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The Ruminator
Once again the temperature drops and it’s no winter wonderland out there. Just dirty gray and cold. I press my cheek up against the dining room window and feel the frozen glass. The proof of January is pressed upon me along with all those bleak days that wait ahead like dog poop on a fresh snow, and they crowd out any chance at a happy mood. A sigh of resigned exhalation leaves a patch of condensation across the cold pane and so I draw a sad face with my finger. Two dot eyes, a button nose, and one big frown.
The holiday season is over. Has been for a week now. The second week of January and the new neighbors across the street still keep their holiday lights on at night. I don’t know them at all, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not even sure what they look like, so who am I to say if it’s out of a stubborn forlornness or a could-not-care-less laziness? Maybe they simply forgot. But every morning now for the last week those lights have remained on early in the cold dark dawn as I retrieve the paper like some just-tickled-to-be-here dog and I’m now beginning to wonder if we might have some kind of a record brewing here, Christmas lights shining on brightly into February, beyond Valentine’s, maybe even into March and the coming spring.
So how do I feel about that?
Oh how I do love all those twinkling multi-colored lights. Throughout Christmas they ignite my spirit and add a magic dazzle to otherwise frigid evenings. But it is not Christmas. No. Its last remains were set out by the curb last Tuesday and dumped into that loud hydraulic monster that feeds around here on a weekly basis. And their twinkling presence only serves to remind me of that fact. The Yuletide has receded, drawn back out into that dark and empty sea of time.
So no. I don’t like all those twinkling lights. Not now. Not at all.
The season is over. I fight that sinking feeling inside of me realizing that it can’t be Christmas all year long. That’s what makes it so special. I know all that. Still, the sinking feeling sinks even further.
Actually I do have a dog and his name is Otto. And he’s tickled to be here, especially when I tickle him, but he’s not much of a paper retriever. And that’s a good thing because, like a fine wine and a good book, I prefer my paper dry and legible.
“Here Otto” I call out, and his old watery eyes look up at me and then here he comes, old tail wagging and long tongue dangling, and it is at times like these that I remain pleased that I am the master and he the obedient beast.
“Good boy Otto” I go on, scratching and rubbing him, pleasing him in the most primal of ways, and it brings me a pinch of joy to make my beastly friend feel good.
I get up and fill my coffee cup again. Thank God for the sanctity, salvation and sanity found deep inside the Brazilian-bred coffee bean.
Otto wanders off into the den and I sit down to peruse the paper while the television offers its daily Pavlovian welcome to the commencement of yet a new day. I should be happy. Another day of life, of freedom and opportunity, not just one day closer to death. The familiar voices drone along and I think about my day, the priorities that must be met, the duties that might fetch some attention, the rest that will no doubt get swept yet again under the carpet. “The Midwest will be blanketed with a good half foot of snow later today as a mass of arctic air makes it’s way south…” and I turn to the business section with a sigh. “And now we turn our attention to a story coming out of South America.” I scan the front page and note nothing of real interest so I’m on to the inside pages checking some stock quotes. “It has been reported that there is a coming shortage of coffee beans from Brazil due to inclement weather combined with some new and strange disease strain making it’s way through…” and now I look up at the television. “… and some experts have even warned that, the way things are going, in a mere ten years there may no longer be any coffee beans left.”
I choke on my last sip and turn off the tube with a slightly shaky hand.
At the office I settle down with another cup of coffee and scan the appointment book. I have a 10 am “Get Acquainted” meeting with a retired gentleman and his wife. Lunch with Ted at the Café Escondido at half past noon and then a 3 pm quarterly review with Harold Jones. Damn. Harold Jones is paying for solid financial planning advice (and getting it I might add) but what he seems to think he is owed is a series of investing miracles. He expects double digit returns regardless of the fact that the S&P 500 was down 2.8% last quarter and our balanced portfolio was up 5.3% during that same period. These are the types of clients that you’d be just as pleased to see go elsewhere and take their bad and somewhat ignorant karma with them.
“Good morning, Jake,” Bertha says as she enters my office handing me some files. Bertha is the office manager and has been around here forever, long before Lighthouse Planners took me on five years back, and she provides a warm and supportive presence that is always comforting, especially back when I was new and more than a little unsure of myself.
“Good morning Bertha, how was the week-end?” Bertha, home of the ever-present ruby-lipped smile, reddish-to-gray hair stacked high into a tight bun that loosens as the day drags on, says, “well, honestly, I’ve had better. Mom was an absolute spoiled sport at Bingo Friday night and the Cowboys got stomped yesterday.”
Bertha takes her eighty-five year old mother to Bingo every Friday night and they’re quite the sight, her mother failing in almost all physical and mental capacities except her desire to win, and big buxom Bertha rolling her into the bingo parlor in the wheel chair complete with Dallas Cowboy car flag somehow waving from the back and with a well-worn pioneer blanket folded across her lap.
“Sorry to hear that but I guess the positive side is that she’s still – well, what’s the word, feisty?”
“Oh yes, feisty, and then some. Why she still wants to win so bad is beyond me. You’d think she’d be happy just to get out a little but no – and she fell asleep late in the afternoon yesterday and I still haven’t told her what happened to the Cowboys.”
What happened to the Cowboys was a second-half collapse on the frozen rink of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Packers rolled it up as the temperature plummeted and the Cowboy players sat stunned along the bench, heads bowed while puffs of whipped ice smoke poured from their helmets.
“Ah, she’ll see it on TV or read about it in the paper. You’re off the hook.”
“Let’s hope so,” Bertha says as she heads towards the door.
“By the way, did you hear about the coffee bean shortage? Price could shoot up and we might even run completely out some day.”
“You know me Jake – I’m just a decaffeinated tea drinker. As for you, well, you’re the coffee-swigging financial expert, you’d better start looking into the buying of coffee future contracts.”
I laugh and say, “yeah, I guess you’re right,” already acknowledging internally the flaw in her suggestion. Because you can’t catch that “caffeine buzz” from drinking cash profits although they might make the prospect of a coffee-less day a bit more tolerable.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned about those coffee beans old boy,” says Bob as he struts into my office. “They’ve been saying for years that we’re going to run out of chocolate, out of the cocoa bean I guess, and from the looks of it we’ve got more chocolate than ever. Now pussy, if we ever run out of that, then we’re in big trouble.” Pussy is Bob’s favorite word, used more than occasionally in situations such as these, but also as a term to describe those who oppose, impede, insult or otherwise get on the wrong side of Bob in any tangible or intangible manner.
Damn. Bertha just left my office moments ago and Bob, who was married when I first arrived at Lighthouse but has since shed that skin, and rumor has it that it was indeed he who got skinned in the end, has a booming voice that he never sees any reason to tone down. I cringe a little but smile a little too because Bertha can’t hear my smile.
I lean towards him and whisper, “well, how you gonna get that if there’s no chocolate to offer her in the evening? And what of the morning after, when the awful truth hits you, with no coffee to zap you back to your senses?”
“But Jake, you know I’m a flirt, squirt and then desert kinda guy – chocolate and coffee never have the chance to enter into the equation. Besides, what of the pistachio nut, now that’s something worth worrying about.”
“How about the wine grape?”
“The celery stalk?”
“Water?”
“What about air?” Bob deadpans leaning in. “Here we are, running all these projections for these suckers, ten years, twenty, thirty, and you and I both know they’re never gonna make it, and neither will we, not with all this shit going on in the world. I say spend it – blow it all – NOW!”
Bob is the kind of friend that’s okay to have around the office, he has a way in helping those long tedious days seem a little shorter, so usually I tactfully play along, but outside these boundaries, be it a drink on the way home or a ballgame on the weekends, well, I just don’t find myself that comfortable around him. I’ve made that mistake more than a time or two.
“Speaking of those suckers, have you had the chance to read this new teleputer report? Some interesting stuff in there.” One thing the world is not running out of evidently is teleputers. I hand Bob the report.
“No – haven’t had the pleasure.” Been too busy all week-end chasing down that aforementioned diminishing commodity no doubt. He looks up from the report and shakes the paper sheets.
“Paper – and trees. What about trees? We’ll need all the shade we can get in the coming global warming fucked-up future.”
Bob turns and takes the report along with his unapologetic booming voice with him.
Harold Jones arrives at 2:58 pm. He’s not one to be too early lest he appear anxious but he’d never dream of ever being late and you had not better be either. I hear his banter out in the reception area, the low confident drawl that already seems to ooze a strange propensity towards sweet savored disappointment, almost as if he’d be disappointed if he was not allowed the opportunity to be in fact truly disappointed, and Bertha’s spirited yet somewhat restrained response, and soon enough the phone buzzes.
“Send him in,” I gasp, and I snap my fingers attempting to assume the role. Jones saunters in with a tight-lipped gaze and I get up and offer him a very firm hand shake and a pickled smile. After a brief uncomfortable exchange of pleasantries we’re down to the brass tacks.
Ouch. I must have sat on them.
Sixteen minutes later he’s up, out my door, and asking Bertha for his pertinent files, documents, tax returns – you name it. All of it. The message is quite clear to Bertha, quite clear in fact to all within the office confines, but I don’t mind it one bit. Let him go I say. Let him find someone else to pester, belittle with his corner-mouthed quips, to slowly degrade, all done mind you with that smirk and that slow shake of the head and those squinty eyes that reflect his barely contained outrage. “I am disappointed,” he had concluded. Disappointed? If he wants real disappointment I say let his sorry ass go right out that door and he can belly up to some fly-by-night schemer dreamer who has designs on liquidating our tidy asset allocations and tossing it all into a tiny overseas start-up selling banana burgers to Siberian goat ropers. And make that a full position margined to the hilt!
Driving home in the late afternoon and a fine sleet is coming down. I have the defrost on with the wipers going back and forth. I’m thinking about Harold Jones of course and about the methods I’d been taught to deal with his sort, and I had tried, I truly had, but sometimes you must face the bitter facts and move on. I don’t like confrontation, I painstakingly and perhaps to a fault try to avoid it, but there had been little choice.
Now look at that – it’s that guy. The one who wanders around town, strolling down busy boulevards talking to himself, stopping in at various public places where everyone acts like it’s no big deal, but it is, and everyone knows it is, but you let it go, because you really don’t want to unsettle him. It’s the local homeless guy. I’ve seen him for years now, walking in the dead heat of summer with a bandana tied around his head, ratty shorts, t-shirt and old sneakers, going somewhere, who knows exactly where, but somewhere. In the spring, in the autumn, and now in the cold gray at the end of a January day, sleet sticking in his red wool beanie and frazzled blonde beard, shoulders hunched around a green army jacket, hands tucked away into the depths of his jean pockets. You never know when or where the homeless guy is going to pop up but you know he will.
And I think to myself, Harold Jones doesn’t appreciate his rate of return but all this guy would like to do is return – to somewhere warm and safe.
To home.
It’s sad to wake up on February 14th and feel alone. Last Valentine’s Day had been quite different, but how was I to know then that I was in fact near the end of the relationship.
I had met April the previous October as the soft autumn breeze coaxed the turning leaves to finally cut loose, one by one see-sawing their way to the cooling ground in a brief final dance. I recall the fresh chill in the air that late morning as I proceeded to the local financial planning meeting held the first Thursday of each month at the public library. April was new to the chapter, a young planner recently hired by a large planning conglomerate, and she appeared out of nowhere somewhat shy yet obviously bright. And very cute. Her brown eyes lit up when I asked her after the meeting if she’d like a cup of punch and a cookie, for she had been standing off alone and away from her mingling friends with that “I’m lost and growing more uncomfortable by the second” look, so I had rescued her, and I soon admired the ring of red painting her upper lip and the corners of her mouth as she sipped and smiled while I talked about my perspective on the proper timing of IRA withdrawals.
Hell yes I gave it my best, but even so, the topic naturally ran out of steam and I began to stammer on about some other less interesting issue and then she came to my rescue saying, “you know, I’d love to talk to you more about IRAs. And 401-Ks. And Monte Carlo Stimulations.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was actually called Monte Carlo Simulation but surely I must have at the very least grinned. “Why of course – I’d like that very much. Why don’t you give me your business card and I’ll give you a call.” She gave me a big fresh cherry smile and scribbled her home number on the back.
I was ecstatic leaving that October meeting and as I strolled to my car with her card still in my hand I felt the sun streaming its life-affirming warmth and golden glow through the lovely tree branches. The chill had given way to a splendid autumn afternoon and I felt that golden glow inside.
But the chill is here now.
You know, I could stand a little Monte Carlo Stimulation today.
I could have stood some yesterday.
I have it on good authority that in all likelihood I could probably stand a little Monte Carlo Stimulation tomorrow.
There will be no April this Valentine’s Day. No nobody. Nada. But as I bend over to pick up the morning paper I notice that the neighbor’s Christmas lights are no longer shining. Now how about that? A small triumph to start the day. Christmas is officially over I guess. Drum roll please – let the bells of springtime ring and the coming winds blow!
I wonder what April will be doing today? Will she even think about me? Well of course she will, one can’t help but remember what one did just last year, that being just a few months back, a bushel of weeks ago, really only mere days. So even if she’s with a new boyfriend today she will at some point think of me at least in a small fleeting and vaguely fond manner and no doubt wonder how the ruminator is faring this day?
Well, the ruminator is drinking his coffee this day, coffee tenderly brewed from his growing cache of Starbucks bags and Colombian whole beans stored in a dark and bone dry spot in his cupboard. The ruminator doesn’t go to the store these days without picking up an extra four or five packages of fresh java for the coming bleak days and a sense of rich satisfaction percolates inside him whenever he thinks of the cupboard. We’re talking heaps of the Breakfast Blend and Dark Vienna Roast and a slew of other exotic blends but no decaf. Screw the decaf. What’s the point? And the ruminator is feeding Otto, shaving, showering, driving to work on a bright February morn, surprisingly happy, and there he is, the homeless guy, sitting on a bench huddled over a steaming white Styrofoam cup of coffee.
I, the ruminator, salute the resourcefulness and guile of the local homeless guy by giving my horn a sharp jolly toot as I drive past. And I’m not exactly certain but it does appear I may have startled him and he’s spilled a little of that hot coffee upon himself. Oh – don’t look now but in my side view mirror I seem to see the arm shooting upwards and he’s too far back now for me to positively identify the extension of one coffee-burned middle finger.
I step on the gas a little and look straight ahead and lose myself in the spreading haze of frozen exhaust.
The early spring winds blow and I find myself carried along with them. It’s easier most times to just go with the flow, floating downstream in a pleasant milieu of routine and a few small harmless adventures. Very few in fact, and none truly notable, so truth be told the days just float by as the lawns green and the redbuds bloom.
Soon enough I find myself at Easter dinner with the folks, the siblings, their children, a big fat honey-baked ham, rain pouring down and a bunch of colored eggs strewn about the house, hidden among the plastic fruit, stuck under pillows, wobbling upon door frames, mounted atop brass candle holders. As the unmarried uncle that all the children without question adore I am designated as the primary egg hider and damn if I don’t enjoy it. But as the kids have grown older it appears that I may be running out of those ingenious spots to cast my lot and the fun is wearing thin, especially when I see them go straight to the special locale that had kept them at bay for at least an hour last year.
“So Jake, what have you been up to lately?” my sister-in-law Amy asks over a glass of pinot grigio at the kitchen table. She wants to make small talk, she wants to be my buddy, she wants me happy, but I am more into hiding eggs and staying away from all this small talk.
“Work” is what I say, with a sigh and a raise of the brow. “Busy busy busy.” I realize at once that I’m coming across as a grumpy ass, unappreciative of her effort, so I smile and ask her what she’s been up to.
“Have you heard from April?” a voice sings from across the kitchen, and it’s mother, always the positive one, positive that I need a wife and a family. She approaches in a slow curtsy, hands clasped loosely as if just thinking about praying, and I suddenly look away at one of the few eggs that the kids have still not found. Tucked gently inside an oven mitt hanging stiffly from the oven door, the pink shell barely visible to the eye if seen from the proper angle (that is the one rule, that all eggs must be at least partially visible from some point in the room) and I get up saying, “Nope – haven’t heard from April mom,” and then I go into the living room and announce to the kids, “hey, there’s still one egg hiding out in the kitchen,” and the kids all skedaddle past me while my dad awakens from his wine-induced Easter nap with a crunch and an expletive. An egg had been placed between his legs by one of the ornery grandkids. For a moment he is rightfully angered, but thinking better of it, at his age he should be thankful that it was just an egg that cracked down there.
The rain slackens off a bit and a shard of sunshine stabs through. Dad stands up and wipes the egg shell from his lap with a sleepy smile.
He has risen.
Now in my early thirties I see it all very clearly. Of course I do. The years are all running together and the four seasons are being dragged along with them like battered cans on a string rattling behind a newlywed’s clunker. Just Married. Forever Harried. I have come to appreciate those seasons, to respect them, but I always seem to be longing for the one opposite the season I actually find myself currently ruminating within. And here I sit, still wandering through the springtime of my own life, but it’s always raining. I tell myself as I wipe the fog from my glasses that if only it would just stop pouring for a second then that’s when it would happen. I would get there. I would be happy.
On the Saturday before the 4th of July I gather with Bob and Bertha, her mother, and all the rest of the gang at the annual Lighthouse Financial Planners company picnic. The volleyball net is getting plenty of action and someone set up a nice croquet course where I have already taken a good beating (and I’m still steamed about Jack Benson knocking my ball way off into the pond where I was forced to take my shoes and socks off and wade through the muck using the mallet as both a crutch and divining rod, each careful step bringing more chuckles from Jack and his buds until I almost slipped when I stepped on the damn slippery thing) and now I am sitting down to a hearty meal of fried chicken, potato salad, cole slaw and fruit salad all washed down with an ice cold beer. But as I sit down at the picnic table I detect the odor, as do all of my fellow picnickers, and even Bertha’s mother shrivels up her wrinkled nose. The scum of the pond has literally stained me. So I pick up my paper plate and excuse myself to an isolated stump near the volleyball net.
“8 Serving 6” cries out a young man that I’ve never seen before, probably some co-worker’s son or brother, and he steps into a hard overhead serve that flies over the net with a bang and a young paraplanner near the back line gives it a quick look and then lets it go.
“What kind of effort was that?” Bob cries with hands on hips, face twisted into a sweaty scowl. “Listen Judy, if that ball is anywhere close, then go for it!” Bob turns back around to face the server and assumes the athletic position, knees bent and hands aloft, as the ball gets rolled back under the net and I scoop up another helping of potato salad, not the mustard kind but the mayonnaise and hard-boiled egg and pickled variety, damn delicious, and the server grabs the ball and gives it a bounce or two.
“9 Serving 6” he grunts and winds up into another killer blast that requires a dazzling leap into the air and the ball comes whistling over the net in a kamikaze loop. A determined Judy steps right into its path, a path that would have surely taken the ball beyond the back boundary, and the sound of ball on flesh is heard all around the park. The ducks on the pond give a terse quack and start swimming away as fast as their little legs will take them.
Judy is on her back now, with hands to face covering the tears and muffling the cries, and she rolls over to her side while the women all gather around her and offer some kind of comfort.
“Man oh man – I’m sorry,” says the young man, his eyes alive with excitement as he approaches the injured girl, “I sure didn’t mean to do that.”
He looks into the faces of his opponents for their confirmation of his innocence and finally Joel Singer says, “forget it, no one blames you for that – still, maybe you ought to tone it down a bit, okay? We’re all just here to have a little fun”
The young man bends down into the circle of compassion tending to Judy, and when he sees the blood trickling between her fingers and hears the muted sobs he cringes and quickly withdrawals.
“Yeah,” Bob says as he looks down into the crowd around Judy, “well, it was a foot fault anyway. Our point.”
The young man looks at Bob, but Bob is still looking away, that feigned disinterested look I recognize, and the young man begins to say something as his lips slightly part but then suddenly thinks better of it.
Bertha comes over with a roll of paper towels and kneels to the ground asking a few of the others to kindly lift the poor girl’s head slightly and then she folds a paper towel into a tiny soft square and gently folds it inside the bloody nostril. “It’s okay baby, you’ll be alright, no harm, you rest for a second and give the nose a chance to stop the bleeding, and then we’ll walk you over to a lounger and you can rest,” and I see Judy take her hand and give it a squeeze.
A few minutes later I toss my dirty paper plate into the trash can and Bob barks out, “Jake, get over here, we need another player,” and the next thing I know I find myself in poor Judy’s spot, the young man crying out “10 Serving 6.”
“Whoa, hold on there a minute hoss. We had us a foot fault that last point,” Bob says as he reaches up and looks through the net, his nose poking through.
The kid bounces the ball a few times and casts a quizzical glance at Robbie Sales, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes ever so slightly, and Bob sees this.
“What? You don’t believe me? I clearly called it.”
“Uh, okay, whatever, just make sure you don’t touch the net next time pops.”
Bob recedes back into his position but I can see that he is obviously mega-pissed.
“We got 9 serving 6, right pops?” and the young man winds up into a monstrous serve that was either a horrible mis-hit or, more likely, a glorious dead-ringer that never even contemplated clearing the net but instead curved in a nasty spinning arc right under it and into the unsuspecting groin of Mr. Robert Sturdevant, who had an instant earlier assumed correctly that the serve was indeed coming right at him but just skimming over that net, certainly not just under, and having anticipated such, had committed himself to an all-out killer spike-jump with legs splayed wide open, an absolute full-frontal exposure, in anticipation of the conquering moment that sadly never came.
By the time Bob regains his wits the young man is long gone, he’s taken off for the trees outlining the northern edge of the park in a hasty jog, and it is then that I realize that he is no one’s brother or son, just some guy out looking for some free food and a little fun, and here he had found both. Two men help Bob to his feet in all his public misery and with arms around their shoulders they lead him back to the picnic benches where they sit him down with a hard thud.
“Oh damn,” Bob winces, and he leans back and starts to pout.
Judy sits behind him with torn paper towel stuck inside her nose and a wry smile spreading across her face. She looks up at me and winks and nods with amusement. She’s feeling a whole lot better now.
“Damn damn ohhhh damn,” Bob repeats and adds with anger, “if I ever get my hands on that punk. Oh damn. Hurts so damn bad!”
I look at Bob and I see one solitary tear streaking his red cheek. His balls ache, no doubt about that, but it’s his pride that really got whacked good. Here comes Bertha wheeling her mother back to the van, it’s been quite a full day already, and as they pass Bob I see the little old lady look up slowly raising her hand and Bertha stops. As a sniveling Bob looks up she opens her mouth and finally speaks in a voice far more lively and bold than I would‘ve ever fathomed. “What are you Bob – some kind of pussy?”
In the park all is silent except for the caw of a faraway crow but somewhere in our holy world a gong has been firmly struck, unheard by all of us but without question felt below the belt by Bob. He looks up in shock for a moment, lips slightly parted and trembling, and Bertha quickly wheels away her mother before any further inquisition could be established. Suddenly Bob’s head drops to his lap, hands spread wide across his swelling sockets, and the sobs come. One by one they come and one by one our fellow Lighthouse planners slip away, eyebrows raised and a tooth-clenched giggle stifled, until only I remain. The sobbing has stopped now, the shoulders have settled into a permanent slouch, just a sniffle here and there, and I understand that right about now he’s wondering how he will ever live this one down, just who was here to actually witness it anyway, and what to say to whoever remains when he finally comes up for air.
I had thought about offering him a word of encouragement and then a quick pat on the back, but instead I stand up and oh so quietly tiptoe away. Maybe he looks up and sees the back of me sneaking off. Maybe he doesn’t.
It’s dusk as I head home and off in the distance I hear the pop pop pop of firecrackers as someone gets a head start on the 4th. Up ahead I spot the silhouette of person walking way too close to the road, too far off to see if he or she is approaching or receding, and a car ahead of me passes with lights on and I see the pink of a face, not the dark tuft of the back of a head, and it’s a man, drawing nearer, and he’s way too close to the road, no margin for even the slightest of error, and the next car swerves into the other lane to miss him and I’m next, the figure approaching, gaining, and then I see him, hiking boots laced high, a red bandana swiped across his noggin, seemingly just a dirty loincloth wrapped about his ass. And I don’t move an inch, in fact I even hug the right side a little, and I grit my teeth as I pass.
He never looks away. Acts as if he never even sees me – just marches onward toward something and I think of all that leftover food we just threw away back at the picnic.
Bertha’s mom dies in late October. On a blustery Wednesday afternoon just days before Halloween a small funeral is held at the First Methodist Church. I sit near the back with a few fellow workers, smelling the waxed pine of the pew and relaxing as I gaze into the dazzle of lights and flowers. Towards the end of the service, when the organist begins to play Ode to Joy, I suddenly have a vision. I remember where I hid that last Easter egg. Up high on top of the wood cupboard, a precarious perch indeed, and that colored egg must have rolled away and out of sight with the slightest tilt of the earth on its axis. Or with the slam of the cupboard door. Well, that explains the smell the parents complained about all summer long. It wasn’t a dead mouse in the attic after all. Just a poor egg, painted, slightly cracked and forgotten.
Bob did not attend the service.
April in October. Not such a bad thing, maybe even a good thing, if one has the sense to just sit back, relax, and appreciate it. But the ruminator never does. Two Octobers ago she had appeared, a sweet and pretty and innocent girl, and I had run her off with all my somber ruminations. Her words, not mine. I had thought of them as reflective and insightful, as necessary, unavoidable – certainly not somber.
“I don’t want to die in the spring,” I had whispered to her in the freezing calm of winter. And then in the spring I had casually mentioned that “it sure would be a bummer to buy the farm in the fall – don’t you think?”
Well, she did think, and what she thought she must not have liked, and so soon enough a distance emerged between us, one promulgated primarily by April, and then by May she was gone.
I didn’t really lament it at first, but as is my nature, before long I so badly wanted again what I no longer had.
Thanksgiving is around the corner and I am seriously contemplating the offer from Bob, one that involves deli-bought turkey sandwiches, football watching and large consumptions of imported beer, but in the end I turn him down. I almost jokingly suggest to him that Bertha might be lonely this holiday season, maybe the two of them could get together in some hospitable manner, watch the Cowboy game, reminisce, but then my better judgment seizes hold of me. There is still no kidding allowed on that subject, not even the slightest of hazy connotations, so I do my best to bury the memory.
“Sorry Bob – gotta go to the parent’s as usual.”
“Okay, sure, I understand,” he says with a mildly put-off glance, “but you oughta get outa there in the late afternoon and drop by – plenty of beer here. Plenty of chips,” he adds with that wry grin and the wink of an eye. As I move toward the office door I say, “yeah, I’ll try to get away. No promises though.”
“Yeah – no promises. Understood.”
Well, I never did get away and I receive word on Saturday afternoon that somehow Bob got tossed in jail Friday night. I receive the phone call from Frank Weathers, the Methodist minister client of ours who had bailed him out earlier that morning.
“What the fuck happened?” I ask in astonishment, immediately regretting the expletive that somehow slips out of my mouth although Reverend Weathers continues on like he hasn’t heard a thing, or considering the circumstances, doesn’t really give a damn.
“He won’t say much and I didn’t ask. But he smelled like a brewery when I got there. The damn fool had on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a Margaritaville t-shirt. And sandals. Thirty-five frickin’ degrees and here he comes waltzing out of the county jail looking like that. Into a sleet storm. The damn fool.”
I decide to lay low and just wait until Monday morning to hear the finer details from the man himself. As it turns out I have to wait a little longer.
Now all those twinkling lights have returned once more. After I get home from work I walk Otto around the block as the grey mid December day melts away into a cold yet festive dusk and we admire all the displays. Otto appears excited, stimulated by the surroundings, and I can only smile and look away when he insists on relieving himself on one of the Bacino’s toothy elves. And of course there are those who go way overboard, the mixing of grinning neon snowmen with the swaddling baby Jesus seeming at first glance a little misguided, maybe even tacky, but surely everybody’s heart is in the right place.
I walk my dog alone under a cloudy and cold sky that seems to trap all that light beneath it creating a magical dome in which we all work our way through December. I smile in its glow, I acknowledge it, and Otto looks up at me and gently barks, tail wagging and eyes seeing, and we continue on. Although it’s quite nippy I understand that there is no need to rush home because all that awaits me there is a closet-full of stacked coffee beans and an under-used laptop computer and memories of all those lost seasons. Time is marching on brother. My pace quickens as I attempt to walk along with it and the wind cuts through my unzipped jacket, its chill slapping me in the face, my footing suddenly unsure and slipping.
On a late Friday afternoon a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving a group of us from the office meet at the local trendy coffee shop to trade a few small gifts and offer one another good seasonal cheer. I really enjoy the company of my fellow workers, we generate camaraderie, a true synergy, and spending some free time with them is a joy. But there is another reason for our gathering, one that has hardly been able to await its proper turn, and that is to confirm the rumors about our poor Bob.
No – I had not heard from the man. He had not returned my few phone calls nor had he returned to the office since that fateful Thanksgiving week-end. His clutter still remains in his office although it has been tidied up a bit, the half-full coffee mug finally drained and wiped clean and set back in its rightful place for example, but otherwise all remains quite the same while the ghost of Bob eerily hovers about. But Bertha has gotten the word from Reverend Weathers who had, as it turns out, by default become the liaison between Bob and the local court system, and I knew by the look in her eyes that what the reverend had told her wasn’t good.
Bertha sips her hot tea and nervously looks about the shop. The last gift has been opened and the last thank-you given in gracious exchange (and my, the irony of all of us giving one another gift cards from this very establishment, the only differences being the dollar amount, except for Jack Benson, who received a dirty and foul-smelling croquet ball from yours truly), and now we all slow down just a bit and assume a more solemn mood as we know what must be addressed next. I sense the anxiety in Bertha and as the last of the laughter and gaiety fades away into a menagerie of throat clearings and self-conscious guffaws I perk up and offer, “now Bertha, it can’t really be all that bad, now can it?”
She tips her head ever so slightly and raises her painted-on brows as she sheepishly smiles. “Oh yes – it can. It truly can.”
“What did he do – rob a damn bank or something?” Chip Hardy asks somewhat derogatively, and he drowns his own chuckle with a sip of his vanilla latte.
“Nah, not that bad,” interjects Ralph Russo. “Look, I know the whole scoop, the entire enchilada, and if Bertha would like me to, I’d be more than willing to spill all the juicy particulars.” We all turn back to look at Bertha and she responds with relief, “oh, by all means, be my guest.”
Ralph takes a long drag on his coffee and then sets the empty mug down with a decidedly louder-than-needed thud. “Well, it seems that our vivacious co-worker drank all Thanksgiving Day, on into the night, and then well into the next day and evening, and somehow wound up late Friday night at Coco Locos where he got into a bar fight with another patron. The way I heard it, Bob was hitting on the guy’s girlfriend and before long the guy hit him with the unsweetestest of punches.”
“What the heck do you mean by that?” Chip implores, and Ralph tips back his head and grins. “The guy called him a – well, excuse my French, ladies – a pussy.”
That word. That derisive term. The spinning P-bomb that just went boom deep within Bob’s intemperant soul.
One by one our group begins to disband while the other smaller details are freely dispensed among us. Bob broke the guy’s jaw with a half-full whiskey bottle, Jamesons I’d wager. What’s more, the gal emptied an entire can of fresh mace on him in a tornado of uproar complete with arms flailing and hellish screams and then the bartender roughed him up a bit before the cops arrived. Additionally, and most regrettably, he wet his bermudas when they slapped the cuffs on him and as they led him out of the establishment day-old vomit was seen smeared across his backside.
So yes. A Merry Christmas to one and all. Fa la la and all that good shit. As for Bob, hang on brother, it’s going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. And last but not in the slightest least, as one unforgettable character once bitterly proclaimed to the innocent passing fool: and a Happy New Year to you – in jail!
Well, now we’re down to just a handful of Lighthouse planners and the coffee’s growing cold and my jaw tight. My eye twitches just a little as I absorb this new knowledge, this sad new fate of an old friend, while the perky caffeine wanders throughout the winding conduits of my entire body. The mood has changed in here, it’s late afternoon in early December and the pale gray light grows old and tired and just dissolves into twilight with the blink of an eye.
I bid farewell to my friends and head for the exit. And as I think about stopping by the bakery check-out and picking up some holiday bread or maybe some orange-cranberry scones if they’re not that busy, I spot him. There he is. Sitting off in that small two-person booth in the shadows, all by himself of course, long red stocking cap with a fuzzy white ball bobbing at the end of it, the faded green army jacket wrapped around him and he looks warm and surprisingly well kept. But what really gets me is the shiny laptop computer sitting in front of him. He’s just typing away, in a mad flurry of gesticulation and constant tap-tap-tapping with absolutely no hesitation, he’s writing something like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do in this world, and I think, whatever its source, it must be a large and non-depleting one.
Suddenly he looks up at me with dead blue eyes and his chapped lips move but his expression remains unchanged, stoic, then slightly annoyed.
“Hey man – I found it.”
His voice is strong, low, and confident. I don’t say anything for a moment, quite frankly I’m taken aback, but then I spit out a few words.
“Uh, hey, I could give you a ride if… like, if you needed one.”
“To where?”
“Oh well, anywhere you needed to go.” Those dead blue eyes flicker to life for a moment, he squeezes them tighter with curiosity and his brow deepens with the new growth from last summer’s long miles and tan.
“Like, you know, home or something.”
Is that the beginning of a smile I see tugging from the corners of his mouth?
“Now why in the world would I want to go to a place like that?”
No smile, more of a smirk and just as suddenly those blue eyes go dead and he jumps right back into that swiftly moving river of his thought and words. Tap tap tap. I’ve been dismissed.
Forget the damn holiday bread. I scurry out into the frozen dark and escape into the smell of my car. And I’m thinking, he doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a past or a future. And he doesn’t want any of them. What he has is what he needs: now and a shiny laptop.
That he found.
I step up to the window and look out. My neighbors, who I still haven’t officially met except for the odd wave as they pull into their driveway or a nod of the head as we all go about the work of keeping our yards green and well-groomed in the summer, never did offer us any lights this past Christmas. Maybe they no longer believe. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they think this neighborhood, with all its nutty need for achieving the proper holiday mood and thus accepted status, has finally pissed them off.
My breath blows onto the cold glass pane and suddenly an incredibly faint figure materializes. A round face with a button nose above the remains of a long ago and faraway frown.
I remember. I can’t help but remember. It’s what I do and, as April once remarked, I do it well. “If only you could forget,” she once lamented. But I can’t. And I can’t forget that.
Another year. Another Christmas. Gone. I ball up my fist and with grinding teeth angrily rub away the apparition.
Where are all those twinkling lights when you truly need them? If they were still plugged in, twinkling this very moment and thus proving the existence of our joy, deep down inside I know I could get there, to the promise of an early spring morning, or to that warm place under the carefree summertime sun, or to the path where windswept leaves show you the way to a tranquil spot of earth.
But I don’t see that unknown neighbor across the street retrieving the day’s mail alone in the dark. She happens to gaze across the street where that unhappy face continues to look out, fist still balled, and the mind still ruminating.
She looks away not understanding – not caring.
She’ll never know that I could be happy.
Once again the temperature drops and it’s no winter wonderland out there. Just dirty gray and cold. I press my cheek up against the dining room window and feel the frozen glass. The proof of January is pressed upon me along with all those bleak days that wait ahead like dog poop on a fresh snow, and they crowd out any chance at a happy mood. A sigh of resigned exhalation leaves a patch of condensation across the cold pane and so I draw a sad face with my finger. Two dot eyes, a button nose, and one big frown.
The holiday season is over. Has been for a week now. The second week of January and the new neighbors across the street still keep their holiday lights on at night. I don’t know them at all, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not even sure what they look like, so who am I to say if it’s out of a stubborn forlornness or a could-not-care-less laziness? Maybe they simply forgot. But every morning now for the last week those lights have remained on early in the cold dark dawn as I retrieve the paper like some just-tickled-to-be-here dog and I’m now beginning to wonder if we might have some kind of a record brewing here, Christmas lights shining on brightly into February, beyond Valentine’s, maybe even into March and the coming spring.
So how do I feel about that?
Oh how I do love all those twinkling multi-colored lights. Throughout Christmas they ignite my spirit and add a magic dazzle to otherwise frigid evenings. But it is not Christmas. No. Its last remains were set out by the curb last Tuesday and dumped into that loud hydraulic monster that feeds around here on a weekly basis. And their twinkling presence only serves to remind me of that fact. The Yuletide has receded, drawn back out into that dark and empty sea of time.
So no. I don’t like all those twinkling lights. Not now. Not at all.
The season is over. I fight that sinking feeling inside of me realizing that it can’t be Christmas all year long. That’s what makes it so special. I know all that. Still, the sinking feeling sinks even further.
Actually I do have a dog and his name is Otto. And he’s tickled to be here, especially when I tickle him, but he’s not much of a paper retriever. And that’s a good thing because, like a fine wine and a good book, I prefer my paper dry and legible.
“Here Otto” I call out, and his old watery eyes look up at me and then here he comes, old tail wagging and long tongue dangling, and it is at times like these that I remain pleased that I am the master and he the obedient beast.
“Good boy Otto” I go on, scratching and rubbing him, pleasing him in the most primal of ways, and it brings me a pinch of joy to make my beastly friend feel good.
I get up and fill my coffee cup again. Thank God for the sanctity, salvation and sanity found deep inside the Brazilian-bred coffee bean.
Otto wanders off into the den and I sit down to peruse the paper while the television offers its daily Pavlovian welcome to the commencement of yet a new day. I should be happy. Another day of life, of freedom and opportunity, not just one day closer to death. The familiar voices drone along and I think about my day, the priorities that must be met, the duties that might fetch some attention, the rest that will no doubt get swept yet again under the carpet. “The Midwest will be blanketed with a good half foot of snow later today as a mass of arctic air makes it’s way south…” and I turn to the business section with a sigh. “And now we turn our attention to a story coming out of South America.” I scan the front page and note nothing of real interest so I’m on to the inside pages checking some stock quotes. “It has been reported that there is a coming shortage of coffee beans from Brazil due to inclement weather combined with some new and strange disease strain making it’s way through…” and now I look up at the television. “… and some experts have even warned that, the way things are going, in a mere ten years there may no longer be any coffee beans left.”
I choke on my last sip and turn off the tube with a slightly shaky hand.
At the office I settle down with another cup of coffee and scan the appointment book. I have a 10 am “Get Acquainted” meeting with a retired gentleman and his wife. Lunch with Ted at the Café Escondido at half past noon and then a 3 pm quarterly review with Harold Jones. Damn. Harold Jones is paying for solid financial planning advice (and getting it I might add) but what he seems to think he is owed is a series of investing miracles. He expects double digit returns regardless of the fact that the S&P 500 was down 2.8% last quarter and our balanced portfolio was up 5.3% during that same period. These are the types of clients that you’d be just as pleased to see go elsewhere and take their bad and somewhat ignorant karma with them.
“Good morning, Jake,” Bertha says as she enters my office handing me some files. Bertha is the office manager and has been around here forever, long before Lighthouse Planners took me on five years back, and she provides a warm and supportive presence that is always comforting, especially back when I was new and more than a little unsure of myself.
“Good morning Bertha, how was the week-end?” Bertha, home of the ever-present ruby-lipped smile, reddish-to-gray hair stacked high into a tight bun that loosens as the day drags on, says, “well, honestly, I’ve had better. Mom was an absolute spoiled sport at Bingo Friday night and the Cowboys got stomped yesterday.”
Bertha takes her eighty-five year old mother to Bingo every Friday night and they’re quite the sight, her mother failing in almost all physical and mental capacities except her desire to win, and big buxom Bertha rolling her into the bingo parlor in the wheel chair complete with Dallas Cowboy car flag somehow waving from the back and with a well-worn pioneer blanket folded across her lap.
“Sorry to hear that but I guess the positive side is that she’s still – well, what’s the word, feisty?”
“Oh yes, feisty, and then some. Why she still wants to win so bad is beyond me. You’d think she’d be happy just to get out a little but no – and she fell asleep late in the afternoon yesterday and I still haven’t told her what happened to the Cowboys.”
What happened to the Cowboys was a second-half collapse on the frozen rink of Green Bay, Wisconsin. The Packers rolled it up as the temperature plummeted and the Cowboy players sat stunned along the bench, heads bowed while puffs of whipped ice smoke poured from their helmets.
“Ah, she’ll see it on TV or read about it in the paper. You’re off the hook.”
“Let’s hope so,” Bertha says as she heads towards the door.
“By the way, did you hear about the coffee bean shortage? Price could shoot up and we might even run completely out some day.”
“You know me Jake – I’m just a decaffeinated tea drinker. As for you, well, you’re the coffee-swigging financial expert, you’d better start looking into the buying of coffee future contracts.”
I laugh and say, “yeah, I guess you’re right,” already acknowledging internally the flaw in her suggestion. Because you can’t catch that “caffeine buzz” from drinking cash profits although they might make the prospect of a coffee-less day a bit more tolerable.
“I wouldn’t be too concerned about those coffee beans old boy,” says Bob as he struts into my office. “They’ve been saying for years that we’re going to run out of chocolate, out of the cocoa bean I guess, and from the looks of it we’ve got more chocolate than ever. Now pussy, if we ever run out of that, then we’re in big trouble.” Pussy is Bob’s favorite word, used more than occasionally in situations such as these, but also as a term to describe those who oppose, impede, insult or otherwise get on the wrong side of Bob in any tangible or intangible manner.
Damn. Bertha just left my office moments ago and Bob, who was married when I first arrived at Lighthouse but has since shed that skin, and rumor has it that it was indeed he who got skinned in the end, has a booming voice that he never sees any reason to tone down. I cringe a little but smile a little too because Bertha can’t hear my smile.
I lean towards him and whisper, “well, how you gonna get that if there’s no chocolate to offer her in the evening? And what of the morning after, when the awful truth hits you, with no coffee to zap you back to your senses?”
“But Jake, you know I’m a flirt, squirt and then desert kinda guy – chocolate and coffee never have the chance to enter into the equation. Besides, what of the pistachio nut, now that’s something worth worrying about.”
“How about the wine grape?”
“The celery stalk?”
“Water?”
“What about air?” Bob deadpans leaning in. “Here we are, running all these projections for these suckers, ten years, twenty, thirty, and you and I both know they’re never gonna make it, and neither will we, not with all this shit going on in the world. I say spend it – blow it all – NOW!”
Bob is the kind of friend that’s okay to have around the office, he has a way in helping those long tedious days seem a little shorter, so usually I tactfully play along, but outside these boundaries, be it a drink on the way home or a ballgame on the weekends, well, I just don’t find myself that comfortable around him. I’ve made that mistake more than a time or two.
“Speaking of those suckers, have you had the chance to read this new teleputer report? Some interesting stuff in there.” One thing the world is not running out of evidently is teleputers. I hand Bob the report.
“No – haven’t had the pleasure.” Been too busy all week-end chasing down that aforementioned diminishing commodity no doubt. He looks up from the report and shakes the paper sheets.
“Paper – and trees. What about trees? We’ll need all the shade we can get in the coming global warming fucked-up future.”
Bob turns and takes the report along with his unapologetic booming voice with him.
Harold Jones arrives at 2:58 pm. He’s not one to be too early lest he appear anxious but he’d never dream of ever being late and you had not better be either. I hear his banter out in the reception area, the low confident drawl that already seems to ooze a strange propensity towards sweet savored disappointment, almost as if he’d be disappointed if he was not allowed the opportunity to be in fact truly disappointed, and Bertha’s spirited yet somewhat restrained response, and soon enough the phone buzzes.
“Send him in,” I gasp, and I snap my fingers attempting to assume the role. Jones saunters in with a tight-lipped gaze and I get up and offer him a very firm hand shake and a pickled smile. After a brief uncomfortable exchange of pleasantries we’re down to the brass tacks.
Ouch. I must have sat on them.
Sixteen minutes later he’s up, out my door, and asking Bertha for his pertinent files, documents, tax returns – you name it. All of it. The message is quite clear to Bertha, quite clear in fact to all within the office confines, but I don’t mind it one bit. Let him go I say. Let him find someone else to pester, belittle with his corner-mouthed quips, to slowly degrade, all done mind you with that smirk and that slow shake of the head and those squinty eyes that reflect his barely contained outrage. “I am disappointed,” he had concluded. Disappointed? If he wants real disappointment I say let his sorry ass go right out that door and he can belly up to some fly-by-night schemer dreamer who has designs on liquidating our tidy asset allocations and tossing it all into a tiny overseas start-up selling banana burgers to Siberian goat ropers. And make that a full position margined to the hilt!
Driving home in the late afternoon and a fine sleet is coming down. I have the defrost on with the wipers going back and forth. I’m thinking about Harold Jones of course and about the methods I’d been taught to deal with his sort, and I had tried, I truly had, but sometimes you must face the bitter facts and move on. I don’t like confrontation, I painstakingly and perhaps to a fault try to avoid it, but there had been little choice.
Now look at that – it’s that guy. The one who wanders around town, strolling down busy boulevards talking to himself, stopping in at various public places where everyone acts like it’s no big deal, but it is, and everyone knows it is, but you let it go, because you really don’t want to unsettle him. It’s the local homeless guy. I’ve seen him for years now, walking in the dead heat of summer with a bandana tied around his head, ratty shorts, t-shirt and old sneakers, going somewhere, who knows exactly where, but somewhere. In the spring, in the autumn, and now in the cold gray at the end of a January day, sleet sticking in his red wool beanie and frazzled blonde beard, shoulders hunched around a green army jacket, hands tucked away into the depths of his jean pockets. You never know when or where the homeless guy is going to pop up but you know he will.
And I think to myself, Harold Jones doesn’t appreciate his rate of return but all this guy would like to do is return – to somewhere warm and safe.
To home.
It’s sad to wake up on February 14th and feel alone. Last Valentine’s Day had been quite different, but how was I to know then that I was in fact near the end of the relationship.
I had met April the previous October as the soft autumn breeze coaxed the turning leaves to finally cut loose, one by one see-sawing their way to the cooling ground in a brief final dance. I recall the fresh chill in the air that late morning as I proceeded to the local financial planning meeting held the first Thursday of each month at the public library. April was new to the chapter, a young planner recently hired by a large planning conglomerate, and she appeared out of nowhere somewhat shy yet obviously bright. And very cute. Her brown eyes lit up when I asked her after the meeting if she’d like a cup of punch and a cookie, for she had been standing off alone and away from her mingling friends with that “I’m lost and growing more uncomfortable by the second” look, so I had rescued her, and I soon admired the ring of red painting her upper lip and the corners of her mouth as she sipped and smiled while I talked about my perspective on the proper timing of IRA withdrawals.
Hell yes I gave it my best, but even so, the topic naturally ran out of steam and I began to stammer on about some other less interesting issue and then she came to my rescue saying, “you know, I’d love to talk to you more about IRAs. And 401-Ks. And Monte Carlo Stimulations.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was actually called Monte Carlo Simulation but surely I must have at the very least grinned. “Why of course – I’d like that very much. Why don’t you give me your business card and I’ll give you a call.” She gave me a big fresh cherry smile and scribbled her home number on the back.
I was ecstatic leaving that October meeting and as I strolled to my car with her card still in my hand I felt the sun streaming its life-affirming warmth and golden glow through the lovely tree branches. The chill had given way to a splendid autumn afternoon and I felt that golden glow inside.
But the chill is here now.
You know, I could stand a little Monte Carlo Stimulation today.
I could have stood some yesterday.
I have it on good authority that in all likelihood I could probably stand a little Monte Carlo Stimulation tomorrow.
There will be no April this Valentine’s Day. No nobody. Nada. But as I bend over to pick up the morning paper I notice that the neighbor’s Christmas lights are no longer shining. Now how about that? A small triumph to start the day. Christmas is officially over I guess. Drum roll please – let the bells of springtime ring and the coming winds blow!
I wonder what April will be doing today? Will she even think about me? Well of course she will, one can’t help but remember what one did just last year, that being just a few months back, a bushel of weeks ago, really only mere days. So even if she’s with a new boyfriend today she will at some point think of me at least in a small fleeting and vaguely fond manner and no doubt wonder how the ruminator is faring this day?
Well, the ruminator is drinking his coffee this day, coffee tenderly brewed from his growing cache of Starbucks bags and Colombian whole beans stored in a dark and bone dry spot in his cupboard. The ruminator doesn’t go to the store these days without picking up an extra four or five packages of fresh java for the coming bleak days and a sense of rich satisfaction percolates inside him whenever he thinks of the cupboard. We’re talking heaps of the Breakfast Blend and Dark Vienna Roast and a slew of other exotic blends but no decaf. Screw the decaf. What’s the point? And the ruminator is feeding Otto, shaving, showering, driving to work on a bright February morn, surprisingly happy, and there he is, the homeless guy, sitting on a bench huddled over a steaming white Styrofoam cup of coffee.
I, the ruminator, salute the resourcefulness and guile of the local homeless guy by giving my horn a sharp jolly toot as I drive past. And I’m not exactly certain but it does appear I may have startled him and he’s spilled a little of that hot coffee upon himself. Oh – don’t look now but in my side view mirror I seem to see the arm shooting upwards and he’s too far back now for me to positively identify the extension of one coffee-burned middle finger.
I step on the gas a little and look straight ahead and lose myself in the spreading haze of frozen exhaust.
The early spring winds blow and I find myself carried along with them. It’s easier most times to just go with the flow, floating downstream in a pleasant milieu of routine and a few small harmless adventures. Very few in fact, and none truly notable, so truth be told the days just float by as the lawns green and the redbuds bloom.
Soon enough I find myself at Easter dinner with the folks, the siblings, their children, a big fat honey-baked ham, rain pouring down and a bunch of colored eggs strewn about the house, hidden among the plastic fruit, stuck under pillows, wobbling upon door frames, mounted atop brass candle holders. As the unmarried uncle that all the children without question adore I am designated as the primary egg hider and damn if I don’t enjoy it. But as the kids have grown older it appears that I may be running out of those ingenious spots to cast my lot and the fun is wearing thin, especially when I see them go straight to the special locale that had kept them at bay for at least an hour last year.
“So Jake, what have you been up to lately?” my sister-in-law Amy asks over a glass of pinot grigio at the kitchen table. She wants to make small talk, she wants to be my buddy, she wants me happy, but I am more into hiding eggs and staying away from all this small talk.
“Work” is what I say, with a sigh and a raise of the brow. “Busy busy busy.” I realize at once that I’m coming across as a grumpy ass, unappreciative of her effort, so I smile and ask her what she’s been up to.
“Have you heard from April?” a voice sings from across the kitchen, and it’s mother, always the positive one, positive that I need a wife and a family. She approaches in a slow curtsy, hands clasped loosely as if just thinking about praying, and I suddenly look away at one of the few eggs that the kids have still not found. Tucked gently inside an oven mitt hanging stiffly from the oven door, the pink shell barely visible to the eye if seen from the proper angle (that is the one rule, that all eggs must be at least partially visible from some point in the room) and I get up saying, “Nope – haven’t heard from April mom,” and then I go into the living room and announce to the kids, “hey, there’s still one egg hiding out in the kitchen,” and the kids all skedaddle past me while my dad awakens from his wine-induced Easter nap with a crunch and an expletive. An egg had been placed between his legs by one of the ornery grandkids. For a moment he is rightfully angered, but thinking better of it, at his age he should be thankful that it was just an egg that cracked down there.
The rain slackens off a bit and a shard of sunshine stabs through. Dad stands up and wipes the egg shell from his lap with a sleepy smile.
He has risen.
Now in my early thirties I see it all very clearly. Of course I do. The years are all running together and the four seasons are being dragged along with them like battered cans on a string rattling behind a newlywed’s clunker. Just Married. Forever Harried. I have come to appreciate those seasons, to respect them, but I always seem to be longing for the one opposite the season I actually find myself currently ruminating within. And here I sit, still wandering through the springtime of my own life, but it’s always raining. I tell myself as I wipe the fog from my glasses that if only it would just stop pouring for a second then that’s when it would happen. I would get there. I would be happy.
On the Saturday before the 4th of July I gather with Bob and Bertha, her mother, and all the rest of the gang at the annual Lighthouse Financial Planners company picnic. The volleyball net is getting plenty of action and someone set up a nice croquet course where I have already taken a good beating (and I’m still steamed about Jack Benson knocking my ball way off into the pond where I was forced to take my shoes and socks off and wade through the muck using the mallet as both a crutch and divining rod, each careful step bringing more chuckles from Jack and his buds until I almost slipped when I stepped on the damn slippery thing) and now I am sitting down to a hearty meal of fried chicken, potato salad, cole slaw and fruit salad all washed down with an ice cold beer. But as I sit down at the picnic table I detect the odor, as do all of my fellow picnickers, and even Bertha’s mother shrivels up her wrinkled nose. The scum of the pond has literally stained me. So I pick up my paper plate and excuse myself to an isolated stump near the volleyball net.
“8 Serving 6” cries out a young man that I’ve never seen before, probably some co-worker’s son or brother, and he steps into a hard overhead serve that flies over the net with a bang and a young paraplanner near the back line gives it a quick look and then lets it go.
“What kind of effort was that?” Bob cries with hands on hips, face twisted into a sweaty scowl. “Listen Judy, if that ball is anywhere close, then go for it!” Bob turns back around to face the server and assumes the athletic position, knees bent and hands aloft, as the ball gets rolled back under the net and I scoop up another helping of potato salad, not the mustard kind but the mayonnaise and hard-boiled egg and pickled variety, damn delicious, and the server grabs the ball and gives it a bounce or two.
“9 Serving 6” he grunts and winds up into another killer blast that requires a dazzling leap into the air and the ball comes whistling over the net in a kamikaze loop. A determined Judy steps right into its path, a path that would have surely taken the ball beyond the back boundary, and the sound of ball on flesh is heard all around the park. The ducks on the pond give a terse quack and start swimming away as fast as their little legs will take them.
Judy is on her back now, with hands to face covering the tears and muffling the cries, and she rolls over to her side while the women all gather around her and offer some kind of comfort.
“Man oh man – I’m sorry,” says the young man, his eyes alive with excitement as he approaches the injured girl, “I sure didn’t mean to do that.”
He looks into the faces of his opponents for their confirmation of his innocence and finally Joel Singer says, “forget it, no one blames you for that – still, maybe you ought to tone it down a bit, okay? We’re all just here to have a little fun”
The young man bends down into the circle of compassion tending to Judy, and when he sees the blood trickling between her fingers and hears the muted sobs he cringes and quickly withdrawals.
“Yeah,” Bob says as he looks down into the crowd around Judy, “well, it was a foot fault anyway. Our point.”
The young man looks at Bob, but Bob is still looking away, that feigned disinterested look I recognize, and the young man begins to say something as his lips slightly part but then suddenly thinks better of it.
Bertha comes over with a roll of paper towels and kneels to the ground asking a few of the others to kindly lift the poor girl’s head slightly and then she folds a paper towel into a tiny soft square and gently folds it inside the bloody nostril. “It’s okay baby, you’ll be alright, no harm, you rest for a second and give the nose a chance to stop the bleeding, and then we’ll walk you over to a lounger and you can rest,” and I see Judy take her hand and give it a squeeze.
A few minutes later I toss my dirty paper plate into the trash can and Bob barks out, “Jake, get over here, we need another player,” and the next thing I know I find myself in poor Judy’s spot, the young man crying out “10 Serving 6.”
“Whoa, hold on there a minute hoss. We had us a foot fault that last point,” Bob says as he reaches up and looks through the net, his nose poking through.
The kid bounces the ball a few times and casts a quizzical glance at Robbie Sales, raising his eyebrows and rolling his eyes ever so slightly, and Bob sees this.
“What? You don’t believe me? I clearly called it.”
“Uh, okay, whatever, just make sure you don’t touch the net next time pops.”
Bob recedes back into his position but I can see that he is obviously mega-pissed.
“We got 9 serving 6, right pops?” and the young man winds up into a monstrous serve that was either a horrible mis-hit or, more likely, a glorious dead-ringer that never even contemplated clearing the net but instead curved in a nasty spinning arc right under it and into the unsuspecting groin of Mr. Robert Sturdevant, who had an instant earlier assumed correctly that the serve was indeed coming right at him but just skimming over that net, certainly not just under, and having anticipated such, had committed himself to an all-out killer spike-jump with legs splayed wide open, an absolute full-frontal exposure, in anticipation of the conquering moment that sadly never came.
By the time Bob regains his wits the young man is long gone, he’s taken off for the trees outlining the northern edge of the park in a hasty jog, and it is then that I realize that he is no one’s brother or son, just some guy out looking for some free food and a little fun, and here he had found both. Two men help Bob to his feet in all his public misery and with arms around their shoulders they lead him back to the picnic benches where they sit him down with a hard thud.
“Oh damn,” Bob winces, and he leans back and starts to pout.
Judy sits behind him with torn paper towel stuck inside her nose and a wry smile spreading across her face. She looks up at me and winks and nods with amusement. She’s feeling a whole lot better now.
“Damn damn ohhhh damn,” Bob repeats and adds with anger, “if I ever get my hands on that punk. Oh damn. Hurts so damn bad!”
I look at Bob and I see one solitary tear streaking his red cheek. His balls ache, no doubt about that, but it’s his pride that really got whacked good. Here comes Bertha wheeling her mother back to the van, it’s been quite a full day already, and as they pass Bob I see the little old lady look up slowly raising her hand and Bertha stops. As a sniveling Bob looks up she opens her mouth and finally speaks in a voice far more lively and bold than I would‘ve ever fathomed. “What are you Bob – some kind of pussy?”
In the park all is silent except for the caw of a faraway crow but somewhere in our holy world a gong has been firmly struck, unheard by all of us but without question felt below the belt by Bob. He looks up in shock for a moment, lips slightly parted and trembling, and Bertha quickly wheels away her mother before any further inquisition could be established. Suddenly Bob’s head drops to his lap, hands spread wide across his swelling sockets, and the sobs come. One by one they come and one by one our fellow Lighthouse planners slip away, eyebrows raised and a tooth-clenched giggle stifled, until only I remain. The sobbing has stopped now, the shoulders have settled into a permanent slouch, just a sniffle here and there, and I understand that right about now he’s wondering how he will ever live this one down, just who was here to actually witness it anyway, and what to say to whoever remains when he finally comes up for air.
I had thought about offering him a word of encouragement and then a quick pat on the back, but instead I stand up and oh so quietly tiptoe away. Maybe he looks up and sees the back of me sneaking off. Maybe he doesn’t.
It’s dusk as I head home and off in the distance I hear the pop pop pop of firecrackers as someone gets a head start on the 4th. Up ahead I spot the silhouette of person walking way too close to the road, too far off to see if he or she is approaching or receding, and a car ahead of me passes with lights on and I see the pink of a face, not the dark tuft of the back of a head, and it’s a man, drawing nearer, and he’s way too close to the road, no margin for even the slightest of error, and the next car swerves into the other lane to miss him and I’m next, the figure approaching, gaining, and then I see him, hiking boots laced high, a red bandana swiped across his noggin, seemingly just a dirty loincloth wrapped about his ass. And I don’t move an inch, in fact I even hug the right side a little, and I grit my teeth as I pass.
He never looks away. Acts as if he never even sees me – just marches onward toward something and I think of all that leftover food we just threw away back at the picnic.
Bertha’s mom dies in late October. On a blustery Wednesday afternoon just days before Halloween a small funeral is held at the First Methodist Church. I sit near the back with a few fellow workers, smelling the waxed pine of the pew and relaxing as I gaze into the dazzle of lights and flowers. Towards the end of the service, when the organist begins to play Ode to Joy, I suddenly have a vision. I remember where I hid that last Easter egg. Up high on top of the wood cupboard, a precarious perch indeed, and that colored egg must have rolled away and out of sight with the slightest tilt of the earth on its axis. Or with the slam of the cupboard door. Well, that explains the smell the parents complained about all summer long. It wasn’t a dead mouse in the attic after all. Just a poor egg, painted, slightly cracked and forgotten.
Bob did not attend the service.
April in October. Not such a bad thing, maybe even a good thing, if one has the sense to just sit back, relax, and appreciate it. But the ruminator never does. Two Octobers ago she had appeared, a sweet and pretty and innocent girl, and I had run her off with all my somber ruminations. Her words, not mine. I had thought of them as reflective and insightful, as necessary, unavoidable – certainly not somber.
“I don’t want to die in the spring,” I had whispered to her in the freezing calm of winter. And then in the spring I had casually mentioned that “it sure would be a bummer to buy the farm in the fall – don’t you think?”
Well, she did think, and what she thought she must not have liked, and so soon enough a distance emerged between us, one promulgated primarily by April, and then by May she was gone.
I didn’t really lament it at first, but as is my nature, before long I so badly wanted again what I no longer had.
Thanksgiving is around the corner and I am seriously contemplating the offer from Bob, one that involves deli-bought turkey sandwiches, football watching and large consumptions of imported beer, but in the end I turn him down. I almost jokingly suggest to him that Bertha might be lonely this holiday season, maybe the two of them could get together in some hospitable manner, watch the Cowboy game, reminisce, but then my better judgment seizes hold of me. There is still no kidding allowed on that subject, not even the slightest of hazy connotations, so I do my best to bury the memory.
“Sorry Bob – gotta go to the parent’s as usual.”
“Okay, sure, I understand,” he says with a mildly put-off glance, “but you oughta get outa there in the late afternoon and drop by – plenty of beer here. Plenty of chips,” he adds with that wry grin and the wink of an eye. As I move toward the office door I say, “yeah, I’ll try to get away. No promises though.”
“Yeah – no promises. Understood.”
Well, I never did get away and I receive word on Saturday afternoon that somehow Bob got tossed in jail Friday night. I receive the phone call from Frank Weathers, the Methodist minister client of ours who had bailed him out earlier that morning.
“What the fuck happened?” I ask in astonishment, immediately regretting the expletive that somehow slips out of my mouth although Reverend Weathers continues on like he hasn’t heard a thing, or considering the circumstances, doesn’t really give a damn.
“He won’t say much and I didn’t ask. But he smelled like a brewery when I got there. The damn fool had on a pair of Bermuda shorts and a Margaritaville t-shirt. And sandals. Thirty-five frickin’ degrees and here he comes waltzing out of the county jail looking like that. Into a sleet storm. The damn fool.”
I decide to lay low and just wait until Monday morning to hear the finer details from the man himself. As it turns out I have to wait a little longer.
Now all those twinkling lights have returned once more. After I get home from work I walk Otto around the block as the grey mid December day melts away into a cold yet festive dusk and we admire all the displays. Otto appears excited, stimulated by the surroundings, and I can only smile and look away when he insists on relieving himself on one of the Bacino’s toothy elves. And of course there are those who go way overboard, the mixing of grinning neon snowmen with the swaddling baby Jesus seeming at first glance a little misguided, maybe even tacky, but surely everybody’s heart is in the right place.
I walk my dog alone under a cloudy and cold sky that seems to trap all that light beneath it creating a magical dome in which we all work our way through December. I smile in its glow, I acknowledge it, and Otto looks up at me and gently barks, tail wagging and eyes seeing, and we continue on. Although it’s quite nippy I understand that there is no need to rush home because all that awaits me there is a closet-full of stacked coffee beans and an under-used laptop computer and memories of all those lost seasons. Time is marching on brother. My pace quickens as I attempt to walk along with it and the wind cuts through my unzipped jacket, its chill slapping me in the face, my footing suddenly unsure and slipping.
On a late Friday afternoon a couple of weeks after Thanksgiving a group of us from the office meet at the local trendy coffee shop to trade a few small gifts and offer one another good seasonal cheer. I really enjoy the company of my fellow workers, we generate camaraderie, a true synergy, and spending some free time with them is a joy. But there is another reason for our gathering, one that has hardly been able to await its proper turn, and that is to confirm the rumors about our poor Bob.
No – I had not heard from the man. He had not returned my few phone calls nor had he returned to the office since that fateful Thanksgiving week-end. His clutter still remains in his office although it has been tidied up a bit, the half-full coffee mug finally drained and wiped clean and set back in its rightful place for example, but otherwise all remains quite the same while the ghost of Bob eerily hovers about. But Bertha has gotten the word from Reverend Weathers who had, as it turns out, by default become the liaison between Bob and the local court system, and I knew by the look in her eyes that what the reverend had told her wasn’t good.
Bertha sips her hot tea and nervously looks about the shop. The last gift has been opened and the last thank-you given in gracious exchange (and my, the irony of all of us giving one another gift cards from this very establishment, the only differences being the dollar amount, except for Jack Benson, who received a dirty and foul-smelling croquet ball from yours truly), and now we all slow down just a bit and assume a more solemn mood as we know what must be addressed next. I sense the anxiety in Bertha and as the last of the laughter and gaiety fades away into a menagerie of throat clearings and self-conscious guffaws I perk up and offer, “now Bertha, it can’t really be all that bad, now can it?”
She tips her head ever so slightly and raises her painted-on brows as she sheepishly smiles. “Oh yes – it can. It truly can.”
“What did he do – rob a damn bank or something?” Chip Hardy asks somewhat derogatively, and he drowns his own chuckle with a sip of his vanilla latte.
“Nah, not that bad,” interjects Ralph Russo. “Look, I know the whole scoop, the entire enchilada, and if Bertha would like me to, I’d be more than willing to spill all the juicy particulars.” We all turn back to look at Bertha and she responds with relief, “oh, by all means, be my guest.”
Ralph takes a long drag on his coffee and then sets the empty mug down with a decidedly louder-than-needed thud. “Well, it seems that our vivacious co-worker drank all Thanksgiving Day, on into the night, and then well into the next day and evening, and somehow wound up late Friday night at Coco Locos where he got into a bar fight with another patron. The way I heard it, Bob was hitting on the guy’s girlfriend and before long the guy hit him with the unsweetestest of punches.”
“What the heck do you mean by that?” Chip implores, and Ralph tips back his head and grins. “The guy called him a – well, excuse my French, ladies – a pussy.”
That word. That derisive term. The spinning P-bomb that just went boom deep within Bob’s intemperant soul.
One by one our group begins to disband while the other smaller details are freely dispensed among us. Bob broke the guy’s jaw with a half-full whiskey bottle, Jamesons I’d wager. What’s more, the gal emptied an entire can of fresh mace on him in a tornado of uproar complete with arms flailing and hellish screams and then the bartender roughed him up a bit before the cops arrived. Additionally, and most regrettably, he wet his bermudas when they slapped the cuffs on him and as they led him out of the establishment day-old vomit was seen smeared across his backside.
So yes. A Merry Christmas to one and all. Fa la la and all that good shit. As for Bob, hang on brother, it’s going to get a lot worse before it starts to get better. And last but not in the slightest least, as one unforgettable character once bitterly proclaimed to the innocent passing fool: and a Happy New Year to you – in jail!
Well, now we’re down to just a handful of Lighthouse planners and the coffee’s growing cold and my jaw tight. My eye twitches just a little as I absorb this new knowledge, this sad new fate of an old friend, while the perky caffeine wanders throughout the winding conduits of my entire body. The mood has changed in here, it’s late afternoon in early December and the pale gray light grows old and tired and just dissolves into twilight with the blink of an eye.
I bid farewell to my friends and head for the exit. And as I think about stopping by the bakery check-out and picking up some holiday bread or maybe some orange-cranberry scones if they’re not that busy, I spot him. There he is. Sitting off in that small two-person booth in the shadows, all by himself of course, long red stocking cap with a fuzzy white ball bobbing at the end of it, the faded green army jacket wrapped around him and he looks warm and surprisingly well kept. But what really gets me is the shiny laptop computer sitting in front of him. He’s just typing away, in a mad flurry of gesticulation and constant tap-tap-tapping with absolutely no hesitation, he’s writing something like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do in this world, and I think, whatever its source, it must be a large and non-depleting one.
Suddenly he looks up at me with dead blue eyes and his chapped lips move but his expression remains unchanged, stoic, then slightly annoyed.
“Hey man – I found it.”
His voice is strong, low, and confident. I don’t say anything for a moment, quite frankly I’m taken aback, but then I spit out a few words.
“Uh, hey, I could give you a ride if… like, if you needed one.”
“To where?”
“Oh well, anywhere you needed to go.” Those dead blue eyes flicker to life for a moment, he squeezes them tighter with curiosity and his brow deepens with the new growth from last summer’s long miles and tan.
“Like, you know, home or something.”
Is that the beginning of a smile I see tugging from the corners of his mouth?
“Now why in the world would I want to go to a place like that?”
No smile, more of a smirk and just as suddenly those blue eyes go dead and he jumps right back into that swiftly moving river of his thought and words. Tap tap tap. I’ve been dismissed.
Forget the damn holiday bread. I scurry out into the frozen dark and escape into the smell of my car. And I’m thinking, he doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a past or a future. And he doesn’t want any of them. What he has is what he needs: now and a shiny laptop.
That he found.
I step up to the window and look out. My neighbors, who I still haven’t officially met except for the odd wave as they pull into their driveway or a nod of the head as we all go about the work of keeping our yards green and well-groomed in the summer, never did offer us any lights this past Christmas. Maybe they no longer believe. Maybe they’re lazy. Maybe they think this neighborhood, with all its nutty need for achieving the proper holiday mood and thus accepted status, has finally pissed them off.
My breath blows onto the cold glass pane and suddenly an incredibly faint figure materializes. A round face with a button nose above the remains of a long ago and faraway frown.
I remember. I can’t help but remember. It’s what I do and, as April once remarked, I do it well. “If only you could forget,” she once lamented. But I can’t. And I can’t forget that.
Another year. Another Christmas. Gone. I ball up my fist and with grinding teeth angrily rub away the apparition.
Where are all those twinkling lights when you truly need them? If they were still plugged in, twinkling this very moment and thus proving the existence of our joy, deep down inside I know I could get there, to the promise of an early spring morning, or to that warm place under the carefree summertime sun, or to the path where windswept leaves show you the way to a tranquil spot of earth.
But I don’t see that unknown neighbor across the street retrieving the day’s mail alone in the dark. She happens to gaze across the street where that unhappy face continues to look out, fist still balled, and the mind still ruminating.
She looks away not understanding – not caring.
She’ll never know that I could be happy.
