Time

It's time to strap-on the stallion again, time to fight time, it's time for birds to soar high or fall low. There is a great disturbance in the flow, and I am called upon to be a dike to watch out for. I can do it all with one hand, like a veritable hentai professional, or I can dig in, with both hands, Death of a Naturalist style, to the muck of I and I and I. It's time to reclaim the land of dreams, Faust II style, time to offend those who should not escape whipping, to make nonsense of horsesense, toss bananas from the fly gallery. It's time to count and re-count and re-ac-count my diminishing abilities to ascend stairs or generally get up at all, time to pilfer that which is generously pilferable, to waste vocally synechdochally precious time, follow inaccuracies with more extravagant inaccuracies since though accuracy has failed me many times inaccuracy never has. Today is Wednesday the 2nd of January 2019 and it's almost nine in the morning. A busy time is ahead. Now is the time to record that which will never be completed, such as sons going mad The reasoning son.

Two weeks ago, my father-in-law (more precisely, my father-in-common-law), died in a hospital room at the Queen Elizabeth Infirmary. Mary and I had arrived there, in Halifax, the day before, to visit him. He'd broken his hip in November, I believe, and he'd had surgery for it, but he didn’t get much better; in the end, he was too heart-weak to rehabilitate. We weren't the only ones in the room. Two brothers and a sister were present too, along with the sister's husband. A couple minutes after he died, another daughter arrived with Mary's mother, who looked stunned to see the body. (She has moderate-to-severe dementia, but it looked--for a couple moments--as if she understood completely.) So there we were, not to leave for three hours. With his body lying there, the children talked about their father's body, thanking he-who-had-departed for all he had done for them. There was a Gideon's handy, so some psalms were read. (I didn't like the translation, of the 23rd especially.) It was time for a hymn, so Amazing Grace was sung, with lyrics provided by everyone's phones. More was said, then we wrapped it up, goodbye-by-goodbye, and I hugged my father-in-common-law, "Goodbye."

I called the front desk again. I said, "Where is the manager? How many times do I have to call?"

Forty-five minutes later, the manager arrived, in a managerial way, to manage. "What seems to be the problem?" he asked.

"The wooden floor is rotting through, in three places!"

"It has rained a lot recently, has it not?"

"This rot is not a new thing; the whole floor is squishy."

"Hmmm yes. It's surprising you're the first to complain."

"Meaning what?"

"Nothing, nothing. Will that be all?"

"No. The toilet. It's broken."

"Yes. That is what the bucket is for."

"I'm supposed to use a bucket?"

"Yes, that's what it's for."

"I can't use a bucket."

"Try thinking outside the box, sir."

"Well this is most.... What are you looking at?"

"Your hair, sir."

"What about it?"

"Has it always been so--how to put it--lean?"

"Lean?"

"Thin."

"No."

"Were you always as stout as you are now?"

"Certainly not; I was a long-distance runner in high school."

"I see. So you've changed. Why is that?"

"These things happen as one ages. C'mon, what's your point?"

"You should get your own hotel room in order before you criticise another's."

Stealing from the obituary Mary's brother wrote, let me tell you about his life. He was born in mid-1929 in Judique Intervale, Cape Breton--an eldest son. In 1948, he and a cousin (or friend) took a load of Christmas trees to Halifax, and the trees were either pilfered or picked up by the city; in any case (no-one ever learned the truth), he remained in Halifax, thereby (so it's believed) escaping his severe and authoritarian mother. He met his wife at a picnic in Judique ca. 1940-1942, and they were married a couple years later. He became a father, six times over, living eight people to two rooms on Summit Street. He got his electrician's training and worked at an aircraft factory and the Halifax shipyards. He retired from work in 1994 and thereafter did volunteer work for decades, as the Eucharistic Minister for the Veteran's Hospital and delivering aid on behalf of the St. Vincent de Paul Society. This summer he had a heart attack but recovered. Then he broke his hip in his house, was hospitalized, survived surgery, but that was the end of him. He caught a pneumonia on December 16th, and died two days later.

The big sky to the east lightened to show the shapes of trees surrounding the flat lake. All terrestrial creation responded, deep in their minds, and eyelids fluttered generally. The twigs and needles of fractal firs offered relief to deep and starry space, tired as it might have been of being the centre of attention for eight hours. Flowers bent over backwards in anticipation and birds only audible for fifteen minutes a day called their crazy tunes. The mountain's top was the first feature to be touched by rose-fingered dawn, and a fine mist rose on the slopes. Somewhere a deer was preparing for a hunt as somewhere some prey awaited pursuit. The waters of the lake prepared themselves to ripplingly redistribute heat down to the mucky bed in which churned the lives of a trillion organisms that were born, lived, and died, all in the space of an hour. A single day is a long time in the life of a symbiotic terrain.  Eight minutes after leaving the sun, a tussle of photons finally hit the lake's west. What did I think when I first saw the sun? Why am I asking myself this? I wasn't there. Nobody was.

In mid-April of 2013--hard to believe it was only five-and-a-half years ago--Mary and I took her parents to Siesta Key, Florida for a week. We stayed in a rented condominium at El Presidente Condos.

We all got along well together, mostly. He and I got into two good fights, though. The first one was about the air conditioning system, because he really wanted to know how it worked, for he was an electrician who knew little about air conditioning. I got--unfairly--annoyed. The argument fizzled out. I should have been kinder.

The second argument--a couple days after Dzhokhar Tsarnaev got caught, so on the 21st--he wanted to call the Tampa airport to confirm our flight next morning. I didn't want him to. We got to yelling at one another. I thought he was going to clobber me. "I may be an old man, but I'm still plenty strong!" He went into his room and slammed the door. Mary mother said, "He's never like this!"

I went into the room, and we made up. I said, "It's like you didn't trust me, that's what upset me. I'm sorry. I love you both."

He accepted my apology.

After our walk, we returned to the cabaña to find that Vic and Tru had arrived, along with their three adult children. Nik said: "We'll find room for them. I'll call for a couple cots."

As the cots were being moved in, I did a head count. There was me, Mar, Tan, Nik, Don, Ann, and now Vic and Tru and Bob and Pat and Lil, making eleven people, and two more to come, who arrived shortly after: Kat and Bea, with a stranger named Dan.

Someone said--it was about one in the afternoon by then--we should all go out for dinner together. Someone else suggested the big bland chain restaurant out near the highway. I wasn't in the mood for that--I'd seen and would see enough of everyone--so I invented a dinner reservation for just my beloved and me at a restaurant we'd happened to pass earlier.

Everyone decided to take naps. About an hour later I decided it was time for us to get out. I changed my clothes amongst all the sleepers. No-one was watching as I took off my pants and underwear. Then, as an afterthought, I took of my shirt. Naked.

He built at least one house from the ground up in the Halifax area, and he moved his mother's Cape Breton house down the highway and onto his plot of land a couple miles away. I've been shown photographs of that move, in that house. We stayed there regular for about six years in a row, and after that we visited often. I can see his house so easily. The red carpet that leads upstairs isn't set right. You open the front door, and you see the dirt ditch around the foundation that never got filled in, and you can't go out the front door. There's four bedrooms upstairs along with a bathroom with a crooked bathtub in it. He moved this house a couple miles. (Later, he said he regretted moving it in the first place, so costly!) The basement is filled with greasy car parts. There's a Volkswagen van rusting in the weeds outside. An ancient edition of The Joy of Cooking's in the kitchen cupboard. Time is eating away at that house. It might be the local kids' sex house for all I know. Time eats away at that house, and I may never see it again.

I used to know a man who was raised in Northern Ontario. In the 1960s, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he wrote an autobiographical radio play for a contest down south, and he won. They brought him down, and made the radio play. He thought he was so creative. However, he wasn't creative enough, and autobiography can only take you so far since it is the shallowest well of all. He struggled through, and charmed the daughter of a modest establishment family into marrying him. He drank a lot, they drank a lot, the tried collaborating on projects, she did most of the work, and he always found himself sleeping till noon. He kept slipping and slipping through the years, amusing himself with non-productive side-projects such as getting involved in high school theatre. His alcohol habit was costly, so he stole money from his wife. She found out, and they divorced. He was living in a rooming house in some part of town, but last I heard he'd been evicted. I suppose he's seventy-five now, living in homeless shelters, feeding his habits who-knows-how, he affected many teenagers for better or worse including myself, and this is a real biography.

My father-in-common-law had a character, and here I will relate what his children said his character was. I find nothing to disagree with. The psychological portrait has to begin with his relationship with his mother. Apparently his mother was a smart woman, with a university degree, and her son--her first born--couldn't live up to her expectations. (This is why he fled to Halifax as soon as was feasible.) He was quite insecure about his intellect. Another tale taken to be revealing is of him and his brother baling hay, with my father-in-common-law shouting to his brother: "Do you think I'm stupid? Is that what you think, that I'm stupid?" I bear witness that I heard him say words to that effect in other situations at least twice. He always felt inferior, including to his children (who were all encouraged to go to university, whom he helped them do just that). But he was physically strong. Story is, one of his shipyard co-workers told one of the kids: "Bernie's the strongest man I ever met." Indeed, when he was past eighty he carried a couch into a house in West Mabou. He could have clobbered me in Florida, yes.

You tilt the ultra-modern clock off the faux-mid-century bedside table to read the time. It's 2:46. The windstorm is continuing its howl down the edges and eddies of your Holiday Inn Express located near an airport in a hinterland eight miles from any city. You've been stranded. You liked the sound of a free night at a hotel, so you took the offer.

The regret, at 2:48, gets you out of bed and dressed. A cigarette will clear your troubles away. The door clicks quiet in the anechoic hallway as you silently walk the vacuum to the elevator and go to L. The desk clerk she looks like a million invested bucks in hospitality studies, smiles at you as you murmur an apology for your unnatural vices. No apology is necessary, sir, for every happy customer is an influencer, word gets around.

Outside you crouch concrete at an inner angle to light up. There's a parking lot and a copse in sight and the dark sky. The hotel is full of nameless spirits, transients with nothing to do, the Life Inn Express. The only pleasure you have is the anticipation of returning to the clean sheets that are hopefully still warm.

Mary's brother insisted to the rest of us that we all had to have our hands on the pall when we draped it over your casket, which was when I partially understood the meaning of the term pallbearer. That was when we were down at the curb in the rain. We six grabbed the handles of your coffin and struggled to get it up the fifteen wide steps of St. Theresa's. We set you down on the roller thing at the back of the church and we two-by-two followed you in to the front. We sat down, then your daughter read something from Isaiah and your nephew read something Pauline. There was communion, then the Priest sprinkled holy water on your casket and waved a censer of incense around you. You were blessed for all time. For all time, us pallbearers followed your coffin to the back of the church. We picked it up, and by God 'twas a lot heavier. I had to use both hands (at times) to get it down those steps to the hearse. By God, heavy. We rolled you into the hearse, and we'll be burying you in CB soon. Once the ground thaws.

(Three years ago, our elderly cat Mexico went missing one morning. I searched all around the neighborhood but she was nowhere to be found. In the evening we searched. We asked our neighbours. No-one had seen her. Overnight I thought that maybe she'd been picked up by the cat-catchers, who probably had a website. I found Mexico's picture there, and retrieved her. The cat-catcher said to me: "You know, she's almost blind." Then, a couple days later, she went completely blind. We had to show mercy, for we knew she'd fall down the stairs sooner or later. We took her to the vet and went through the process of putting Mexico to sleep. We cried our eyes out. We'd never noticed how small she was! Next day, crying all the time, I gathered up all her things and put them in storage. I was still upset for a couple days, because I'd loved that crazy thing. She'd been one mad kitten who just could never keep still....

(About six months later, I told my father-in-common-law the whole sorry tale from beginning to end. He looked at me with a faux-serious face and said: "You cried ... about ... a cat.")