Whoops -- hard to believe so much time has elapsed since this journal's last installment. Not that the silence has been deliberate (or that people have been hammering at my virtual door jonesing for an update). Two, three days back I made several attempts to pull together what passes as my thoughts and dump them here in reasonably coherent fashion. The result: pure, blithering, unintentional comedy gold, me finally giving up when my word processing program decided to have a seizure, wiping out a paragraph or two of ponderings in the process (producing a brief blizzard of colorfully foul language from yours truly). Which I took as a sign to call it a day. Sometimes you have to know when to fold up your tent and slouch off into the metaphoric night.
It continues feeling strange to find myself out in the middle of northeast Vermont's snowbound hills instead of Madrid's noise and energy. There is a part of me that experiences this time here as an especially long session in a sensory deprivation tank. A beautiful, endearing sensory deprivation tank, but still -- awfully damn quiet.
I returned from Montreal just in time to miss my downhill neighbor Mo's 84th birthday bash. When I stopped in the next day to grovel with apologies and see how he was doing, I found him looking tired, a little strained. Normal, I suppose, for someone in his situation: three days post-installation of a pacemaker. His heart had developed a tendency to slow way the hell down during the long Vermont nights, slow enough that implanting a cardiac metronome seemed like a good idea.
He was sitting at the kitchen table paging through an outdoorsy magazine when I showed up, his live-in sweetie off driving a schoolbus. Home alone, feeling kind of isolated, especially in the wake of the previous day's houseful of birthday partyers. He let me know he was going to be home alone a lot during the next couple of weeks, told me to stop by any time I felt like it -- sounding like an indirect way of asking for company.
I walked down there one afternoon during the following week. Both cars were gone, but I made my way through front-yard snow and dog poop to knock on the door just for the hell of it, just in case one of his kids or grandkids had temporary use of his vehicle, leaving Himself in the house, at loose ends. The response: silence. An eerily deep silence, unusual in a house where the two resident canines generally make an unholy racket at the sound of knuckles on door or footsteps on porch. More knocking, more silence. And at some point Mo's chubby beagle, Sally, appeared in the kitchen window, staring quietly out at me, expression strangely mournful. I talked to her, she gazed back, eyes sad. When I finally gave up and returned home, I found myself feeling strangely disquieted, decided to return the next day to make sure Mo was all right.
And I did. And he was. More than all right –- spirits and energy high, his body feeling better than it had in some time, the pacemaker doing its job and then some. Him talking about resuming the long daily walks he used to take up the road past this house, something that disappeared a few years back as various ailments took hold. He cut a priceless image on those walks -- a long, gnarled walking stick in one hand (longer than Mo was tall), the end of Sally's leash in the other, the dog jerking him in various directions as they moved along the road, Mo attempting to maintain a straight course, a creature about 1/10th his body weight dragging him pretty much anywhere it felt like. I'd love to see that kind of vaudeville pass here on a daily basis again.
He's a tough old bird, Mo -- it would not surprise me if he proved to be indestructible. It wouldn't surprise me if he wound up outliving everyone else on this hill, cackling gleefully while shooting squirrels off our headstones.
In the meantime, winter has returned to these parts. Proper, ass-freezing Vermont winter, not the strange, slushy global warming pseudo-cold-season we've been experiencing in recent weeks. A bit of a shock to the system, but beautiful.
And the days roll on.
España, te echo de menos.
rws 5:47 PM [+]
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