Stones in my pockets
Yesterday was a fitful day of distemper and I went out and rode my bike to get over it. Of course, my tires were flat and my pump didn’t work, and the Shell station pump where I drove the bike to didn’t work and the guy couldn’t come out to help, and I came back and finally got my neighbor’s pump to work and by that time it was high noon, the bells of Our Lady of the Rosary wailing and the sunlight bouncing off the hot concrete into my weary and worn eyes.
I rode. I rode. I rode.
I rode through City Park, which was unusually quiet for a Fourth of July, I rode down the bike trail along the bayou out to Robert E. Lee, and up along the lakefront and by the defunct Mardi Gras fountain and over the torn up street that leads out to West End where all of the restaurants of my youth have vanished into the storm, where the old wooden bridge from Bucktown is gone, where a big iron pumping station sullies the vista, where boat houses remain empty and in shambles from the storm, where the light house has been rebuilt to eighty times its original size and the red roof is missing, where people still fish off the end of the spit that juts out from West End. I rode and rode and rode trying reclaim something that I felt like I had lost.
I circled around West End where Fitzgerald’s, Brunings, Fontana’s, all used to be. Bastille Day is approaching and with it the two year anniversary of my mother going into the hospital and the subsequent denouement of her life. I knew then what I know now, that it was the beginning of the end, with all its finality and lack of fireworks, and just plain and simply sad and lonely on the other end of the ghostly pier that awaits us.
I’m in transition over here, an orphan, faced with more repairs that I can/want to handle on the LaLa, staring my resources in the face, dangling on a threadbare string that no longer supports me, about to begin something new whose promise is abstract, and I want to tell you the sand is shifting beneath my feet. I do not know what to do – do I sell the house? do we get a roommate? do we move into my office and rent out the front? I do not know what to do and frankly, I’m weary from thinking about it – since May 2005 when I bought this house sight unseen I have been pouring everything I have in me into it and it is still costing me, taxing me, and weighing me down. Is it worth it?
“When I’m feeling the pain, the bayou is calling my name.” ~Tab Benoit
I contemplated death yesterday riding along the ghost town of West End because at some point that is where we are all headed. I thought about stones in my pocket, and walking into the bayou, a la Virginia Wolfe, and then I remembered the kid. Right.
I walked this morning with an old friend, and we talked about this period in our lives, our mothers recently dead, our bodies moribund, our inner selves still grasping to understand what is going on inside and outside of us. He said he thought dying was much more of a comfortable idea than it had been in the past. And I said, oh yeah, I agree.
But just as he said that we were passing a street that was a riot of pink and white blossoms from the chocked full Crepe Myrtles that lined the street and yards, there were blossoms everywhere and I had this vestigial desire to reach up and grab a bud and force it to bloom like I had for my mud pies as a child when I lived on Louisiana Avenue. I thought of a fellow blogger’s recent entry contemplating a life in a single walkabout entitled Schools Out For Ever.
We never leave off the jones for that innocence of childhood, we never come full circle to accept where we are now, we never fully understand where we are going until we are already there and gone and by that time we have put our own spin on what happened. In all honesty, I rode home and sat on the banks of the bayou under an enormous oak tree and watched turtles sticking their necks out and fish jumping and thought, right now it looks this way, but tomorrow it will look different again.