My Addy (Snail) & CellPhonePome

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Subject: My Addy (Snail) & CellPhonePome
Date: Sun, 03 Oct 1999 15:25:35 CDT

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      I awakened to Nancy knocking at the door of the garage, always polite, then having her come in and sit in the tent with me beneath the quilt. Not quite cold enough for breath to show, but getting there.

     Am missing my circular saw which I left at former housemate Norm's place. Gone, disappeared, and no one seems to have a clue as to its whereabouts. Grrrrr. That's $70 to replace. Thereabouts.

     Have found the extension cord, my DeWalt drill is still here, and various other tools. I'd thought I'd lost some of my Altar Lovelies, but found most of them last night. Ah, that was a blessing. So will set the altar back up soon. And before it I will sit of a morning and evening, wrapped in a blanket like an Indian, communing with some Power Greater Than Myself.

     The ride was bitter cold this morning, or so it seemed. I kept my left hand shoved in the pocket of my bibs, resting on my thigh, feeling the thigh muscle contract into hardness with the churning of the cranks. An uneventful ride across the Kansas River, then left at City Hall, around the bend to...JavaBreak.

     Nicoletta was on duty. Yesterday she introduced me to her boyfriend, Matt, who rides motorcycles in all kinds of weather and of course is not nearly good enough for Nicoletta who I sort of think of as my recently adopted daughter. Of course I will never say anything.

     Hot coffee and a moronic-looking fellow who lives in there and should be paying rent at the table next to me, scribbling away. Lesson plans. Oh? A professor? What has KU sunk to?

     And a loud social worker who's elected to come to the basement of JavaBreak to do whatever it is she's doing of a Sunday morning. Thru the dirty pane of glass, I look out onto the old walls of Lawrence. Limestone? I can almost feel the little fossils, white and cylindrical popping up to the surface of stone. Loud one speaks into her cell phone and I grab a piece of paper and make notes:

Cell_Phone@JavaBreak.dickens

I know why
You want me to get
Pregnant, she said
There in the next booth
With her loud voice
Ravishing the cell phone.
It's because you want
My t-shirts.
I'll be too big
And they won't fit me
Anymore.
Through the basement window
I see the old limestone wall
Bracing for winter,
Trying to slough off the already
Fading fingers of ivy clinging.
This town is forever
Pregnant.
New walls are forever
Midwifed by working men
In bibs and heavy shoes,
Until nothing much
Remains the same
And t-shirts no longer fit
Walls which once were young
But now brace for winter
With the clinging ivy-memories
Of what once was.
Not fitting even when
Autumn ravishes us
With cell phones
And lesson plans
Sunk to this,
Even as we shrink from what we were.
Even then
Nothing much
Fits.

     Notes. She was nice enough and perhaps she had to speak loudly to make the other person hear.

     There were no cell phones when I left 26 years ago, I was thinking.

     No answering machines. Beepers, pagers, faxers, PCs, Macs, satellite towers, microwave dishes--none of that.

     There was a bicycle and a body still in its 20s, lean, mean, able to cross huge distances in a single day's leap.

     Don't know what is dragging me back into the past today, but there it is.

     I am not a tree in autumn, but a man in autumn. There is a difference, I think, but please don't ask me to explain it beyond...

     Wood. I may have a wooden expression at times, but am not made of the darned stuff. I may shatter, but do not splinter. I drop my clothing of an evening, but not my leaves. And I am colorful at this time of my life, speaking easily to the young women as young or younger than my daughters.

     I alone have survived to tell you this, the servant cried out in the book of Job. When the Assyrian came over the hill and attacked the camp like the wolf falling upon the fold.

     Pinch. Yep, still here.

     I stopped at Dillon's and bought gloves. Will you need a sack? the strawberry blone asked, or is this an emergency?

     My hands that cramped, red? LOL.

     Emergency, I tell her.

     A misting of rain, the seat beaded up, streaking as I pass my newly gloved hand over it.

     An IM intrudes...Sierra writes, I hate mugs.

     How do I respond to that, being a mug myself?

     And lovely letters today...which reminds me...my snailmail

addy: DICKENS
c/o Nancy Moring
14370 54th St
Oskaloosa, KS 66066

     Please feel free to send me a BIRTHDAY CARD, my b/d being on the 16th of this month. I will be (cough, cough) 25 years old. Well, add 30 to that, just for good measure.

     I would love to have birthday cards. I am such a glutton for love.

     But, then, aren't we all?

     Nicoletta brought me the paperback of Bukowski, her smile breaking white in the dimness. Lightbulb burn out? she asks.

     No, I tell her. I just prefer it this way.

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