, my father so proud of his
sons. None of us has become locked into a Cain and Abel relationship. As
brothers, we get along with each other and this pleases the old man, who never
had a brother of his own.
Sure, he doesn’t care to talk too much and he gets turned off whenever I
start ranting on about global villages and international imperatives and
feeling betrayed by government. This comes from my mother’s side of the
argumentative beast inside of me. I just come right out and say it. Though my
father did like when I told him I couldn’t condone any political system that
would punish those with initiative. He also told me in his indirect way that he
was more than disappointed, that he sometimes despised the military action in Iraq as much as he despised what he
called the corrupting influence of the country’s growing welfare state.
Yeah, my old man is old-school guarded and complicated, the opposite of my mother, who gets injured so often because she tends to remain open. Before they left for Hawaii, we were talking politics and I told them over dinner, “The bastards say what they want. They lie. There’s absolutely no more shame or accountability. Frankly, I don’t know why people put up with it.”
What is a parent supposed to say to
that?
They’re both
insightful, so they think first, long and hard, before venturing to say a word.
In my father’s case, as if he’s far away on another coast, he often says
nothing. My mother might respond, in private, but she’ll defer to my father and
remark that I should probably take up political issues with him when it’s just
the two of us.
They’ve been
married nearly fifty years. I wonder if during all that time they ever worried
about or considered a divorce. It’s not a topic I’ve ever discussed with them.
I wouldn’t know how, wouldn’t feel right doing so. They’re not a perfect
couple, but they’re my folks – like a solid, impregnable fortress that as a boy
I could go to as a place to hide from all the pain the outside world had
inflicted on me. It was the only place where I sure of my allegiances. A stable
element in my life, a marriage of sorts, with Mom on one shoulder and the old
man on another.
Amen. Yet
nothing is stable. A man gets lucky if he meets a good woman. She’ll open him.
But not me. Not this night, anyway. I’m icy and want to stay this way. I have
the cold the way I like it – with no suggestion of any buzzing or ripples. The
stars like talons that scratch at me from the inside out, ripping away the
igloo walls that hold captive all my memories.
Sure, I can
love someone. It’s possible. I can be a father to the shining source of great
gladness in life, though I’m not really sure I can love or trust another person
after seeing so many of their faces in the sand of my dreams, knowing they’re
all strangers, holding that carnivorous look that rarely softens. Those faces,
my ghosts, the dead and living that define what lives and rots frozen
inside.
I’ve seen
too much so quickly that it’s as if I’ve seen nothing at all. Time. Sort it out
and heal and expect no promise the sorting will amount to anything other than
more derangement. Still, I won’t sleep with a gun under my pillow. Let them
come, either from April springs or in Jeeps that have been rolling days over
distant horizons. If I’m not one then I’m two, telling my other selves where
I’m going or if I’m coming back. It’s never too late for innocence, mercy,
forgiveness and patience, but the rest of it – at least for now and maybe
forever – it might all be too late for.
Have to
laugh. I feel like one of the chosen few, though I don’t what that means. I
sleep in the nude and wake from nightmares just like anyone else. I continue to
live without ever fully understanding my own fears and conflicted
identity.
The sky, it’s like an opened fridge on a hot day and I’m sweating as I
reach in to get myself a beer. I must let life happen, just I let the cold of
night become the place I’ve dreamt of as a
home.
I hug
myself. Pins and needs shingle up the sweat of my back and my ears begin to
ring.
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