A Tote of Sticks

The first draft of anything I do is the one that has the Life in it – and then I start making it grammatically correct and taking out the dashes and the dots which I love so much – taking out the made-up words that say it better anyway – putting in commas so my imaginary critics have nothing to say – I’m the worst critic anyway, a trained editor of Life and licensed English teacher – and I feel by the tension in my neck that the Life is being drained out of me – blocked off – as though periods were sutures and semicolons were clamps, commas were scalpels and parenthesis were boxes where little bits of Life get held in check.

And then I have a headache and I want to throw it all away – the thing that made perfect sense when it first was born, first drafted – because I don’t want it boxed up like pictures cropped and trimmed and clarified to take out all the rubble of sticks in the background. Real Life is a run on sentence like a ghost that flows through walls, would never stop at lights or signs. Like ganglion, I get twisted in knots and confusion once the editor/teacher in me sets to the task – the nerves in my back can attest . . .

I took a walk yesterday after feeling this ganglion in my being, walked through a forested pathway that leads down to a lake where I take a few laps to see the herons and – this time of year, the geese should be arriving from Canada any day now, always a week or two before Thanksgiving – and on the forested path I saw an old lady’s purplish blue and whitish legs moving through some leaves and I ran over to see that a frail old lady had fallen. She was fine, I deduced after a few words, but she couldn’t get up – so I reached under her arms like I’d seen them do for my mother at the nursing home, and lifted her to her feet. She smelled like a dirty old stovepipe and stale crackers. “I’m steady now,” she said, and I let her stand on her own. “You sure are strong,” she said. The conversation went on for about 10 minutes – “I should be in a hospital, shouldn’t be living alone any more” – and she pointed out her house to me, a view of the lake I thought, and I learned all about her son who she said did the best he could for her -- those leaves in the yard really bothered her -- and that she couldn’t see to push the buttons on the phone to call anyone to clear them . . . so many details of her life . . .

She had a big tote full of sticks and she went about the task of picking up more sticks and putting them in the tote as we talked . . . so finally I told her I’d be walking around the lake and I’d be coming back this way if she needed me to pick her up again – we laughed – or anything at all, I said. I looked back up the pathway after a dozen or two steps to see her hitting one stick with a bigger stick to make it go into her tote full of sticks. I went around the lake just once and came back – but she had gone.

I dreamed about her all night . . . the son too . . . so many thoughts about life as it gets old and can’t see enough to push the buttons on the phone . . . starts collecting sticks in a bag . . . just feeling and sensing, as I lay in bed this morning, that ganglion of chopped up nerves in my neck and back like the old lady’s tote of tangled sticks.