Character Study
Sunday, June 7th, 2009
This is short character study I wrote after a speaking voice came to me during a recent free-writing session. This is the first I’ve published. More might appear as posts as I draw closer to the novel ledge.
I have heard people say that everyone has a story to tell. I may be the exception to that rule. I have nothing to say about my life or the lives of the people living around me in these townhouses. All of them look the same, the people more so than the houses. Quaint and beige. In their 60s and 70s. I am 63 years old. I get the paper about 5:30 or whenever the paper boy throws it in the drive, which lately has been past 6 during the week and on weekends, close to 6:30. When I’m done reading or sometimes if I’m not – if it’s a really engrossing paper but it’s getting close for to time for the kids to make it down to the bus stop – I”ll fold it over the arm of the chair and water my plants in the pot on the front stoop. The neighborhood kids have caused me too many interruptions. I like to wear my sandals with socks, which draws hysterics from the boys who walk by under the chestnuts to the stop sign and can’t find something more interesting along the way. They point and me say things they don’t think I can hear behind my back.
“Damn gramps, I can’t tell what is whiter: your legs or those socks.”
They say shit like that and then continue up the shady walk crunching under their feet and shooting chestnut guts all over the lawns. But I always go back to my paper and finish it before I move on to anything else. In the fall, it usually takes me more time. I like to read about football, college or pro, doesn’t matter. I am a football junkie and I like to read about the strategy – the chess aspect. Anything who knows about football knows that the offemsive and defensive coordinators are the ones who desrve all the credit. They determine the outcome, not the head coach or the players.
When the papers read, I have my breakfast – the same everyday: half a grapefruit, Cheerios, and a glass of orange juice. I eat it alone in the sunlight coming in from the sunporch to the kitchen and catching in my Sunflower drinking glasses. I usually start a small pot of coffee while I’m eating. My wife passed about four years ago. The first morning after her funeral – a Tuesday – I went through my regular routine and set a coffee cup out for her on the table out. I’ve been doing it ever since. The routine has me following it after 14 years in this house and 37 as a married couple. We got married young when she was a sophomore in high school and we had three kids, time flying, and we found ourselves as these old people, slaves to weak bodies and spotted skin. Our kids are spread out around the country like Apricot jam, a daughter in Oregon, our second in Dallas and our son in Buffalo. They all have familes and demanding jobs that keep them there. My son is about to leave his wife. He’s threatened it, but he hasn’t taken the reverse plunge yet. I like his wife, but I’ve forgotten her name a time or two, and it’s made it back to me that that’s enraged her. I can’t say that I care. I can’t say that it matters, either. But small things get blown out of proportion when you don’t have much to focus on.
I’ve done a decent job of protecting myself from needless fearless. Still, everyday just after breakfast and again after lunch, I take to watching throught he curtains in the living room at the townhouses across the street. The houses face perpindicular to mine. A boy hung himself in the side yard of one of the houses there a year ago. It happened in the night. I missed all the action except for a squad car that was late leaving that morning, about 5 am. I happened to read the story in the newspaper. His friends found him. He used shoe strings to hang himself in a closet. I think reading that story drew me to the windows, another step in my routine, but there was also something sinister about those houses.
I passed an old lady on my walk the other day. She had a young smile, but her skin was wrinkled and her posture was arched from what might have been her 106th year on Earth. She was sitting out in her garage in a whore-pink bathrobe on a bench along the wall, either gathering some fresh air or taking in the pedestrians, of which I was the only one. My guess is that she went out for the paper and stopped for a breather. We exchanged glances and I felt like I might have when I was a little boy and my mother had taken me to the grocery store and the stock boys and a few customers ran their hands through my red hair or smiled and waved hello. They were so much older. I was just a baby and I felt like one with her eyes on me.
I looked out at her house this morning and saw and ambulance in her driveway. She was sitting down to a stretcher and as they lifted her up to carry her away, I saw her look my way.
