shut-in

My grandmother would sit, as I do now, at least for a short while, as is the prognosis, at the storm door, looking outside, at nothing in particular and everything in general. What’s out there looks decidedly different when you’re in a wheelchair. Yesterday, I sat at a side window and stared at a patch of green grass in the side yard, the same side yard I’d ignored for the previous 10 months, with the blinds drawn and curtains closed. What struck me were two things: one, how that patch of heretofore scraggly, crabby grass could look so inviting. And, two: what great effort, how much time, it would take for me to get there, out there. I understand, too, better, now, the term shut-in. I don’t think we hear as much, anymore, about shut-ins. Perhaps they’ve been eclipsed by our concern for the homeless, and perhaps well considered so. My grandmother was a shut-in. She lost a leg to diabetes. She’d spend hours of her days in her bedroom, listening to ball games on the radio. She loved Rocky Colavito, the slugger for the Cleveland Indians with the movie-star good looks, who performed the sign of the cross before every at-bat. I think he made her feel a bit less forgotten, somehow, The Rock did. She'd always say, "Don't knock the Rock."

hit

I saw his eyes through the windshield. I think I saw fear, panic, though I’m not sure. Everything happened so fast. The car was there, back there, then it was on me. I still remember the sound of the impact. It was dull. Sort of hollow. Not a thud. Different. Then I was down. The next thing I saw was the car. Thirty feet ahead, stopped, engine running, still, exhaust pluming in the gray, misty afternoon. He took forever, it seemed, to exit the car and when he did, his face bore a look that seemed a cross between anger and terror. He was older, dressed in a suit. I felt badly for him. Imagine that. But I did. Everyone around was telling me to lie still. Hell, I wasn’t going anywhere.

our home

Our home wasn’t a very happy place, either. In fact, a sense of sadness pervaded it. At least that’s what I felt. Maybe it was all the religion. Father was all fire and brimstone and mother was only a step or two behind him. We didn’t laugh much, either. We wanted to, but it just didn’t happen much. At best, I guess you could say we were polite. I would’ve traded a little politeness for some knee-slapping rowdiness. The best times I remember was when I was outside, in the woods. It was open, there, not suffocating, like at home. I could breathe. My best friend was Max. His house was different. His father ran the local saloon. His mother worked there, too. Even Max helped out. He had good stories. He thought it was really weird that we didn’t laugh at our house. He said that’s about all they did. I was jealous, of course. I’d eat dinner over there whenever I could. It was fun. Max’s father ended up getting shot dead by a drunk. His mom stopped laughing for a good while. Turned out, later, that she’d been seeing the man who shot her husband. He went off to jail. She sold the bar. Max left town when he was 17. Later, he joined the army. I lost track of him, after that.

blissful

We lived in a small town in North Dakota – Blissful. It was named by a Lutheran minister named Hugo Hustenburgh who founded it with his wife and three children, when they put in for a few weeks on their way to the Cascades and Seattle. For some unknown reason, they never left. The minister died three years later. Rattlesnake bite. His wife went mad four years after that. Prairie craze, they called it back then. The constant whistle of the wind. Drove more than a few pioneers crazy. She put a gun to her head. The kids were teens, by then. They all up and left for northern Minnesota and mining country and within a year all ended up in jail, or worse. Back in the late ‘40s, when “Life” magazine was making a habit of naming places “all-American” cities and towns, a rumor swept through Blissful that our town was next in line. Mother, who knew how things went about in town, said that the city fathers burned more than a bit of midnight oil rewriting the city history. Never happened, though, the selection, so our history was never redone. Blissful wasn’t a happy place. It was more workmanlike. Stolid, but to a fault. The happiest person in town was Mazie Wilkes. She was the grade school teacher. She saved my life.

uncle jim

I learned later, much later, that Jim was my mother’s brother – my uncle. He’d gone off to the war and come home different, at least that’s how my mother explained it a few years after he disappeared – “different.” I never asked her why she never told us about him, before that summer. I wanted to, but everything happened so oddly that I never felt comfortable. I never asked my father, either. We didn’t ask him much. He was always wrapped up with something or the other, mostly to do with the church. I found out later, years later, that Jim, my uncle, had been a black sheep in the family, dating colored women and gambling and drinking and getting into fights, all the time. I told Nick, my best friend at school, about him, about him being in the war and all, and he said that Uncle Jim had probably killed a Jap or two and that that had changed him. Nick said his father’s cousin came home from the war different, too, because he had killed a man while looking him direct in the eyes. It must be a hard thing, killing someone, I guess, even if it’s war.

the visitor

He stayed with us one summer, in the spare bedroom overlooking the old oak tree. He walked with a bit of a limp and didn’t talk much. He had a dog named Old Joe and a worn, brown Bible that he left on his nightstand when he and Old Joe went for walks up the far side of the mountain. I didn’t talk much with him; I was too afraid. My mother said he was an outlaw, but I think she was joking. My father, who was an Episcopal preacher, would sit with him at night and discuss Deuteronomy. Once, at dinner, a Thursday night in July, I think, he asked me if I knew anything about the war. I told him we studied it in school and he said, “Then, you probably don’t.” He didn’t say it mean, he just said it matter of fact, but it came out kind of rough. My mother apologized for him, quietly, in a nice sort of way, like she did for others, sometimes. He left in the middle of the night, during a thunderstorm, was just gone, when everyone woke one morning. My mother didn’t make any excuses for him, that morning, she just cried, quietly, again. He never came back. I asked my mother, then, who he was, but she just shook her head, gently. All she would say was, “His name was Jim. Pray for him.” So, I did.

doomsayer

He is fond of saying “the revolution
is coming,” because
it
always does,
and
he is not convinced
it will be
bloodless,
because
it often isn’t, and he knows
it
will
be painful, because pain is
part of
the process.
some who dodged the
most recent financial “apocalypse”
fool themselves into
believing that the end
already came
and already
went, which is silly and
goes to show they
don’t know
the meaning of a simple word:
end.
hardly. that, anyway: that was simply
a
shot across
the
bow.