Channel 4

After sweeping the crumbs onto the floor, Samuel grabbed yesterday's local paper off the kitchen counter and departed to his usual spot in his usual seat at the gas station down the road. There he drinks his coffee with one sweetener and waits to talk to townies about the weather. "Sure is hot today," they say in the summer. "Sure is chilly out," they speak between their chapped lips in the winter months.

From the backyard, Melanie heard Samuel leave. She had just picked up the chair tipped over by last night's storm. She sits down in the recliner in front of the TV, the seat still warm from Samuel's morning in front of the news. This is Melanie's longest sit of the day. She was sitting in for a morning of daytime television. The phone rang at the end of a series of commercials, just as her first soap began, and a telemarketer chatted her right ear until yesterday's episode recap was over. She politely declined the saleswoman's offer to protect her home at a discounted rate with a new home security system. Her husband thought it enough to post a National Rifle Association sticker on the glass front door and a beware-of-dog sign in the backyard even though they had not cared for a dog since their son, their only child, moved away to college to read about the media. That was a lifetime ago.

The end of Melanie's first soap meant it was time for her medication. "MTWRFSS," it read. She popped opened Wednesday. "Hump day," she muttered to herself. That meant a weekend on the back porch watching the birds she could not name, save the hummingbird, was drawing near. Melanie found delight in the rapid flapping of their wings. She once read on the back of a bird feed bag that hummingbirds live such short lives because their hearts use up all of their beats trying to keep up with the rapidity of their wings. The opposite dynamic, the blurb noted, could be observed in turtles.

Melanie sat entranced by the soap drama until lunch, and she decided on her Wednesday usual—beans and sauerkraut. Samuel knew it was Wednesday when he smelled the lingering stench of sour croute. This reminded him that it was not Tuesday, which his old paper indicated. After Samuel returned from his outing and registered the invading smell, he found his way to the couch for a nap. Melanie heard a siren roar by outside, peaked through the blinds, and returned to her TV seat, and listened to ticking of the grandfather clock. She was already thinking about dinner. She arose from her chair, shifted through the boxes in the cabinet, emptied the contents of one, which were all bagged separately. Melanie did not need the directions on the back, and she threw the box into the trash.

Samuel rose at the first scent of grease, stretched for the remote, and turned on the TV in time for the 5:00 news. "Going to be nice tomorrow," he said. Soon enough dinner was served. 

An Unsound Method

Once in a Mexican restaurant I felt the table shake. I knew it was no earthquake in the typical sense, I was pretty sure it was not a salsa belch, and when my ears took the aftershock I glanced to my left and found what seemed to be a seven-foot giant—seventy percent legs—with even a more formidable perm. The man seated across from the woman exclaimed, "I'm not going to raise my children like my parents raised me," and the woman raised her hand as if going to slap the innocent child in the stroller on top of the table. She did not slap the infant, and I could not decipher what she said, but the violence of her gesture tells me she was saying something along the lines of "I'll slap the devil out of my child the first time he steps out of line."

I could not see the tender nature in this woman. Her voice reverberated with power and force, her stature projected intimidation, and her movements suggested a violence on tap. I watched them without trying to conceal my glare. Between their table and mine I felt some sort of protective barrier, like watching characters in a film, news anchors on the low channels, or people in a separate subway car through two layers of glass. Yet, that hand could have reared back at me. She had already violated the space I assumed as my own for the length of my sit for buying a burrito. In the end she filtered out of my peripheral and I finished my burrito while carrying my own conversation and left the child to live in a state of uneasy speech and gestures.

I exited the restaurant and thought of a mother zipping up her toddler's jacket on a windy day in February before school, the zipper catching two thirds of the way up and the child grimacing as his body jerked from the upward motion inhibited by a small out-of-place lining. 

Eavesdropping: This Side of Paradise

I was standing in line waiting to board my plane as a conversation behind me encroached upon my ears. A guy initiated a conversation with a girl. He was newly employed as a pharmaceutical salesman who came to Jersey for training. He'd studied business and finance—typical of a guy of his appearance and manner of speaking I contemptibly thought—at a university in Ohio, a "party school," he noted. He also said that he was a big drinker. She's in graduate school at NYU studying Occupational Therapy. She lives in East Village and was visiting a friend in Nashville. She was from Arizona and has never been to Nashville, to where I was going home. After the two exchanged their information on disease and medicine, the conversation made its way to alcoholism. According to a particular scale, four drinks a day make an alcoholic. The guy replied, proudly, that he was an alcoholic by those standards.

He said something about a piece of her clothing or accessory, and her reply was "you're observant." To which he replied, "Well, I'm a salesman." He told her he was a big drinker, and then after asking her what her book was in her hand (This Side of Paradise), he said "I'm not a reader." So I suppose he'll only know pharmaceutical sales, never himself.

I stopped listening to them after they finally learned each other's names. They were no longer no one and everyone I wanted them to be. They now had an identity, had become people with more complexities and layers that might very well discard my judgments and render my assumptions less credible or even invalid about them both. We separated as we boarded the plane, and I ended up next to two Nashville residents, a man a woman. The man dominated the conversation the whole flight, but I heard only muffled speech under the hum of the jet engines outside my window.

So I turned on my overhead light, adjusted it towards my lap, and reflected on what NY had said as I had scrambled across its streets the past week. I heard the wind playing the skyscrapers, the ghettos, and the Brooklyn Bridge. It played an album through the boroughs, through all the people and their homes. The tracks were diverse and eclectic.

Preparing to Bloom in the Spring

There is about ten feet of whitewater in this town,

And only three of it is on the way down.

It's brown thereafter, almost black

After a few feet more.

Two feet account for the first year here;

Two for the year when I first encountered

Homer through Keats.

The remaining three for the two I spent

Solitary, reading and writing

For myself—

For the melancholy, nostalgic, and activist types,

Sentimental tellers of truths and corruption.

Now I am not writing as the McDonalds cup

Or the Walmart bag captured by the gulf.

I am not even the cars gliding above

On the bridge that runs one direction

With a gps in the windshield.

I am not the birds either.

And after the whitewater darkened, when I was

Tossed into the muck after sliding down the grime,

I let the current wash me

And accepted my darkwater brethren—

More confused than ever, but willing

To let the late winter current—biting and perilous—

Carry me upstream to the City upon a hill

With some more rapids, with more whitewater

And more turbulence and fun. 

I am the fish that you can't see under

The dark stream with dull scales and broad gills

Swimming to each side continuously

Until I plunge down the next falls

Around the bend blocked by a cluster

Of trees on an embankment

Preparing to bloom in the Spring.

Paul and His Poodle

            My neighbors are three girls who won't wave, a guy who won't wave, and two other guys who won't wave. They are all around my age, early twenty-somethings—maybe older—self-absorbed and important, living in a tunneled universe—confused, afraid, and repellent. Only an amnesic middle-aged man, Paul, who walks the street most days, acknowledges me. He has a lot of experience hanging on his face. We talk about the same thing every time we meet out front of my faded house—his accident, a car crash. He walks his poodle with one hand and carries his cane with the other. I have never seen the man's eyes. I cannot see how he sees the road. I know only a little about his injury and consequent amnesia.

            Because of his ever-present sunglasses, I am not sure if he is ever looking at me, but rather still at the road as he turns his head in my direction, like he has this narrow vision that only reaches the end of the avenue, venturing no farther off course than the parameters of the pavement. The end of the avenue is in sight from my house. I wonder, "Is that as far as he can see in life, to the end of this pavement?" I think about his how far he carries himself in his mind. Do the depths of his imagination only run as far as the end of the road? Perhaps he wakes up and thinks only that far ahead. My imagination carries me deeper, too deep a lot of the time, and I find it difficult to construct my future. The amnesic man is held to create but a few hours at a time for himself. Paul's poodle is more patient than me hearing his injury story over and over. He pampers the dog with consistency, trained in Paul's monotony, which to the dog is stability, love, and comfort.

            I never see other neighbors talk to Paul. I see their TV's flashing through the blinds as they absorb their own realities.

            I sit on the front porch reading when no one is contaminating the air with anger and dispute. The urgent sirens, the discordant mix of birds chirping, the cars hovering past—none of it is bothersome, but I cannot read when people fight. But when I am at peace reading on the porch I notice my poor posture and my quick-to-ache back. I have slouched my entire life—always somewhat disinterested with what is happening. It is only straight when I sleep. I straighten up but just to slump again within a minute or two from fatigue. Then Paul walks down the road, waving, slumped over too, his cane in one hand and his dog's leash in the other. He waves; the poodle pays me no mind. They pass by, my back is tired, and I go inside to read on the couch in the living room. The room is too big, too spacey, and instead of moving to my room to my desk I reach for the remote. I watch movies on repeat until I go to work. I talk about those movies at work. My co-workers forget the titles instantly after telling me they have not seen them.

            I think about my posture, my crooked teeth and how I only smile enough to see them when I am happy enough, the movies I watched and the book I did not read. I think about the stories I never finished, about the graduate school applications I did not fill out, about the essays that could have been winners instead of runner-ups with one more patient revision. I have no idea where to step, what to step on, or how to dress while I am stepping. I worry. I am leading a simple life, but I know little about those who paint the brushstrokes. I think about my neighbors who will not wave to me, and Paul walking his path. I remember that not too long ago I did not know Paul's name. He told me when we met but I did not listen, because I was skating and I was thinking about skating when he spoke his name and shook my hand. It was only recently that I shook his hand and looked him in eye through those sunglasses. I knew then that he was looking at me.

            I think about my neighbors who will not look at me, who will not wave at me. I think about what I will do tomorrow, and the future then does not seem too terrifying. Tomorrow reaches to the end of the road, and if the road circles back then at least I will have been distracted for some time, waved at some people who are distant neighbors, and shaken hands of people whose names I will remember the first time they tell me. Experience will hang on my face, and I hope to be able to tell about those experiences. With T.S. Eliot in mind, my trousers are already rolled, but my hair has not grown thin.