Pansies

It's wonderful having a balcony, but up here on the fourth floor, the wind blows almost incessantly, and the sunlight is harsh. But I've gotten better at finding hardy plants, and last summer I finally had a nice, verdant little garden where I could sit surrounded by zinnias and daisies and succulents.

But summer seems like a long time ago, and once the mums bloomed then browned, I snipped and deadheaded everything and once the rains hit I pretty much stopped going out there.

And now this week they've been talking snow, so one afternoon I pull in my babies (aside from the pansies in the flower box, which are just going to have to brave the storm) and crowd them onto a couple of little stools.

The next day, a guy empties a bag of charcoal briquettes in an alcove of the museum and sets it ablaze. When the fire department comes to extinguish it, they tell us this has been happening all over the city but that they've been mostly ignoring it unless there's a risk of property damage. Sure enough, as I leave work, I see people huddled around fires in many of the doorways.

That night it does indeed snow, and when I leave for work the next morning, the sidewalks are covered with a slick dusting. The streets are milky with ice, and I roll along extremely slowly. The only trouble I have is on the bridge, which is covered in a few inches of snow. I have to essentially walk my scooter across while still resting my knee on it. It takes a long time and the handlebars keep getting jerked from side to side. I'm sore by the time I get to work but I'm glad it isn't worse.

By the end of the day the sidewalks are mostly just wet. Salt crunches beneath my wheels. The snow on the bridge is still thick and bumpy with footprints. When I'm halfway across, a dented hatchback pulls up and the driver leans out and asks if I need a ride. I thank him and tell him no thanks, I'm almost home. He smiles and waves as he drives off.

That night the news shows clips of tractor trailers overturning and cars skidding into the river. Trees toppling, roofs collapsing under the weight of the snow. I pour myself a snifter of whiskey and cast a paternal gaze upon my little plants, huddled together and safe from the cold. Out the window, the hills are frosted, Christmas lights twinkling here and there. It's only been winter for a week. It seems like an endless road to spring.

 

for Nader

49

For once, I head to the doctor's with a minimum of dread. I've been walking again for less than four days and so far my foot feels fine and my left leg muscles grow stronger every day.

When he comes into the room and looks at my unwrapped foot, he says, "Oh my God, what did you do?" I'm completely baffled, and tell him I didn't do anything, that I've just been using the walking shoe like he says. "It's all wet. You're not supposed to get it wet. This is a mess." It has been raining pretty much nonstop, so I guess some water got through the bandages. "Well the shoe's not waterproof," I say. "Should I be wrapping it in plastic or something?" He shakes his head and starts peeling away dead skin.

"This was supposed to be better by now," he says. He tells me that the part where he did the surgery looks fine, but the sore I got from wearing that massive boot has apparently gotten much worse in the few days since I was last here. "I'm putting you on antibiotics again. Make sure you wear that boot and get back on the scooter."

"But the boot caused the sore," I remind him. He says he'll see me in two weeks.

As I sit on the streetcar, I stare out the window and fantasize about ignoring the doctor's orders. Maybe if I just wrap my foot up carefully and take things easy, maybe that'll be enough to make it heal. Of course, if it doesn't, it'll just prolong the inevitable. But after five months of being incapacitated, the idea of even another day without being able to walk makes me want to die. I mean, really die. I've been struggling so long and at this point I'm having trouble finding compelling reasons to keep living. My life has been a series of bad decisions, bad luck and bad timing, and I don't see that getting any better. I don't feel strong enough to keep doing this. What do I have to look forward to? An increasingly lonely existence of seeing my loved ones die as my body deteriorates? What is the fucking point of that?

 

I pick up my antibiotics and get my scooter back out of the closer where I've stashed it in a burst of what now seems like pathetic optimism. I've learned my lesson. Every time things seem to be working out, they will inevitably get even worse, without even a full week to enjoy the respite. Of course you never know what amazing thing could happen to you tomorrow, and you have to be grateful for the gift of life, and the world is a magical place that is teeming with wonders. I'm turning 49 today. I will never hope for anything ever again.

Santa

 I wake up hours early and can't fall back asleep, so I pour a cup of yesterday's coffee and lie on the couch and wait. The cat, who rarely makes any noise, is meowing insistently, and I can't figure out what he wants. My phone informs me that I have five voicemails. They're all from the same prison scam. . At least a dozen times a day a recorded voice tries to convince me to accept collect charges from this prisoner. I blocked the number but apparently that doesn't prevent them from leaving messages.

I have an appointment with my foot doctor in a couple hours. Dread and hope have congealed into a roiling slurry in my chest. I try not to think about wanting to be dead and as a result the only thing I can think about is wanting to be dead.

By the time I roll into the doctor's office I'm on the verge of tears. The assistant unwraps the bandages, which are speckled with blood; a new wound has opened up in the side of the foot. The doctor doesn't seem concerned by it; he says it looks like the boot is just rubbing, despite my not walking on it. When I tell him how worried I am he reassures me, says it's nothing. He re-wraps my foot and gives me a smaller, lighter shoe to wear and tells me I can walk now, that I don't have to use the scooter any longer.

I drop my scooter and old heavy boot back at home and spend the day walking around town. At first I use my cane, but it's more of a hindrance than anything. I go to a few  places I haven't been able to get to; junk shops, record stores. Everyone around me is a faceless blur, their voices jumbling together incoherently. The world outside the bus windows passes in a dull wash of gray.

I decide to head down to the Goose to celebrate. It's a sloppy, chilly night, but I get there just as one of the indoor booths opens up. I order a Reuben and a few drinks and doodle in my sketchbook. I watch the other patrons and listen for some good tidbits of conversation, but they all sound dull. One young woman is wearing a revealing top. I catch myself staring and I blush and focus on my book. 

As I'm leaving, a group of men and women dressed as Santa arrive, laughing and screaming. All of them are wearing beards, even the women. I walk home- and just those three words are kind of a miracle, the fact that I am actually able to put one foot in front of the other; slowly and awkwardly, true, and not without pain, but still... I've waited so long for this moment, for some sign that things are getting better, that this period of hardship is finally coming to a close. It's genuinely good news, and I should be jubilant, but instead I feel nothing. The dread has been drained from my chest but so has the hope, and as a result I'm left feeling completely empty.

Moi-moi

"One of these days I might just drive off a cliff and into the ocean," she had once written to me. So when she suddenly stopped returning my calls and emails, I assumed the worst. I'd been calling pretty regularly; I was worried about her. Both her parents had died in the past few years, and one of her granddaughters had toddled into the sea and drowned. Then that fall, her youngest son had been murdered by an off-duty federal agent in a McDonald's on the Big Island. She was, not surprisingly, falling apart. 

 

We didn't have any friends in common and she didn't have any presence on the internet that I could find. I thought of contacting one of her remaining sons through Facebook, but they didn't know me and I felt strange about doing so. I took to regularly checking the Phoenix obits, but there was nothing.

 

Eventually I did track down a good friend of hers, and sent her a message. Two years she wrote back; since she didn't know me, my email had gone into her trash folder. She knew who I was, and said I was welcome to call, which I did immediately. "She talked about you all the time," she told me. "You were one of the few people who was really there for her towards the end."

 

What had happened was she'd collapsed in her garage while her sort-of-not-really-boyfriend and his pals partied inside the house. She died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Though she'd been partying pretty heavily herself lately, they didn't find any drugs or alcohol in her system, and the car in the garage hadn't been running, so it wasn't a case of carbon monoxide poisoning.  The official cause of death was declared to be pneumonia.

A month later, her son came home to find the sort-of-not-really-boyfriend hanging from the rafters of that same garage. 

 

My notebooks are filled with failed attempts to write about Eydie and our complicated friendship. Maybe someday I'll be able to figure out how to do so in a way that does her justice. In the meantime, it's been ten years today since her death. I still miss her, still expect to pick up the phone late at night and hear her voice, slurred and sleepy. "Tell me a story so I can go moi-moi," she would say. And I would tell her a story. 

 

Elm

I spend nearly all my waking hours shuttling between two rooms. I live in one and work in the other. Six city blocks separate them. I wake up in darkness and travel from one room to the other. My journey back is slightly less dark, but upon returning home I inevitably pass out for an hour or two and when I wake up it's dark again. My life is small and drab, a greasy smudge on the damp sidewalk. There will be very little left of me when I go, just some piles of paper and canvas, easily disposed of, or stowed away and forgotten. A few people may think of me occasionally, until they don't. In the meantime, I spend my nights reading. Maybe I paint and draw a bit, watch a movie or some bad TV. It's too hard for me to get around, it doesn't seem worth the effort dragging myself somewhere to sit alone, especially when every night is rainy and cold. Besides, the pandemic is still raging; I don't have much desire to spend too much time indoors, surrounded by crowds of strangers. And so days go by without my having a single conversation longer than a few words, without a single meaningful connection. When I was young, I would watch the lonely older men and wonder how they got to be that way, wonder how they could bear it. Well now I know: they don't. They become dead inside, slowly, like I can feel myself becoming. Like the elms in the park; though they still grow leaves, when a storm brings one down, the splintered trunk is seen to be dry and soft and completely filled with rot.
 

Pretzel

 The cranes that tower over the city are festooned with red and green lights for Christmas. They glow through the mist as I head to work early in the morning. More glass towers are being constructed, though all the existing ones are half empty. The banks and the developers don't care; it's just another scam in a country whose entire history is an exhaustive encyclopedia of scams. Meanwhile, though the cracks in society that started to appear decades ago are spreading, crazing out in all directions, the people who live and work in those towers still feel secure. Their wealth will protect them when things really start to crumble. Who are these people? I don't know, I never see them. I don't hang out in the places they hang out, don't shop at the stores they shop at. They ride the elevators from their condos to the underground garages and drive past the encampments which line the bases of the buildings, speeding out of the city on their way to spend their leisure time in the mountains, the woods, the beach. Wine country. They remain hidden from those of us who spend our days wandering around the streets which are being transformed into a generic house of mirrors.

I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how things got this way, but the opacity of the systems which run our country shields them from scrutiny. It's difficult to effectively critique something you don't  understand. I can see fragments of the story, but it's hard to fit them together into a coherent narrative. This is one reason interest in conspiracy theories is more intense than it's ever been; I'm not the only one who feels baffled by the world around me. Plenty of  people are struggling to make sense of issues which remain calculatedly obscured. The people (mostly men) running things know that if we really understood the con, we would revolt. Or maybe not. It's hard to get people to rise up, as long as they remain reasonably comfortable -and as bad as things are here, all you have to do is look at footage of a war-ravaged country like Syria to realize how much worse things can get. But we are kept distracted, we are kept docile, and years of cynicism and failure have made it difficult to believe that real change is even possible.

As a result of all this, many Americans have given up on democracy and are eager to embrace a fascist regime, which is ironic considering how much they gripe about being told what to do. I realize they're just lashing out, that there's no rational thought behind their actions. The far right politicians, seeing that their party has become increasingly unpopular and out of touch, resort to rigging elections and changing the laws in order to cling to power. Their constituents are encouraged to vent their frustrations on various manufactured enemies, such as immigrants, or "Hollywood elites;" in a wildly successful attempt to direct their rage away from their own leaders, the people actually pulling the strings. In the meantime, the politicians on the left express concern but claim that their hands are tied.

It's hard not to feel powerless in the face of so much dysfunction and hypocracy, especially when the threat of climate change is no longer an abstract, distant worry. Even the most adamant deniers must know, deep down, that life on this planet is about to become a lot more challenging. I really think they're as terrified as the rest of us, but instead of accepting that we have to make big changes and sacrifices to try to slow down the apocalypse, they double down, grabbing as much loot they can and clinging to it. Billionaires make crackpot plans to escape to outer space, or slip into other realities. When I think of all the good things their money could accomplish, I feel sick with rage. And yet, I'm not rebelling, I'm not risking my life to fight the establishment. Unhappy as I am, I'm still not willing to risk what delicate stability I've managed to achieve.

So the cranes above the city are all festively lit, and so is the tree in the center of town, a majestic Douglas fir chopped down and sawed apart and reassembled in Pioneer Courthouse Square, though hardly anyone comes down here to shop. Most of the retail businesses went belly up long ago, or fled in the quest for cheaper rent. The few that remain hang on despite people's disgust at the rows upon rows of tents that line the sidewalks. They say they're afraid of crime, but they're mostly just afraid of being reminded of just how precarious our lives are, afraid of that glimpse of how much worse things can always get. I don't do much to celebrate the holidays, but I did put my little dollar store tree up this year. On a prominent branch I hang my favorite ornament: a very realistic pretzel, complete with big crumbs of ersatz salt, made by a departed friend. There are way too many ornaments for such a flimsy tree, and the whole thing looks like it's about to topple over, but I feel the need to pile them all on. In these dark times I'll take any bit of brightness I can get.

Blue Devils

 My already small life has shrunken even farther. I go to work, I come back home. I go to work, I come back home. I spend most of my days off sleeping, with an occasional trip to the grocery store. I don't do anything. I don't talk to anyone. It's miserable.

 Most of the way to work is on a slight downward incline, so I give my knee a reset by sitting on my scooter with my bad leg extended. The ride is more harrowing than fun; I'm  mindful of how easily a single stick or sidewalk crack can send me sprawling if I hit it too fast. I usually stop to rest at the halfway point, in front of the Carmelita Apartments. The word RIVER is written in pale green on the yellow bricks, has been for months. A few blocks away I stop at the crosswalk as one car after another speeds past without so much as slowing down. I give each one the finger.

The way back home is, of course, slightly uphill, so I can't sit down. I'm usually pretty tired after work so I take it slow.. I take a slightly different route than in the morning, which takes me past a building which used to be an accounting office. In front is a patch of grass which is a popular spot for dog walkers to let their pets relieve themselves. A couple of months ago, a plastic bucket appeared there with the words "Dog Poo Here" written on the side along with a couple of doodled flowers. The bucket soon filled with plastic baggies full of poo, but then it emptied again. This happened a number of times, the level of poo bags rising and falling, until finally whoever was emptying out the bucket just gave up, and little baggies of all colors were everywhere. Then they all disappeared -all the bags, along with the bucket itself- and people went back to just letting their dogs shit directly on the grass.

The only other time I leave the house is to see my doctor. It's a short ride on the streetcar but it takes every bit of strength I have to go up there and back. Since surgery I've been going at least once a week. The day finally comes when I'm scheduled to get my stitches out. The doctor takes x-rays, then unwraps my foot. My foot looks like a slab of raw beef, the stitches stick out like black hairs. His initials are still written in magic marker on my skin: PP. He takes out a few stitches, then stops, thinks for a moment. "I'll do the rest next week," he says. "Does it look okay?" I ask. "Looks great," he says. "So why not do them now?" I ask. "Next week," he says. "You said that last week," I say. He wraps me up and leaves the room. I hear him say "high risk" to the receptionist, who over the weekend went to see her old high school football team, the Walla Walla Blue Devils, play. Before I leave I ask her if they won. She doesn't answer. I tell her I'll see her next week, and don't realize until I get home that I've forgotten to make an appointment.