Sweet words touch me
I know your sound and scent
The welcome of your footfall
Sweet words pull me close
Touch me in tender special warmth
Spare me you harshness
Sweet words bring life alive
My life please just this once
Untouched by yesterday
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There are the array of partial intimacies, connections between two people, where, like two not quite fitted puzzle pieces, some of the edges align, and for that, anyone would be wise to be grateful.
In the meantime, I am drawn to the page, to the book, and, again, finally, to the physical. The long walks, the trails, the summiting moments, to climb back on the bike and break the hills that are like weeds in their prevalence here. And again to the gym, solitary in my task, regaining the vessel’s tone.
Then to the page, the garden, the sweet air, and always with the blinds open to the possibility of sunlight.
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It’s some sad ass shit sitting here in the General Surgery waiting room waiting for my appointment. There’s some hurtin’ folks here. People walking bent over, crooked, slow, sad stuff. The wounded and all. Staff at the reception desk are nice and fire humor like rays of sunshine. Some of us smile, some laugh, some don’t react, must be the pain.
Another thing I’m figurin’ out about these waiting rooms is there are assholes everywhere. Sitting less than 10 feet from me is a man in his thirties and his mother. He has the face of a wrinkled egg with pale moss on top and a slit for a mouth. If I was God I wouldn’t have given him any lips either.
The dude’s cell phone rings. Immediately his tone is unpleasant, nasty. “I told you I’d call you between three and four,” he snapped into the phone. Pauses. Then, “That’s what I told you. You learn to listen. I’ll call you later, got it?” He snaps closed the phone. Looks at his mother, says, “That child needs a foot up her ass.”
I hope the surgeon’s gut him.
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Many years ago, probably around 1975, I’d been out looking for a job. I couldn’t find one on this particular day and returned home, angry and frustrated. I went to see Michael, my closest friend then and now. When I went into his house he was just beginning to lower a needle onto a record when I said, “You know what? You don’t get any fucking respect unless you have a suit and a good job.” The needle paused just above the record’s surface. Michael said, “Please – Nixon had a suit and a good job.”
Michael has a genius for right-sizing things like no one I have ever known.
I had a perplexing conversation with a woman I was in a relationship with some time back. It went something like this.
– Peter, your shirt doesn’t have a collar.
– I know.
– Why not?
– They didn’t make it with one, I don’t know. It has buttons.
– Not all the way down.
– Well, some are better than none, no?
– But there’s no collar, Peter.
– Is that important?
– If you have to ask that’s not good.
– How’m I to know if I don’t ask?
– Stop it. You should wear a shirt with a collar when we’re going out to eat.
– We’re going to breakfast at a diner.
– That’s going out to eat. I mean you’re wearing shorts, a shirt with no collar and not enough buttons.
– It’s over 90 degrees outside, lots of people are wearing shorts.
– That’s not the point.
– (I look down at my shirt) There’s enough buttons.
– That’s not the point, Peter.
– It is for the shirt.
– You’ve never made a commitment to a shirt in your life.
– I made a commitment to this one.
– Don’t you love me?
– Of course I love you.
– It would mean a great deal to me if you would wear a shirt with a collar when we went out to eat.
– Look, we’re only a few minutes from the house, let me go back and change shirts.
– There’s no time. We’re late.
– But we’re not meeting anyone.
– We’re late, I can feel it.
I have three dogs, they never ask me about what I’m wearing and I never ask them about what they wear. They have no choice. And while I do have a choice, it is mine and only mine to make.
Anyway, I have to go now. I’m late, I can feel it.
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Daddy, I am all here. There is room in this moment for only us and I am finally all here and I know, now, that is what you wanted, hoped for. In less than one hour I will reach the uncleared trail, the unlearned trail. I will step quietly into 1:44 p.m. this day, the first minute you never reached knowing I will be on my own in a way like never before. Not alone like never before, on my own like never before; there is a difference.
I know as I stand with you here that this will be my place of rest too when my time ends. We will, as always, be good great company. And oh, how I miss you, still miss you, always miss you.
You were ripped off, Daddy, dying at 55 like you did. Ripped off. And that she let you died alone Mommy did. Home with us in Nyack leaving you along in that iron lung in St. Luke’s Hospital, telling us, me, the doctors said you wouldn’t know if anyone was there anyway. Leaving you alone so foreign to me. She had her wounds, Daddy. The deepest? She could not see herself and thus could not love herself which is why she ended herself. Sad, Daddy, sad.
I am all here with you, Daddy. Always with you I can be all here. Now, finally, in sober life, I can be all here anywhere, and always with you.
I will soon be in the day and days you never met. On the uncleared trail walking point. It was you there until now. There is an aloneness to this I’ve never experienced. It is, in a way, scary. Yet, in another way, it emboldens me.
We are soon to that minute, Daddy, that last minute you were here. This time you are not alone, nor am I. I am all here now, loving you. Always loving you.
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Peter S. Kahrmann - Est. 1953 