Velvet Verbosity

“No man loves life like him that’s growing old.” ~Sophocles

He is an elegant man, tall, slender, and white like a beech tree bending gracefully over his task.  I ask him where I can find the vinegar but he doesn’t hear me.  It is then I see he is wearing a hearing aid.  I speak more loudly, move in closer but not too close.  I don’t want to give him a start.  I want him to remain graceful like he is.  He hears me at last, turns slowly toward me, blinks a couple of times and then efficiently tells me, “aisle eight”.  He is turned back to his work before I can even say thank you.

It is Saturday and the store seems full of old men today.  Or maybe it’s that I’m noticing them today.  Perhaps some yearning to understand where it is I’m headed, to find a message in the lines on their faces that yes, there is meaning, and they’ve found it.

On my way out to the car, a largish man leans his stomach over the handle of the cart, leaning on it for support more than pushing it.  The cart is full of cheap bottles of soda and I imagine him sitting down to a dinner of microwaved meatloaf and a glass of iced pop in front of the television.  Later he will fall asleep in his chair with a blue light flickering across his face and his stained t-shirt.

Driving home there is a light drizzle.  Not enough for the delayed wiper setting, but enough that I have to manually send them swiping every few minutes.  It is near dusk.  I drive past a robust old man with an unruly white and gray beard that billows like a storm cloud around his face.  He is walking in this gray drizzle and yet seems not to notice.  He strides along, piercing the drizzle with his dark-eyed squint, carrying his round belly and that mass of hair like he means it.

Two brothers resisting age, fighting it with all their might.  The regimen of vitamins, maniacal exercise and pretending they’re still in the game long past their prime.  Resisting settling in or down they achieve little but looking restless and never quite satisfied with the Now.

He is tall and moody, though a light comes into his eyes if only you just say, “hey, how are you?”. I watch him out of curiosity, trying to determine if he’s thinking about anything at all besides the salad he methodically eats. It would be a remarkable feat, wouldn’t it? To think about nothing but exactly what it is you’re doing. Many people spend years chasing down such sublime “nowness”. Yet I’m not entirely convinced that is the state of this man’s mind, even though he does seem to be entirely focused on the precise movements needed to gather the lettuce, the carrots, the avocado, and dressing onto his fork until nothing but the smears of oily vinaigrette with tiny bits of food smattering remain. For a moment I think he might lick the plate, not out of hunger, but out of some need to complete.

California…land of sunshine. That’s where I’m headed next week and I’m packing my sun-dresses and my bikini, though there won’t be much time for beaches since I’m going for WORK. I do have one day semi-free before I fly back so I let my friends on the West Coast know and made plans with one of them for Thursday. He called tonight.

Me: Hello?

K: Hey you, are you seeing the eclipse?

Me: Yep, I’m looking at it through my window.

K: It’s so beautiful, I’m standing out here on the deck.

Me: It’s too cold here.

K: It is?

Me: Yeah, so I’m staying inside. How warm is it supposed to be next week there? Warm enough for sun-dresses?

K: Uh. Yeah. Of course. Wait, where are you?

Me: I’m in Massachusetts.

K: OOOHHHHH. I thought we were getting together tomorrow.

Me: What? No. I meant next Thursday. Did I not say that?

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For more funnies, go here I say!

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Now even the homeless are blogging.  For reals.

The Homeless Guy 

Some excerpts:

All the libraries are closed today - not a good thing for the homeless. Yesterday’s balmy weather and high temps in the 70’s will be tempered today with highs in the 40’s.

With the library closed, I hope to do some cafe hopping. I hope they let me hang out on their computers for most of the day. That shouldn’t be a problem if business is moderately slow. Now to just find a good position in this seat, so that my back won’t hurt.

The Homeless Guy even Twitters!

I am on Twitter.com Start up an account, if you haven’t already, and follow me! I am at twitter.com/thehomelessguy.

What the hell?  I have a Mac Book Pro and I still don’t really get Twittering.

“One good turn deserves another”. So I share a story of kindness. Last night I was struggling with letting go of a toxic person in my life, so I reached out to a friend. We call those people “friends” who can meet us halfway through the gaping chasm that often separates us all from one another no matter how close we stand or how much of each other’s exhaled breath we breathe. It is the friend who can stand on the other side of the earth and make us feel that we are touching one another through a secret portal in the time-space continuum.

Tonight, R did that for me. He reached across many miles, across digital wires, and held me, held my hand while I released the buildup of pain and anger I had around this situation.  Everything I said was familiar to him. He could have written the script having had someone in his life so similar. “Don’t believe this”, he said, and affirmed what my head had been telling me, but my emotions could not catch up to.

“You’re a good woman”, he said.  To have someone reach a hand out to you and say, “this way back to yourself” has to be one of the kindest gestures from one human to another.

Thank you R for being that gentle hand. I owe you one.

Image: http://artfiles.art.com/images/-/Christine-Ellis/Loving-Hands-Photographic-Print-C12153830.jpeg

Not to usurp the 100 Words on Bold submissions, remember to KEEP SCROLLING!

She is beautiful. Radiant. She can’t possibly know her own beauty. Her skin speaks beauty, abundance and health. She sits, knitting, her brow furrowed in concentration, and I am mesmerized by the little repetitive dance of her fingers.

In the space of an hour she knits about 6 inches of something fuzzy, interwoven with pinks and purples. I don’t like these colors, but they suit her pink pink cheeks so for tonight I don’t mind pinks and purples. Suddenly I don’t mind them so much so that I wish she was knitting whatever it is she’s knitting for me.

It’s because I see her capacity for love, and the sadness that has broken her, and I want to be a vessel to receive what she hasn’t been able to properly give before. It’s because I wonder how she can be so radiant and so sad at once, and how much more radiant she could possibly be. It’s because I want the chance, just one chance, to help someone else shine so brilliantly that the whole lot of humanity goes blind with love. Just that once.

I wish it were some kind of surprising crush, but all desire is fueled by the want of something. It is not her that I desire, but what she is right now that I am not at the moment, maybe never will be again, maybe never ever was. I like to believe I was once a creature of flesh and sorrowful juices and radiant love. That I had beauty like that. My decaying bones and gristle want her life.

As we are leaving she comes up to me. She is so much taller that she has to arch her neck downwards toward me and her face is looming like a pinked moon just inches from mine. I feel vulgar next to her radiance, but I don’t turn away. I let her grace soothe me. I let my own spark ignite and burn. She is thanking me for something I said. “I really appreciate it you know”, she says, gently smiling.

Her heart aches through her eyes, and her love mixes with her sorrow creating tears that don’t flow out, but instead back down to her heart filling it up until it’s so large I can hear it beating in my own chest.

Picture Credit: I found this picture by doing a Google Image Search for “Juice and Gristle”. Brought me to a great little blog about “The Culinary Adventures of a New York City Lawyer”. Check it out. Tell him that Velvet Verbosity sent you.

Today, I crossed the field where the local Smithie girls play Ultimate Frisbee, noticing my feet getting kind of damp from the wet grass. As I stepped onto the sidewalk, my world abrubtly converged with a stranger’s.

She (the stranger) was riding along on her bicycle in all her short-haired, salvation army attired, messenger bag shouldered glory when, suddenly, some unnamed joy seized upon her so that just before we would enter each other’s visual fields, she belted forth a loud whoop…a hearty “WooHoooooooo!”, that she let arc out of her young, proud mouth.

For the briefest of moments, we were face to face, her head turned to greet me as I stepped out from behind the fence, and our eyes met and lit up, and our faces beamed acknowledging smiles at what had just been shared. Then she was gone, my bicycle messenger of joy.

(Image from www.vanillabicycles.com because this post is about the convergence of strangers, and bicycles and joy, and in my humble opinion Vanilla Bicycles are all about joy in the form of bicycles, and I suppose I could fit strangers in there too if I thought about it.)

I see her every morning, and sometimes in the afternoon. She runs up and down my road every day, but she doesn’t look like a runner. She doesn’t have proper running shoes, or clothing. She looks pained but isn’t sweating. She doesn’t move like a runner, she holds her arms the wrong way.

It is safe to say that she is probably new at this sport of running, but it isn’t only that. She is overcoming something. Running, for her, is not just an avenue for a firmer body and better stamina. No, she is running for other reasons, and I can see them written all over her.

She runs to escape a past, to get ahead of the present, and in the hopes of arriving in a new future. She runs to break the barriers between the universe she lives in now, and the parallel universe that could be her life. She runs to build…her muscle, her confidence, her dreams, her will. She runs to escape the last remnants of darkness that cling inside her. She runs against the grain, against everything she has ever been shown, ever been taught, ever been allowed. She runs for freedom. She runs to save her soul.

(Image: Sean Gabriel Ellul http://www.sellul.com/dmaster12.html)

Her world is now vivid and sharp-edged. Her world is 13. Her world is self-important, self-indulgent, fulsome and large…yet so small to any onlooker.

I know that world, I remember it. The aching needs that must be filled while the source eludes. The terrible clamor of peer-pressure knocking at every turn. The feverish race to be in. To not keep up is to be “out” and that is no place anyone wants to be at 13. To be “out” is social death. At 13, it might as well be real death. 13 hasn’t comprehended what that means anyway.

The body, oh the terrifically annoying body that is never the right size or shape…too big, too small, too round, too narrow, too tall, too short, too curvy, too flat.

13 is the world of “everyone else”. Everyone else has the goods, and 13 doesn’t understand it’s all an illusion. If just once, they would all drop the illusion at precisely the same moment, unveil all the massive insecurity, it might cause a wave of cosmic energy so powerful that the earth would shift on its axis.

He grew down instead of up. Sometimes people do that. It’s not that he didn’t try, but he built his stairs like a house of cards, only without grace and patience. It couldn’t bear the weight of his pain.

He found it easier, when the cards began to fall, to go down..gravity and velocity his companions. He tried to take me with him, grabbed my ankles as he fell, and God help me I almost went. But my resolve to live was stronger than his pain, stronger than the force of gravity.

I didn’t bother struggling. I slicked my ankles with vaseline, watched him slip, and said good-bye.

(Image from: http://abyss.hubbe.net/jeremiah/gallery/gfx/covers/jtv/lg/ep/s2/205-falling-lg.jpg)