kingtycoon | 4-21-2014

So this is just a mention of how it goes.

After work I had more work - go see the very old man, who I guess is not quite that old. 70's Wait, no, I had to set him up with a username and his birth-year was involved - 1930. He told me he was in the Air Force after high school and I guessed he was in Korea, and he admitted that he was. So 84. That's pretty old. My old Pop is 76 now, I can't think about him being in the condition of the very old man - who is in a wheelchair and must be pushed and wears his pajamas all monday. It's not shameful or anything, he's a very old man, but it's the exact situation that will shame and injure my old Pop.

I walked my handsome self to the nice retirement tower to help the man with his equipment, and he was pleased and talkative, he wanted to treat me to dinner in the retirement tower - a fancy place actually - and I agreed because I'm usually hungry. We're sitting and talking and I make nice with the mumbly waitress and the restaurant manager and flirt with the cooks (as is my way) and we get extra food because that is how shit goes for me because I'm smooth and cool with ladies. The very old man is a very light skinned black guy - lighter skinned in fact than my old Pop - and everyone assumes I'm his grandson - though I could be his son-son. I'm flattered about it and happy and all day people are thinking I'm ten years younger than I am, because I am, really. I explain that I'm merely his IT consultant, and a pair of very old ladies come to sit with us and talk and I am charming to them because old ladies are not shy of being charmed by fellas - which is a nice thing of old ladies. At another table old men are telling old ladies poems. Straight up reciting Browning to old ladies, and I talk for a long time about flowers and the orchestra and am invited back. Invited with a little urgency and a little sense of hope, not a wild fantastic wish, but a little twinge of wanting.

Of which I'm balefully aware, that wanting. I'm lately feeling under it. As if all my interactions have this element of obligation and want, some transaction in which I'm the good being traded. There are comings and goings and comings and goings and I'm asked over and again - in not so many words, what do you have for me?

So I'm tired, I walk up the hill, lovely and sprung. There's that faint halo on all the trees, of the lightest insubstantial green, a little bare wool of verdant fluff - and there is the petrichor scent that hangs over the low street and the long sunset lingering on reflecting pools - and I am glad at least that I get to walk past reflecting pools and count the fifty nine robins that cross my path, each plump or sleek and all daring and good. Worm-fatted and angling for their moment to father and mother their blue eggs. Dear old things, the eldest of the creatures that have a little chamber in me. I think, passing the cemetery how this is a day, where I could drop my backpack and run off from the wanting, leave my wires and cables and gadgetry and go into the forest because there are forests, little woods to run past and there you see the wild-grown daffodils - which thought and talk made the very old lady swoon a little, clasping her hands right over her chest. It was sweet to think of and then the licorice sweetness of going off into the woods where nothing is asked and no-one could need me. A selfish wish but I've been lately so unselfish, I'm feeling unwound and frayed from it.

I'm thinking this past the forest, past the construction - up to the apartment complex and there are the three young boys, very young - between 5 and 8 - I'd guess, having learned how to guess these things, maybe one of them faces school on the daily and you will know how they go to school because of the fervor with which they mash boards against the ground and shout and hammer the earth with loose materials from some forgotten construction. And one says to me - something. "Dance... Mister... Dance..."

"Yeah I like dancing, how about you?" And they leap up, all of them together to show me their breakdancing, heroic and modestly acrobatic and flawless - it's easy to carry your weight on a hand when your weight is 40 pounds. They overthrow themselves, doing more flips than they mean to, crashing down harmlessly and getting up again, they throw themselves against the broken sidewalk and it's a goddammed miracle. This little kids. I clap at them and clap and encourage and say that I'll try and remember to bring a cardboard box next time.

The man at the store is saying he wants to go back to Jordan, I just want to go home, my arabic is terrible still, he tells me so. I come home at last. It's a long day but the Sun's just setting finally, and I couldn't tell you the color of the sky and I don't feel like I'm needed too much or that much has been asked of me, and I feel for a minute as if, if I were asked, I would have something, actually, to give.