thehypocrite

Saturday Afternoon 240914 2pm

An old woman is why we have stopped here today. She has spent her life worrying, angry and complaining. But the kindness of my friends drives them to stop and say kind things to her. To help with the dishes, to make sure she’s taking her meds and eating enough.

I, just a chauffeur today, sit idling in the car, AC blasting at 3 right into my face. Between the icy, dry forced air and my flayed heart, my vision is blurred with the lubrication of wavering emotion. And I start to think of this place as I knew it as a child.

The neighborhood is old like the woman. Though with less anger and bitterness. A once thriving part of town that has since fallen into inexpensive rents and disarray. Though there are many parts of town like this, few have the wet smell of the red mud river that snakes through this one. Late in the season as it is with so little rain, its flow is now unhurried and the pervasive odor is more sour than its usual fresh-rain-on-mud. Also distinctive to me because it is where I grew up. Stomping the dirt roads here and there and avoiding the older boys, the drunks and homeless that lurked in the parks even those many decades ago.

Across the street, about 25 feet from me, three men sit in a front yard. Each wears a truckers cap stained with sweat, both new and old. The grass wore away long ago, trampled underfoot and with white plastic folding chairs that are a jumble of clutter around a table that was likely once part of a very fine set of porch furniture. Several nondescript bottles of varying volume populate the table along with a very well-worn box of dominoes, not yet spilled for today’s gathering. The surface is visually unbalanced with a large, 5 gallon water jug. It is like the insulated igloo dispensers from my carpentry days more than 25 years ago, only this one fancier, with rollers and a retractable handle. It is probably better insulated too. It needs to be in these dog days.

The men appear to sit and chat languidly about nothing at all with nowhere to be and no expectations in the glowing late summer than to soak up one another’s camaraderie. I think their ages and mine are similar. Have we seen each other before? Before time took her pound of flesh (or gave it) and reduced all of our brilliant youthful vigors to countenances that are slowly draining of their color and elasticity as we each become the old age and treachery that would so readily outdo the youth and skill we all once were. Their faces glisten and shine this September day, giving them a quality of sculpted ebony. A comical contrast to my own appearance of unbaked dough.

One leans back and lets his arms dangle like wet noodles. He glances at me frequently. No doubt, he wonders 'Why is he staring at us?’. My shiny SUV, while not completely out of place here, is at least not coated in the glaze of dust that is everywhere during this dry time of year which makes me conspicuous. I think, ‘That is what artists do. Look, then look away, jotting little doodles of the life around them.’ He does not hear my inner voice and so continues to glance, and now, I am self-conscious. So my sketch becomes erratic and the details less.

I imagine they are discussing wives and girlfriends as one holds up a drink and says ‘may they never meet!’ And the men flash Ivory and gold with a hitching laughter that always gets more animated with drink. Likely, by sunset these laughs will be full on guffaws, more inebriation resulting in more animation.

But our meeting is over and we pull away to other calls this afternoon and I leave the three fellows to their dominoes and drink. Maybe the rest of that jumble of chairs got put to use as the sun set and the day cooled.