RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,176
(way off the mark)
It's become more and more
difficult for me to reach any
reasonable ends about myself
as things continue to fall apart
around me. I think I am often
without a rudder upon a sea
made of the foam of everything
I detest. I look back to my very
worst days and begin seeing
them now as a highly-missed
acmes of a golden age. For me,
what is missed now seems the
best. And boy, I say to myself,
have I really screwed things up.
-
Let anyone tell you what they
may - when you are young,
or as you progress along - but
they will never tell you about
old age. Take that as a lesson,
and beware, beginning now.
Death is a portal, but the down
drawbridge is broken and
does not close up. The same
people who will claim to be
helping you will kill you
in the end.
-
Elmira was a lonely dead-end;
a place that had risen, had
been, and then had faded. I
knew any number of locals
there who'd been natives; their
entire lives spent within that
arena of old values. They had
been abandoned, by the mid
1970's, by the very life they'd
adopted as their own. It was
that simple, and there was as
little recourse to changing that
moment as there was or is of
resuscitating a dead person. It
all just moves along. No one
there could properly address
what had happened to them, but
in a certain numbness they had
found enough means to operate
within the lost haze - assumptions
and attitudes deadened, most of
what was sought was a calm type
of survival. Grandiosity and the
expectation of higher things to
come were non-functioning relics.
I had a friend, Dan, who was
constantly praying - even in the
middle of the day, at lunchtime or
whatever, he'd take moments to
pray; the sort of prayer whereby
the lips move. Silent, but mimed.
He finally married, and, in the two
cases I'd known of, when his wife
at home entered labor, he took the
phone call at work, drove the 25
miles home - I suppose praying
too along the way - and had
returned to work by the next
morning proclaiming the birth
a success and just moving along,
back to the job at hand and not
mentioning it again. Another
friend, Berniece, in the same
fashion, with 6 or 7 kids at
home (she was 15 years or
so older than me), prayed often
and aloud, and preached the
word. I did her house over, as
a side job, for storm doors and
windows, and it was all the
most pleasant of atmospheres.
She fed us big meals, paid
properly, was thankful, and
ran a Southside Elmira home
and household, without a
husband, in a great and a
prayerful manner - not exactly
'Catholic' but close enough, with
all those icons and saints and
prayers everywhere. Any of
these people, in the mid 1970's,
acted as if they're being out and
adrift in the strange atmosphere
of old Elmira was nothing out
of the ordinary - and to them
it probably wasn't, at all. How
can you know what you have
if there's nothing to compare it
against?
-
Some days I was joyous. Other
days, a completely depressed
and alienated character. I struggled
hard just to continue. And then it
all went away and I somehow found
an even keel once again. Yes, that
was 50 years ago, and only now, in
these late days, am I losing everything
and witnessing the demise of all my
own, earthly endeavors. Nothing
left, and nothing ever made from
it. I am aghast now, each day, as
life trickles from my fingers. In
the piles of learning and study I've
applied myself to, all that I've ever
amassed, I realize now, amounts to
nothing. An empty echo of a passing
storm. What good has any of this
done me? What have I, in turn, ever
done for others with any of it? It
seems as if every one of my shots
was way off the mark. In my very
darkest moments, both real and
spiritual (which I guess I consider
'super-real'), all I ever see is a
gap; a void; a horrid emptiness
now where something should be.
And it can't be explained away.
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