What noise is it?

As long as he'd attended school Erwin had played the role of the insufferable whiner with great success. He was in fact most well-suited to the role, as he carried within him strong sense of self-pity. Indeed over time no one could have thought of anyone better suited for the part. Everyone came to accept him as such, and even invited  him to birthdays, and later during high school expected him at weekend parties where he, since he was also the son of a wealthy businessman from town who seemed to have no scruples about how the boy spent his money, would supply liquor and beer for the other revelers from his father's stocks.

In his junior year however, the opportunity came for Erwin to change to the role of the gallant. A young girl in grade ten had come to pay amorous attention to him, which he accepted willingly, however she made it clear that he must play the gallant when the two of them were together alone. When they were out on the town with and around others from the school and so on, he must continue in his role as insufferable whiner. 

Erwin accepted the offer and much to the surprise of the girl's peers she paid much attention to him, both physical and otherwise, to him. Her loyalty appeared to know no bounds. Erwin seemed to be able to say and do the most embarrassing and uncouth things, and she would adore him all the more. Indeed, the two became very much "the talk" as many young girls and their mothers could not understand how this lovely girl could suffer such a boy, nor could they fathom how Erwin could spend so much time with a girl of her calibre, and remain so unchanged. As it often is with high school romance, despite Erwin's tenacious attitude toward the girl and the pact they had made, she tired of him and, to be fair, he of her. Thus shortly after graduation they agreed that they would no longer see one another. 

Erwin was however, greatly changed by it all. Still though, he could not convince his friends, who were now his workmates and colleagues in local business that he was a gallant, and that in fact he had found this out through his time with the girl. Nothing he could do or say would convince them otherwise. Indeed everything he was heard to say or seen to do, was taken as an irony or as a shameless ploy to get attention where none was merited. Distressed, Erwin took to drinking and playing VLTs, which surprised no one and which, over the course of several years, ruined him financially and physically.

One day while assisting a young bar maid with opening the plate glass sliding door of a display case in which the town's war veterans were honoured so that she might dust the mementos, the brittle glass fell out of its tracks, twisted in his hands and broke, slicing his arm and through and severing an artery. Having already had a good start on a cheap bottle of rye whisky, he bled quickly and, though it did not kill him, the doctors discovered a wasting cancer of the esophagus, and within three weeks he was dead. 

Many people attended Erwin's funeral, though they showed little pity or charity on his behalf. In fact the event was raucous and celebratory and the minister, ill at ease with it, seemed unable to redeem the time for the family. Not in fact until the bar maid stood weeping at the microphone, during dinner the family hosted after the interment of the body, would any of the townsfolk stop to question their treatment and assumptions about him. And can you blame them that they did not stop long? Indeed what noise is it that separates us in the end?

The man and the mouse

Lately, in fact for a few days now, he's heard it in the wall. Always at the same time and always in the same room. He wonders whether there might be something to it that he always seems to be there when the mouse makes his entrance (if scrambling around inside a wall is an entrance) and then, it seems, beds down for the night.

It's been a mild winter. Except for the last few days, the mice have seemingly been less desperate, at least that's the way he's interpreted their muted presence so far. For instance even this recent mouse event begins at around 8 pm. Said mouse runs, or so it sounds to him, up the wall and across about half of the ceiling and then, so it seems (you understand I've never been inside a wall to watch a mouse make his way in one direction or another so I speak speculatively), it turns around and returns and, if his hopes are to be believed, leave. This man likes to think that he can enter the consciousness of the mouse and know its mind and motive. This man sees himself superior to the mouse, despite having failed consistently in his endeavours to make his dwelling place mouse free from the outside.

(We could devote several pages to the time spent in seeking out entrance points, and then a variety of ways of stopping up holes and passageways. Let us simply say that curses have been uttered, spades and hammers have been employed, as have cats, steel wool, spray foam, galvanized metal sheeting, live traps, poison bait stations, supra-sonic noise deterrent devices, broom handles, metre sticks, and hand-drills! (Past two in the morning this man has in fact been so certain that he understands the movements of the mouse in the wall that he has lain down along the wall with a portable power tool equipped with a 3/16" drill-bit and driven it, with force, through the wall board in the belief that he will, if not skewer, at least send a strong message to said mouse.))

At this the reader may wish to laugh, but the extreme measures recounted here simply attest to the desperation to which a mouse in a wall of his house can drive a man. This most recent serial visitation - three nights at least it - surprises, and yet doesn't surprise the man. There have been, of late, no signs of mouse activity. No mouse shit on the open shelves. No boreholes in the cracker box. No fresh mounds of styrofoam or wallboard to indicate digging and chewing. The man has learned that there's not much to do until you see evidence. You need to know where to set the trap.

Thus the mouse attempts to teach the man a more zen approach to his rodent concerns, indeed to his own life. Perhaps in fact the mouse is a buddha reincarnate. Sporadic in its appearances, the man at last resigns himself to allow for the presence of the mouse. Sure he will continue to be vigilant and, should the mouse in fact leave the walls in order to enter the interior proper of his home, he will do what he can to deter it. But for now hearing the mouse in the wall will be a reminder. A suggestion that he remember that this is a natural world, and in this he can be one with the mouse.

In fact he now asks if he can see himself as offering a kind of accommodation. There will be limits to the extent the occupier will be tolerated, but the interior surfaces of his walls may well be a bastion he must concede. Is this a revelation? Will it stop him from engaging in further machinations designed to keep the mouse at bay? Will this small buddha mouse awaken him and entice him to an early morning yoga session?


Ride report
in:      3'C wind 15ks SE
out:    2'C wind 15ks SE (rain)
 

After the burial

The two of them tamp the earth they've just heaved back into place. The older one says something about how difficult it would have been to replace the canola in the same way that they'd dug it out, that it was too dark and now he's too tired to do it anyway. "It's better to get away before anyone actually notices them out here," he says.

In the East he can just see the light rimming the horizon. "We've got to get going," he says, and makes one last ridiculous adjustment to an upturned root ball. He can't be too sure now, even as the gray replaces the darkness. Carrying our digging tools they agree that they need to take different paths out of the field than they did when they walked into it together, carrying the body between the two of them. They each loop around to the dirt lane and then arrive at the truck at about the same time, from opposite directions.

He uses the square-bottom spade to scrape the dirt off his boots. It's moist and black and gray. The clay has mixed in, making it hard to remove. Frustrated, he still has the presence of mind to pick up the larger clods and toss them into the truckbox. His brother sees him do it and does the same. "Good idea," he says.

Sitting in the truck, shifting and clutching, he feels that the bottoms of his boots are still clumped with clay. Without talking he drives a few extra miles, both dirt and gravel roads, and finally uses the highway before pulling into the village and parking the truck. Leaning on the truck box and looking at each other the brother smiles and shrugs in a way that says, Well that's it then, I guess. Then he turns to get into his car and drive off.

The older one walks to the back of his house to use the garden hose and a flat-bladed screwdriver to clean the remaining soil from his boots. Finished he wraps his arms around the two spades and the pick-axe and carries them to the garden-shed. Then he returns to the house and enters it. Standing there he notices that his boot soles are coated in the white fines of the quarter-down limestone on the garden path he and his wife had just put in place two weeks earlier. Frustrated he stomps his feet on the mat leaving boot prints in plain view.

He has it in mind now that every piece of evidence must be managed, so he takes off the boots and tip toes across the floor, opens the door to the garage, and tosses them onto the painted concrete floor. In socks now he walks back to the entrance mat carrying a nylon bristle broom. With vigour he brushes away the white tracks, clearing them into small pile of limestone dust on the tile floor, which he sweeps up into a dustpan and empties into the garbage.

Clapping his hands now he replaces the broom and heads to the bathroom. By force of habit he looks into the mirror and runs his hands through his hair, only to see flecks of fine white dust streaking his dark hair. Imagining the crime-scene forensics that may now find him out, he can't help himself in his anger.

His wife awakens to the crash and finds him kneeling and weeping and bleeding, picking up shard after shard and dropping it into the waste basket. "What'd you do?" she says.

He looks up when he hears her voice. "It's such a long story," he whispers and begins to smile.

"But you're crying," she says.

"I know," he says, "it's so hard to get everything right."


Ride report
in:       -8'C wind 13 ks NW
out:     -3'C wind 5 ks NE

The Aging father receives a mechanical lift

There are days when I find it difficult to rise in the morning. You? One friend of mine, D, says that when he wakes up he thinks of all of the things that he has to do that day, or maybe in his whole life - it's not that he's ambitious or anything but if I were him and he were me we'd both be able to say that we've got a backlog of things to get done - so he gets up and starts to do something. I presume whatever he does, it's the highest thing on his list.

Anyway, when I wake up in the morning, I think about all those things too, and then I roll over and go back to sleep. This sets us apart in a way. I mean I admire him. I really do. I tell myself that if I would be as disciplined as he is I could get a lot of things done. I'd probably be farther ahead in a lot of things. Maybe I would have finished that entry for the blog yesterday about mice. But I didn't. I went to sleep after winning that curling game and tending bar and getting home late.

Listening to my friend D talk about getting up, it doesn't sound at all like discipline. It sounds like getting up is just something that he has to do when he wakes up. The options for him are: lie there awake, thinking about what you have to do during the day, or get up and start to do what you have to do during the day. Whereas it seems that the options for me, that moment I wake up in the morning are: roll over and go back to sleep (a euphemism perhaps for forgetting what I have to do), or get up and start to do what I have to do during the day. I'm the person who would, given the choice, take forgetfulness and oblivion over memory and action.

This makes me feel regret. I can get up on my own, but I don't (of course eventually I do, but I put it off as long as I can). Whereas my aging father, lying in his bed in the morning, can't get up, but wants to. This is typical isn't it? You see my friend D says that if he could roll over and go back to sleep, he would. And I say that if I could just get up and start the day I would. And my aging father says, I just want to be able to get up. By typical I mean, ironic.

He can sit up. He can slowly swivel on his hips - hands planted on the mattress and pressing pressing and getting in the way - and get his legs stuck out over the edge of the bed. Then he stops to pant. He puffs his cheeks and blows out of his mouth, lips loose. I recall doing this too when I'm in pain and I'm waiting for it, hoping for it, to subside. Actually, he's also waiting for the nurse's assistant to maneuver the mechanical lift into place in front of him. In fact as she guides it to him he reaches for its curved, padded bars. Looming over him like a gangly pterodactyl he accepts its capacity to take him into its arms and raise him up.

The two attending nurses help him into the harness. He's done it before and he knows the drill. There's an ignominy to it that he's come to accept. "Who'd have thought," he says again and again, and he keeps breathing heavily to manage the pain and, I wonder, the anxiety of all this trust we so easily cede to the machines. The mechanical lift the nurses call it. Not unlike an emotional or a mental lift?

Once he's strapped in and gripping the bars in the right places they step back, have another quick look at the straps and the attachments, and then they flick one switch and the servo hums and the hydraulics flow and the piston pushes out because of the pressure. It's nothing to lift the one-hundred and eighty pound aging father up to a standing position. As quickly as he's up they swivel him, in about three seconds, over the few feet to the chair that he'll be sitting in for the next few hours while we visit, and they try to make him comfortable, and he tells them what number out of ten his pain scale is at (nine), and they tell him that it's only been an hour since his last Tylenol 3 but maybe they can get him an Extra Strength Tylenol, and we try to elevate, then lower, then elevate his angry looking left leg "just to make the pain go away," and they serve him his hot lunch on a green tray, and his daughter cuts the open-faced beef sandwich smothered in a brown liquid someone names gravy, and he eats with some gusto while we talk like he may or may not be interested in our conversations. The lift does not flinch as it lowers him into the chair as easily as it raises him from the bed, neither does it feign interest in our conversations or our hangings on or our caresses.

We're living with them now, these mechanical beds, lifts, pain-killers, bandages, food trays, and chairs with wheels. Without them we'd have to touch one another more, and who really wants that. Even as my aging father's daughter rubs lotion on his face and combs his hair and he says that she could have been a good mother, we will willingly defer to the machine if we can. Sure I will hug my aging father and kiss him on the cheek before I go, but I perform this small mercy with an ungainly and unfamiliar pace that betrays my intentions.

I want to do the best for him, but I'm unwilling by dint of distance and my seeming necessary obsolescence compared to the adeptness of the machines. I cannot give the aging father a mechanical lift. Mine will be clumsy and close, more prone to failure. We dare not take that chance. Both of us, the aging father and me, have agreed to this doctrine of the mechanism. If a machine can do what I once had to do, it can do it better simply because it can do it at all.

Oh yes I am taking the easy way out, and still I get people telling me that I'm doing well, that it's hard having an aging father and "caring" for him. And they're right, but only in the sense that it's difficult to manage my desire for moral rectitude. Like tomorrow morning, when the alarm goes, I'm going to roll over and sleep for another half hour, because I can.


Ride report
in:     -7'C wind calm (facing East)
out:   -2'C wind 10 ks NE

The aging lover and his neighbour

Life has treated him well. Quite well in fact. So well that on his ninety-first birthday he awakens at seven in the morning, arises from the bed, relieves himself, washes his face and hands, dresses, and steps out the door for a morning walk. The divine one, even as he has aged, deports himself with style. He maintains a fashionista's flare. He could be featured on The Sartorialist, if he had chosen to live in a large metropolitan centre with a fashion sense.

Which he hasn't. Magdalene sleeps in his bed as the ancient of days walks down the graveled road that leads south from the acreage. His memory of her and the remarkable means he employs to keep her young and virile make him smile now. With years of practice they have become compatible lovers and more. It's a clunky way to say it, but be aware that loving with the body has always been a clunky affair that novelists and poets make efforts to disguise with verse.

Of course he knows that only he, the great old lover, has achieved anything like the ebb and flow of their lexicographic imaginations with his actual body. And to achieve it he's had to convince Magdalene to work with him on demand. To be fair it must be a woman like this who can and does demand the freedom to roam and practice in other fields, as it were - that are always ripe onto harvest, she says, looking down at the new body he gives her freely every day.

What can he do but accept her meanderings, for when he stands at the door and knocks she knows his voice, and later he knows hers? For he brings not peace but a sword, and this enlivens her. She becks to his call, and he gives and gives and gives, as though the wound in his side has offered him insight into her femininity. His one peccadillo is to keep an open bottle of wine moldering on the bedside table. He's gotten into the habit of taking a swig before he finishes. This vinegar on his breath provides the one annoyance for her, as he sets himself on to finish the night.

When he returns to his bedroom she still sleeps, though he has an inkling that this may be a ruse. She's told him several times before that one day she'll stop this gravy train. This aging lover though, doing unto his neighbour as she would do unto him, maintains faith in his own maxims. No sounding gong or clanging symbol he, for he will come unto his own whether she receives him or not. Further, he expects also that one day she will say to him, as he gasps for the seventy-seven thousandth time, I thirst, when my love, when did I see you thirsty and give you drink?


Ride report
in:      -8'C wind calm - facing east
out:    3'C wind calm - facing southeast

As the four horsemen ride

Alarm
You look up at it and disbelieve it for a moment until you remember that you reset it just before you went to sleep. This you did because you intended to get as much out of this day as you could. Though you love the comfort of the sheets you understand that more important things await. You rise, head to the toilet to relieve yourself, return and dress for the commute to work.

You pack your bags
Just as you do everyday you make sure that you have the right clothes - lately matching, even stylish dress, has become significant for you - and then you pack your lunch as well. Always something like a sandwich, or some portable leftovers and two pieces of fruit - an apple and a grapefruit. By this time you've spent about fifteen minutes awake and the house is still gloomy. You'll drink coffee when you get to work. Breakfast is not necessary for you. Not today. Not at all, except on the weekends.

On the way in
The wind pushes you along from the south and, though the radio has said that the temperature is colder than minus ten Celcius, you feel warm as you pedal steadily north. There is no reason to pedal hard, but there's no reason not to, and the exercise feels worthy. You shift down a gear and pedal harder. Your breath comes in shorter and your heart begins to thump. These things make the effort of the bicycle ride well worth the trouble. As you turn to the west and the wind addresses you from the side, your pedaling cadence slows and your breathing becomes more laboured, but you do not give yourself the luxury of shifting into an easier gear. Not on this day. At one point you hear hooves behind you but when you crane your neck around you find that you are completely alone on this gravel road. Into the east the horizon remains gray.

You arrive
By the time you've stowed the bicycle, placed your lunch in refrigerator, started a pot of coffee, and stood under the hot water in the shower room you've been awake for more than forty-five minutes. You dry yourself, apply deodorant, dress and lace up your shoes and step out into the hall. Now you are not alone. You smile congenially at the first one you pass and begin to speak but catch yourself. Why should anyone know? What good will it do them? What good is it doing you? By this time you've done nothing different in spite of your firm understanding of the looming apocalypse.

You imagine
It had to be this way. Someone was going to get it right one of these days and it might as well have been you. When you first realized it you felt the burden of knowing and thought that it behooved you to let your friends and family know too. You thought of the posts you would make on facebook and the group emails you'd deliver, but the fear of being the fool stopped you. How could it be your responsibility? You are not the reckoner. You are just the one who knew. Who predicted it, and was right.

At lunch you smile
The leftover pizza tastes as good as it ever has. You tell your co-workers sitting around the table that you could be content with leftover pizza for every lunch. Just as you finish one of them launches into a long and sordid tale of the hitches and near failures of the medical system. You smile and nod and affirm and offer an answer to the problem all the while knowing that she should have stayed in a little longer and stayed on the morphine. Not that this is a bad day, but if you were offered a morphine drip for this one day, you'd consider it, given what you know.

Drinking the last coffee
Just after lunch you finish the last cup of the day. That's the way it is with you. You lose your taste for it when you're done with it. It's handy. As though your body has conditioned itself against excess. Except of course in your knowledge of the coming of the end of things. You are hearing echoes of hooves now. You find yourself staring over people's heads as they speak to you - listening. It's so obvious. Don't you hear anything, you say to a co-worker that always saves a sly smile for you. Maybe there's more, you think. To that. Someday. Then you remember what day it is, and you head off down the wide windowed hallway on your own. To be unfaithful on this day would be such a cliche.

Uneventful in the extreme
This is how he answers his wife's question as he arrives. His breath comes in rasps as he says it. He's been riding hard into the east and he has seen the red horse riding low out of the east. Just as he turns south the rider passes him saying "Peace to you brother. Though you have ridden hard you will not find redemption." Heading south now and still looking back at the red, he raises his gaze in time to swerve out of the way of the black rider who passes with the howl of the wind. You ride for fifty yards before realizing that both of your tires are completely flat.

You can't imagine it
The remaining two horses join the pounding chorus heading into the west, but you have had your fill of these harbingers. All day you've doubted yourself, yet here is the evidence that you can't dispute. Now as the snow falls, the wind howls, and the temperature drops you're just as surprised as your wife who you take up in your arms, though you are out of breath from all this living and knowing. You take her up in your arms and you say to her that the preparation of food can wait. There will be other feasts to attend. "For now," you say, "the only feast that one should dine on is this last banquet of carnal pleasure."

"You're out of your mind," she says, smiling.

"I'm out of my mind!" you say as you carry her across the threshold and draw her to you, falling down together, onto the bed.


Ride report
in:     -14'C wind 15ks S
out:   -5'C wind 10ks S

Photographs

First
(Three ways of looking at a photograph of an aging father, if you were to take one.)

One view
The aging father sits low in the high-backed hospital chair. The cotton gown reveals the hairless red and white of his old smooth skin. You could be embarrassed by this human revelation, but you're bigger than that, and you take in other details as well. A cotton flannel sheet covers his lap and falls over his knees. One foot rests on a low stool and you notice the skin on this leg - red where the bandage does not cover it. Seeing this may give you a clue as to the source, or the result, of his illness. Knitted slippers warm his feet, and he appears to look at them as his right hand clutches at the flannel sheet. With his left hand he grips the wooden armrest, but you can't be certain in what direction he's exerting force. Does he want to stand up, or push himself deeper into the chair. With his white hair wafting above his scalp he might, in fact, have just fallen from a way up in the sky, down into this chair.

It's important to note that the aging father does not look at the camera in this photograph, which limits what can be said about it.

Another
On the left of the photograph a nurse stands in her uniform, bent slightly at the waist. She could be offering a helping hand, as her right hand has begun to reach forward. The way she pushes her neck forward makes her look motherly and ingratiating. I mean this in a charitable way. She wants to help.

On the right of the photograph another middle-aged female, perhaps a daughter, balances on the edge of the chair's armrest. With both her hands she wrings a white cloth over a small blue plastic bowl that rests on a portable wheeled table. She could be Mary Magdalene, had Christ lived to be ninety-one years of age.

Finally
Behind the hospital chair in which the aging father sits, there stands a figure that you might easily lose sight of, the wires, tubes, and bags wound around the thin chrome pole-stand conceal it. The face of the figure has a mouth of red digital numbers. Don't be fooled by this disguise. Death has a way of showing up, even unbidden.

Second
If you enter a hospital bathroom because you need to use it, after you've finished you face the mirror. What you see will surprise you. You will smile at it as you wash your hands, bringing water up to your face and running wet fingers through your hair. You will nod and say to that face, as the water cools and drips from it, "I'm not so bad off after all."

Third
There are two of them in one frame. That's me in the top one, walking and holding the hand of a young father who holds, in his other hand a thirty-five millimetre camera with a rather large flashbulb contraption attached to it. This young father looks down at me, reaching out from the bottom left corner of the photograph. I'm holding his middle and index finger and the grass is green. The rows of sweetcorn in the vegetable garden behind us tells me that it's June or early July. It's hot, but it's lovely. I'm sure that we're walking on a Sunday, since the young father looks unhurried and attentive.

I'm featured in the bottom one too, grinning and holding up a disinterested brown and white puppy. A year older now, but still framed on the left side of the image, I stand on my own. Behind me a truck, and beside that, standing in front a person seated with his hands around his knees and wearing a striped shirt, a bicycle on a kickstand.

In both photographs I'm squinting up at the camera in the white midday sun.