Thursday, July 10, 2008

Hot Days And Bits And Pieces

We've hit the high water mark of about 105 degrees around here and have settled into the 90's. We have dry heat-- the blast from a hair dryer type of heat-- and if you set up a few sprinklers to let this hot air flow through them before it runs across your skin, you can make a sit down on the back deck rather pleasant.

Or a nap in the grass in the yard.

The economy is keeping everyone from spending money on construction. Few loans are being taken or offered and the boys are all off doing small jobs and getting by. I've opted for the spend nothing, need nothing program of summertime laziness. A nap in the grass is free. So is a glass of water.

With time, I get to tinker. In the shop, on the pewter.

My fictional coma-man Walter still lives in my mind, and as an addendum to my ceiling cat post, here is a bit of Walter-- "the hospital-bed-bound recovering slumberer"-- and his a-musings...

From "The Lights Go Off, The Lights Go On"--

They tell me part of my brain was gooping out of a hole in my head and onto the street when they found me. The doctor says they scooped it back in and someone smooshed the skull over it and taped it down.

Later, they picked out small bits of tobacco and grass and dirty road gravel in 14 hours of surgery.

The doctors say they didn’t get all of me and some of me fell into the street and was trampled by those black boots with their Vibram soles. That part is no longer me at all and is gone for good, but lots of parts of me are still around and that’s a miracle.

I’m special they tell me because I didn’t leave when I was stomped to death. I stuck around somehow and breathed by their machine and waited for myself to come around again. I didn’t do this on purpose-- I had no intention of dying like I had no intention of living-- but the doctors and the nurses don‘t think like I do. They think I had a will to live and I don’t know what to say to that. I wasn’t there when all of this was happening to me.

In fact, I can’t remember being anywhere.

My daddy found my sister in her bed with her arms wrapped around her BooBoo and no heart beat and no breath. Her BooBoo was her fluffy friend with golden floppy ears and purple fuzzy nylon hair.

BooBoo was not quite a person and not quite an animal and not quite anything else. He was long and lean and floppy and my daddy said was buried with my sister in a small wooden casket in a cemetery out of town near where my Mom came from. I used to wonder if my sister was happy to have her BooBoo with her after she died, but now I wonder why my father put her BooBoo in the box at all? It made him feel better, I suppose, but I don’t think my sister wondered about her BooBoo or cared about her BooBoo after she died. I mean, if a coma is a dark and non-existent place where there is nothing, then death must be darker and even more non-existent. It’s all a matter of degrees.

BooBoo might have been better placed on a shelf in my parent’s house where my sister’s memory still had some meaning and where BooBoo still meant something to somebody whose lights were on.

The picture I now have of my three year old dead sister is of her skeletal remains, tiny and darkened and draped in a crusty tapestry of jerkied flesh, propped upon a synthetic non-decaying pink polyester pillow clutching her BooBoo with its golden floppy ears and purple fuzzy nylon hair.

On BooBoo’s face there is that same look of happy amazement it always had, its sewn-on eyes never blinking and its frantic happy smile never closing. If you pulled its string, it would still yell out in amazed excitement-- “Hey! What’s New In The Neighborhood?!”

If my sister were alive today, I think this ending would abhor her.

1 comment:

Cheesy said...

I wonder if purple hair decomposes?