Some Great Date

The weather has turned here in Western Maine. A few weeks ago you could still find disconsolate patches of snow here and there, loitering with bad intent in northeastern shade. There were frosts last weekend, down in the twenties at night. The frosts punished people that planted pansies and passed the slackers on by. The lilacs have pushed out their wan purple bottle cleaners to scent the breeze and draw their trinities of hummingbirds, butterflies, and bumblebees. The tree swallows have moved back into the house that’s not supposed to attract them, for the third year in a row. The male sits on the roof to guard it while the female swoops and darts across the little meadow in the back, and she comes back full speed and goes right in the hole without pausing. Then her mate bombs across the meadow to get his share. It all seems so impossible but there it is, like everything under the dome of the sky if you’re paying attention.  If you do not know the sky in Maine when June enters the dooryard you can never understand the attraction of this place.

It seemed to me that nothing would survive the winter. We had so many stray cats roaming around our yard last year we made names for them. There was Newman and Catzilla Junior and The Dishrag. Our old cat Momo has wasted away to two dimensions, and we feared that he would no longer be able to hold his own in the spring. He shambled out across the snow drifts in March and ranged over Puiia mountain and Rich’s steps and Davis’s tumbledown greenhouse looking for friction but found none. He sleeps untroubled on the rocker on the porch, all night, waiting for an adversary that never comes. He is the solitary king of a dead dominion.

My neighbor, as solitary as any cat, caught cold I guess. Winter takes its vigorish here whether you can spare it or not, and it took him. Pneumonia. I liked that man a great deal. He was friendly on his own terms, something that’s common here. We would see him, rarely, as he came and went, and every once in a great while we would be passing by while he was outside, and stop to chat. He was salubrious in a way that is rare in this world today. He was in the military many years ago, directed a factory of some sort, was a policeman in a small town for a time, and did charity work when there was no other work to do. He lived all alone. He had a son who was in the military, too, in one war or another, the country doesn’t seem to keep track of such things coming or going anymore, but returned home safe. Later he stopped to help a woman who was in danger when her car was disabled on the highway, and he was struck and killed.

My neighbor never spoke of his son to me. It broke him in some fundamental way. It did not diminish his generous smile when he waved as he mowed, but it put it behind bars somehow. His son is buried in a little boneyard near here on a quiet lane where we ride our bicycles. He wanted to be buried with him, but he had to wait because the ground was still frozen.

My wife and I pedal past the iron gates of the cemetery, the granite markers unread except by the gold finches that rocket through on their constant errands, and I look over my shoulder and wonder if I too am waiting for some great date but my ground is still frozen.

Rumford Delenda Est

I did something well out of the ordinary yesterday.

Or was it Thursday? I don’t know. Or is today Thursday? I don’t know what day it is, or what week, or the month, because these concepts have no meaning to me anymore. Time passes and that’s that. I do what I do, day and night, winter and summer, Christmas or Lent — it makes no nevermind.

As I was saying, I did something out of my routine. I left my house. I got in my truck and drove perhaps a half-mile. My wife knows how I am, and has a mordant laugh at my expense: I do not know how to leave my house. What is it I need? A wallet, I guess, some keys, if I remember correctly. I’m required to wear glasses in order to drive, but I don’t even know where they are most of the time, because the law and I have different opinions.

I have different opinions than everyone about everything, it seems to me, so I keep them to myself. Other people avoid rubbing their neighbors the wrong way about this or that, and simply skip over the few topics not held in the same esteem by both parties, whistling past the graveyard of opinions that bring only discord. Me? I avoid everything.

I could be a Savonarola. Mussolini on the balcony. I’m good at it. I’d say I’m better than most, but that would be lying. I’m better than everyone at it. It’s just another topic for me to be at odds with everyone about. I have no desire to burn people at a digital stake all day. Or, more truly, I know in my heart that I have the desire to burn real people at a real stake, so I’d rather not travel down that road even one inch. It’s not simple human kindness exhibiting itself on my part. I’d have to pay attention to people I find repellent, and I haven’t got the stomach for that. I do carry matches, though. Just in case.

Back to the topic. I left the house. Found my glasses and keys, and we set out on our five-minute journey. My wife and I used to walk around the neighborhood for a fresh air and birdsong interlude, but I got tired of ill-mannered dogs and vinyl siding, and gave it up. But I know where everything is, and what it looks like around here. I live in a mill town, given to dreariness on a good day, and the last good day was thirty years ago. My wife had gone out alone to escape the house with three versions of me in it, and had seen a wonder, and wondered if I’d like to see it too.

On a street not far from here lives a man. I do not know him, but I have waved and said hello. He is salubrious in a way I admire. He has lived here forever and a day, I imagine, and watched his town disintegrate. He refuses to go along. His house is conspicuous. It is so yellow that Van Gogh would throw in the towel and go back to the store and start shopping for raw umber. He crawls up and down it, and all around it, and it is as neat as a pin. He does everything himself. He put up a big fence around his yard, an enormous undertaking, and never flagged until he was done. Every surface is clean and bright and in good repair, everywhere you can see. It is the only structure in this town I can describe in that way.

We stopped walking down his street a while back because his neighbors were disreputable. On one side was a house gone to seed for forty years or more. The denizens had approximately 150 snot-nosed urchins who played in the street, which I rather enjoyed seeing, but they kept two, hair-trigger pitbulls the size of donkeys, and you could never tell if they were tied up or not. These animals represented a desire to publicly contract ebola so you could get your own seat on the subway of life. Fine by me.

On the other side of the neat house was a two-family affair that looked in rather better shape, but that’s not to say good. There were no obvious structural issues visible to my eye at two hundred yards, which is more than I can say about my house. The house had been occupied by a series of Hatfields and McCoys, cars by the dozens, but somehow never with an even number of tires, abandoned toys everywhere, stray cats outside and stray people inside. I never saw an actual person who lived there outside, a mark of the breed. One minute the window curtain would be a confederate flag, then the rental merry-go-round would spin and a Sponge-Bob beach towel would take its place. The stray cats were the only constant.

The man in the perfect yellow house persevered. He painted his driveway and waxed his lawn and dusted his roof shingles. He polished his trees and chromed the inside of his mailbox. He was adamantine. He was, and is, a species of wonderful.

He must have gotten weary of the noise, and the trouble, and the endless low-rent hubbub. I testify to you, with God as my witness, that when the houses on both sides of him decided to spin the wheel of occupancy one more time, he bought them both, and he gave them the delenda est. Flattened them. There was a pile of lead-painted pickup sticks on one side, waiting for the next round of dumpsters, and the one on the other side was nothing but a patch of straw with the first hint of grass yet to poke through.

That man knows something. Something important. It’s not that he knows exactly what would show up in the two houses when the For Sale or For Rent signs came down. He’s not pretending to tell fortunes at the fair. What he knew, for a dead cert, was that there was no chance of any change bringing anything but: Worse.

I should get out more often.