Wait for it….. “i’m not aware of too many things, but i know what i know, if you know what i mean”……..the bohemians.
Not everyone’s, just his own; what’s’ the meaning of life, that is. He gets up and pads downstairs, puts on a pair of wool-lined high-tops and an old grey robe. Water surges from the tap until the pan is almost full and he slings it onto the stove. The coffee grinder shatters the silence, he dumps the grounds into a paper filter and pours the boiling water across it. An old dog looks up expectantly, so he fills the bowl with a beefy dog gruel and puts it on the ground. It’s not what either of them was expecting so they stiffly move toward the door and the old dog shuffles out.
Here comes the sun. It scatters shards of light across the counter tops, shimmering like a seascape and he imagines a coral reef, waves crashing on a pristine beach somewhere, far away. Coffee steams up into his face, his glasses fog momentarily while he reflects, absent-mindedly, and he tilts the cup and fills his mouth with bold brew. Another thought shoots across his addled brain, this one about plantations in South America, tropical and hot, a juxtaposition of the snow in the yard where his old dog is squatting, teetering, tottering.
This is his time alone, until the others awake, and he wants to make the most of it. So he sits in the same place as yesterday, and the day before, and reaches for a dog-eared copy of Shakespear’s Collected Works. He’s been told it’s got most of the answers and all of the questions, so he’s scoured it from cover to cover over the years, searching.
This time it’s King Lear and the first few lines confuse and befuddle him with their syntax (typical, he goes looking for answers and ends up with more obfuscation). Old Lear is losing his mind and he tortures himself with empty questions. Conspirators and fools surround him, each with their own agenda and the poor King wanders in a piteous stupor of ‘why’s’ and ‘how’s’. Familiar territory. ‘This isn’t helping’, he says to no one in particular, and puts the book down. Again. This has become routine, read a little, think, or not, and wait for the temperature to go up. The sun is now smashing through the windows so the brightening room is in stark contrast to his dark mood.
He thinks to himself he’s like a carving, or a statue that someone else, not he himself, has rendered. As Michelangelo had explained, he was merely removing that which was in the way of the piece already there in the marble (God’s original sycophant, he thinks to himself). Mike said, ‘Just knocking the superfluous out of the way, to reveal the works inside’, or something like that, only in Italian, and probably a lot better sounding. Certainly more lyrical.
So, he asked himself, was there nothing he could do to change the outcome? Was he just going through the motions of knocking off pieces to peel away that which was already there from the beginning? Was this fate? His Fate? What about free will, he thought freely.
What the……?
The night before, some neighbors had come over for happy hour and in the frothy swirl of drink and food someone asked him for his plan. “You know, man, like what are you up to these days?” Others, younger, still working, vibrant, (purposeful?) had offered up their own verse and score without pause. At his turn, he stammered and awkwardly deflected by pointing to his empty glass. They moved on, but he left neither shadow nor its umbra in his wake and stood at the same window he was now looking out of with the same perturbation, a kind of ringing in his ears. What was he doing? He felt numb, apoplectic, until the old dog barked to be let in. Am I the not-so-eternal-foot-man, he asks. Ah, is that it? Opening doors and looking out windows? Moving books from here to there? Not making plans and standing in thresholds?
Someone said history holds all the answers. History is prologue; that’s what he’d heard. And it was accessible, as opposed to the future. So he’s been reading about the world’s great conflicts, wars and the short-lived and intermittent periods of peace, which seemed like gratuitous punctuation for the fireworks. The former was considerably more voluminous than the latter. He thought he might find grist for the mill there, or maybe even enlightenment in the thoughts of others. Surely they must know something, he surmised. But its a fleeting thing, inside a map-less future as he shrugs at the atlas before him.
Someone is stirring, she walks up the stairs carrying a phone and a collection of bath/shower stuff. A smile, a grin, a sleepy nod of her chin, his favorite daughter (not Regan and not Goneril) has just walked in where he suddenly feels lighter, better, sanguine. Certainly fatherhood was rewarding, rich with lessons and insights, humbling and at times, profound, but he couldn’t accept that one’s purpose was to live for another, not even his own children. And he couldn’t accept that it was to simply fulfill the procreation box and insect-like, get out of the way and shortly thereafter, roll onto his exoskeleton. Functionary and final. Doesn’t that beg even more questions?
Perhaps there was no answer. The answer was in the questioning, in the looking and walking around. As in staying thirsty. Really?… was his life’s purpose hiding right in front of him, in plain sight, in the form of a Mexican beer jingle? It wasn’t even his favorite brand, but maybe he was missing the point there. To be, or not to be. That was the question. Was to drink, eat, and be merry, the same question?
He mused on his past; as a student, a scientist (of sorts), an entrepreneur (of sorts), an outdoorsman, a traveler, a companion, a lover and a friend, a father and husband, a brother and son, stardust. All well and good, but was there redemption at the end of that winding road? What was his story, would he just be a link in the chain of the species; is there a door at the end where it’s all understood and we see the purpose?
He thoughtlessly scratched his chin, dragged his foot across the back of the old dog who thumped once and slightly lifted his head. Maybe.
…she said, “Teddy don’t worry your mommy is here, taking good care of you”…..(McCartney)
