RUDIMENTS, pt. 591
(rhiannon rings like a bell through the night)
I've never liked books with
fantastic creatures in them or
phantasmagorical ones either;
whatever the difference may
be. Nor have I ever liked reading
set-ups, perfect foils, storylines
dependent of either tea or
sympathy. I own neither. I
liked the grittier stuff, if it
has to be fictional at all.
-
It's still like that as I roll along;
it gets harder and harder for me
to read anything current, except
for some few exceptions. I
just can't release myself to walk
amidst someone else's 'created'
problems and situations. It's
somewhere between the two
where I get interested : not quite
fact and not fiction at all. That's
where poetry lives.
-
The stuff that can be made up;
why do that? Life is all around
you and it's often better than ever.
In those Elmira years, consider,
everything was wide open. There
were pretty much no limits on
what you (anyone) could say or
do. That in and of itself was
remarkable, as seen so now,
in hindsight - when the baseball
leagues can no longer use the
word 'disabled' for their injured
players ('He's on the 15-day
disabled list') because the
disability people were offended,
as of recently anyway. Personally,
I'm offended. If you happen
to be reading this and you
yourself are young and
Potteresque, I suppose you'd
think I'm the fool here; but,
in turn I denounce you as
the fool.
-
Anyway, there was a time when
none of this bullshit mattered one
whit. Life was vaguely different,
with all its glimmering charms.
There was a college bar at the
end of my block, called 'The
Branch Office.' Catching a red
light at that corner, to my father
in law's delight, had you sitting
there waiting for the light to
change, and the sign there,
because of the corner building,
appeared only as 'The Bra Off.'
He discovered that and thought
it to be uproarious and we must
have laughed 15 times over that.
And never cared who liked it
or not. The world was all still
there, yes, but its limits and its
shapes were different. That's
all gone now; the import of
everything has been made
leaden and tinkered with. I
always figured that there
was a smile, somewhere,
in everything.
-
It was nothing at all in Elmira
or Columbia Crossroads for the
thermometer, in dead-Winter,
to stay at 12 below for early
mornings for 5 or 6 days in
a row, and, with luck, reach
perhaps 12 above, or 15, by
1pm, only to start its downard
carom again by 4pm. Life was
like that. I used to, in Elmira,
get up each day and go to my
job at Whitehall Printing,
maybe a mile and a half,
tops, away, on 1st street at
the railroad, and I'd take my
Schwinn, every day whenever
I could. By the time I got to
work, or to home, back, the
solid, super-cold air would
have my stupid cycling lungs
frost-burned. It took a good
10 or 15 minutes for the
wheeze to go away and the
semblance of 'normal breathing'
to return. Asthmatic, at that
point, or its equivalent, a
doctor told me the cold-freeze
had taken its toll and I'd lost
some sort of little hair-filters
that protect the lungs - nothing
that made sense to me, but he
said that wheezy breathing
and bouts of heave were apt
to continue for the rest of my
days unless I was lucky
enough for some lung
recovery to self-generate.
For that diagnosis of
doom, or nothing, (or
how I looked at it,
humor) he asked for 60
bucks. I paid and walked
away, wheezing. It felt, overall,
during this, as if an I-beam of
some construction site had been
jammed down my chest. Years
later, the same thing occurred for
like 9 Winters when I took the
train to Princeton daily. Cold
mornings, not AS cold, but
cold, and I had to walk some
from the train, searing my
lungs again and fighting
the wheeze and hurt upon
arriving at Small World,
a coffee shop where I'd sit
and read and thaw out until
both breathing and temperature
had mostly returned to normal.
Some days I wished it never
would and I could maybe just
die there walking - the more
I tried to compare my Elmira
life, and before that my NYC
life, to the gentility-brew of
large-house Princeton, the
more biting everything became.
I realized, for someone like me
to be in Princeton anyway was
half fantasy, half reality. So
I took it, and, manhandled
as I was, I lived on.
-
Like every daunting task, at
first it's imposing and large,
but then it quickly breaks
down. Like a scientist who
consistently enlarges, by
microscope, every little
thing normally unseen,
until the entire world is
then shown and represented
as gross and enlarged, all
things get distorted - even
the most lovely of items
are horrid when seen in
their enlargement. The big
lens I'd put to Elmira,
however, found me benefiting
instead of retreating; the
run of the river and the little
islands, the few, in the middle
of the stream became images
of a certain kind of paradise.
The lady I bought my house
from, oddly enough, had been
an interior decorator and the
house had just been done over
in her strangely well-detailed
style, which we were able to
live with and even overlook
and enjoy, and I asked, 'All this
work, why are you selling?' Her
answer was that she needed money
for legal expenses, and quickly.
Her son (one of two, both rather
dastardly) had been drunk, with
a friend, on one of those islands,
(kids used them), and after the
two 17 year olds had boated
there, and drank to complete
excess, the one kid had passed
out, and her kid, thinking him
dead, had buried his seemingly
lifeless body. Evidently shovels
and all that were there. Thus,
the kid really did die, and her
son was up for manslaughter,
involuntary or not. Thus, the
unfolding of her story, as 'story'
turned into pure fact once I
got her house. The day I signed
and closed it was about a thousand
degrees, the house was boiling
hot and the upstairs was hotter.
Everything seemed so strange to
me, and I really needed a fact-check.
Was I living a tale here, or was
all this real? This story was
growing out of control. Our
new neighbor, and his wife, was
some 70-year old guy (Jeez, that's
me now too!), from Paterson
New Jersey who had lived through
all the silk-factory strikes and
labor wars that had ripped that
old city apart when he was young.
He was able to fill me in on the
incidentals of old Paterson, NJ
like gold : the silk-wars, the
commies, the cops, the old
factories and railroad industrial
stuff; it was all vivid and this
Giovanni DeSantis guy made
it all real. Our dog constantly
barked at him from our yard,
and all this guy (this is weird)
did that first whole Summer
was sit outside in his rear yard,
on a chair, in the sun, with a
record player next to him,
playing whatever Fleetwood
Mac album it is that has
Rhiannon on it. Jeez I must
have heard that 150 times.
I used to think too myself how
I couldn't make this stuff up:
Some Italian immigrant guy,
in his mid-70's, from the
1919 Paterson Silk-Mill
Wars playing Rhiannon in
his backyard right next to
mine while my dog barked
at him and he just sat there,
silent, day after Summer day,
staring out and listening.
It was all pretty incredible.
Fantastic creatures indeed.
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