Can't Stop

...staring at this photo.

still from Heima

Ceci n'est pas une vie

  
She made a monocle out of the house key ring and stared at him for several minutes, succeeding—but just barely—at suppressing fits of gleeful, childlike laughter while waiting for him to look up at her, having felt the pull of her gaze; he never did.  He had moved his work out into the dining room, finding that the long mahogany table was better suited to his blueprints than to dinner parties of five couples and ten place settings.  His gaze on his work was intense and steady; steely gray eyes scanned the pages, paying no mind to the woman at the other end of the table. 

When she realized he wasn’t interested in her game, she pretended to engage in his.  Taking a pen from the front pocket of her apron, she sketched a five-sided house the size of a half dollar on a corner of the nearest page of blueprint paper, and on the inside of the little house she drew a heart, incessantly retracing the two lines, leftsiderightsideleftsiderightside, until the rhythm of it all had created a hum in her brain.
  
Pausing, with her pen anchored to the bottom point of the heart, she looked along the length of the table.
  
“Y’ever think maybe…that maybe it’s getting to be a good time…I mean, it’s been two years now and you’re doing well at work…and most married people by now, you know…”  He had yet to look up, but she could tell from the quickening pace of the puffs of smoke issuing from his pipe that it wasn’t worth the effort trying to sell him on something she wasn’t convinced she even wanted.  She only knew that by now she was supposed to want children and so assumed it was something she had to mention, a topic not unlike the suggestion of a new restaurant, which, come to think of it, usually became an awkward point of contention for them anyway.    
  
She let the silence cloud her eyes and instead pictured a scene from five years before when they had first met, standing together outside the university library, smoking cigarettes; he had been wearing a lightweight trench coat in the mid-February freeze.  She’d assumed then that he was some kind of artist, too poor to afford adequate outerwear and such the thinking-man as to be able to transcend the temperature and find warmth in the furnace of his musings.  Enchanted, she’d asked him for a cigarette, which he lit for her with a match plucked from a matchbook bearing the name of a nearby literary café.  She didn’t realize then that he was the one who was supposed to be enchanted by her, nor did it ever occur to her that he might have actually been painfully cold standing there in that trench coat or that his favorite book was No Time for Sergeants, with Stone’s Love Is Eternal a close second.
  
When he first saw her, with those bright eyes and straight teeth, he immediately pictured her assimilating nicely within the designs he had laid out for his life.  She had great potential anyway, just like a vacant lot between Spring Garden and South Streets.  Tall and slender, the pleats on her skirt were perpendicular to her patent-leather belt, which he could only see because she had forgotten—or neglected—to button her winter coat, an oversight that had given her the likeness of a bird in flight as she ascended the stairs to the library.  He couldn’t believe she had perched next to him and asked for a cigarette.
  
Between puffs, she had spoken to him of her father, explaining that she had taken up smoking because she loved sitting around him while he smoked his pipe.  If it had been acceptable for a woman to walk around smoking from a pipe, she said, she would have, but she settled on cigarettes instead.
  
She remembered how he had switched over to smoking a pipe shortly after their wedding, about a month after they’d moved here from Philadelphia.  Their marriage had been the end of art museums and libraries and the beginning of a tyranny.  She had dropped out of college when they’d married—no major sacrifice, as she’d never really felt that she belonged in that realm—and he’d taken up smoking a pipe.  In a daze, she watched him puffing away until the image on her eyes had become a watercolor, and she thought of that painting.  "This is not a pipe," it said to her, poking her in the ribs like something was supposed to be funny, a joke.  But it is a pipe, right?  She knew that it was a pipe.  Either she didn’t have the imagination to understand or she didn’t have the patience to smile kindly and move on. 
  
She put the pen back into her apron on her way to the coat tree by the door, sending nonsensical questions his direction as though she were testing sound levels on a microphone:  "Have you ever climbed to the top of a hill just to see the sun rising out of the valley below?  Or maybe, have you ever walked a path just to see where it ended?  Do you even remember my middle name?"
  
In the silence that followed, she exchanged her apron for his trench coat, first taking her pack of cigarettes out of the pocket and leaving just one for him.  With her pen, she wrote a good-bye note in five words on the cigarette: "This is not a cigarette."  What did it matter that he would probably never see it?  She gathered some sense of satisfaction from the jab, but maybe she really only felt vindicated for having stolen his beloved trench coat.

Foregoing the necessary umbrella, she slipped out of the door of the apartment carrying nothing more than her pocketbook.  Unsure of where she was going, thinking only of finding a pipe for smoking and picturing a downtown lunch counter, she stepped into the street, her image blurred out between the drops of rain and the headlights of oncoming traffic.

If he heard her leaving, he made no movement to stop her, instead going about the task in front of him, looking up only when he smelled the chicken potpie burning in the oven.

100 Years Is Never Enough

Today is my grandpa Mudd's one-hundredth birthday.  To celebrate, I put my morning mug of just-poured coffee into the microwave for an extra bit of heat, thinking, as I lifted the deep black liquid to my mouth, That is H-O-T very warm.

If he were still alive and well, we would have taken him to breakfast at Burkempers, a place I haven't been since I was eight, at which age it felt like our food took an hour and a half to reach the table and the bathroom was dark and scary.  I can remember Grandpa charming all the waitresses, who called him "Mr. Mudd" and treated him like their favorite uncle.  Mom would have presented him with a bag of fun-size Snicker's, which he would have torn into with panache, leaving a handful of wrappers in his empty coffee cup.

After a stop at the bowling alley next door, the rest of the day would have been spent visiting friends and relatives and taking many smoke/Snicker breaks before the night's festivities.  I'm not sure what we would have done to celebrate, but I know G-pa would have eaten a plateful of cookies and cake 'n' ice cream before opening presents--another jacket just like the old one he's got on, a box of Crunch 'n' Munch, fresh white socks with "MUDD" already printed on the toe...

I still remember the way he smelled.  I'd try to describe it, but that seems somewhat cliché.  But I can smell him still, even after he's been dead ten years.  And with that smell comes the feel of his rough cheek against my lips and his rounded shoulders inside my embrace, his soft, black hair, sticking up a little in the back because he's just taken his hat off after being outside for a cig...

I'm suddenly remembering things I haven't thought about in years, and I realize just how much I miss my grandpa.  I wish I could have known him before his mind went and I was put in charge of writing down his story for him to read later and remind him of his name.  It's likely I'd assumed then that if he just read what I'd written in his diary--mundane anecdotes about his neighbors at the nursing home or a statement about his favorite meal--he'd remember on his own.  It was the same case with the photo album of Andy and I posing at different spots in the first nursing home Grandpa lived at, collected in an album with strips of paper reading things like, "Rebecca walking down the hall from the dining room" or "Andy standing in front of your apartment," stuck in the sleeve along with the picture.  Anyway.

My grandpa Mudd was somewhat of a rockstar.  No, seriously!  I can't describe it; it's just the truth.  In the days between his death and funeral many stories were shared from his life, and he has since been immortalized in my memory.     

If he were here today, I'd be sure to sneak him a chocolate chip cookie topped with a spoonful of peanut butter and a pipe for smoking, as long as he promised to give me a few puffs.

Maybe four years before my time, this was most likely taken by my mother.