Memoirs of a Flower Child - George S Geisinger (the best books to read txt) 📗

I've had to get along without her all day, but that's not true. She's all but a stranger some ways, and already I'm lost without her by evening, an hour after I've left her to do as I please. I try to imagine what I did before I met her, before we'd sit and I'd talk while she smokes cigarettes outside in the courtyard. I wonder what life was before her I met her, as if I've forgotten. I don't even remember how we met. I only know I talked about being lonely, about not having someone to talk to. I talked about not talking.
Now I'm writing about not knowing what to write.
I was wrong when I was young. I can't get along without company. I need people.
She wanted to go hear the live music in the lounge after lunch. I took the first elevator I could get after I got her wheelchair in through the outside door, and came home quietly enough, with my very musical tail between my legs, getting out of Dodge, talked to my brother awhile on the phone. I told the woman the music would make me cry. It's true, too. I feel so bad about letting my music go lately. It's not fair to my talent to let it go. I need my music. It's not fair to God's talent.
I can't help wondering what my life will be like with a guitar in the apartment here. People come and go around here all the time. There's really no privacy for such things as introspective music composition, playing only for my own amazement. I hope I can get so I can play with some reassurance soon enough to suit me, after I get the instrument. I don't want to be a has-been for the rest of my life, musically. I'm still the musician; it's not dead in me. I'm not dead. My instincts continue to thrive, my training is second nature by now. I'm getting the guitar to have an instrument to relate to. I'm getting the instrument to help me.
The sun is down past the trees in the west now. My clock has the volume up, I guess you could say, ticking like the clock it is, with an attitude. It's a wonder there aren't more people hanging out in the hallway, looking for life outside my door, at the medication counter of the retirement community, laughing it up on payday.
She was grumpy today, soured at the service in the dining room as always, she said. I wonder how I get along sometimes, feeling lost and alone so often, with plenty of people around. I called here and there on the phone, but my brother was the only one to answer. The woman says she doesn't know her phone number. It doesn't even sound like a strange thing to me, that she doesn't know it. She survived a burst aneurism in her brain. If she's grumpy, or doesn't tell her phone number for any old reason whatsoever, it's perfectly alright with me. Besides, I don't think I've any room to complain, anyway I look at it. She's listened and read everything I've thrown at her. Then she asks for more writings, saves my seat out in the smoking area outside after a meal. I'm only finding out a little bit about what she has to say, for a change. We're busy being people together.
(It's not the end of the world until Saturday, according to one of my buddies, anyway. He predicts the Rapture of the Saints sometime this Saturday. This is Thursday night, and he doesn't answer his phone tonight. Maybe the Lord was early. Maybe I wasn't invited. Now it's Saturday night, and all this doomsday stuff seems to have fizzled.)
It's getting late again, though.
Why I cannot stand the workings of my own mind any better than I do is a constant mystery to me. My brother says it's my illness. I'd like to be able to feel good about myself more often, to feel good about my friends and the people I know, about the things I do. It's as if I feel really rejected because the phone doesn't ring, while I go about doing exactly what I want to do, which is write this dribble into my laptop, practicing my writing all the livelong day and late into the evening.
I don't know what I want sometimes. I'm just being fussy here. I've got my sodas and my coffee. I've got my retired-writing-professor-friend, and a very nice personal lady friend, too, both cheering me on, especially about my writing. I cannot present either of them with enough original material to suit the three of us. Sometimes I look at the young lady and make a sincere effort see who she is, as a person. My buddy always talks to me about my idealizations of women. Women aren't what I think they are. I look at her and have nothing to say to her at the dinner table, and she catches me looking, thinking Lord knows what, gives me the evil eye, so to speak, like the youngster used to stick out her tongue at me when she'd catch my eye. It's alright.
I still find life to be very strange. I've been living a while now, but I'm still not accustomed to it. Life is strange. I keep waiting to sense more of a fulfillment, more of an essence of completion, reaching for that illusive reality. There's not a beverage or food that gives me a sense of filling me, no relationship that gives me the sense of fullness either. It's the same idea King Solomon wrote about in Proverbs in the Old Testament. It's all vanity, a chasing after the wind.
But it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Mr Rogers had it right, too. They were both men for their times.
I seem to write about my life almost exclusively. My life is my story.

***

A solitary man remembered the woman who had befriended him as he sat quietly alone in his apartment late one night. The way her body was rounded, softly feminine, the way she was womanly in every way. She had long since outgrown the girlish look about her. She was not thin and hourglass-like. Her figure was full of womanhood. She was responsible for herself, gladly mature. There was no trick there, no tease. Her body could have described a pregnancy at some unknown time in the past that was unspoken, even lied about if she'd chosen to lie, some untold time ago she could just as easily failed to complete a delivery, as kept it to herself in front of him; the one surprise only a woman or a girl can hold against the will of any man who cannot contain himself and his appetites. That almost cruel sentence of a sudden lifetime of responsibility falling from the softness of the woman's lap, a possibility of an untold depth of unending reality, untold uncertainty, an idea that that particular man had never fully understood.
It was beyond him.
The way she would sit quietly and listen as he babbled on and on about his lonely life would fascinate her. She would smile now and then, when he said something lighthearted, but mostly she would listen to his sadness. She was always listening, seldom speaking, entertained by the words of this man who didn't seem to want anything but to talk to her, talking as if it were something very personal he was trying to say or do, something abstract, and it was never clear to her what it was that could be his object behind his constant flow of words and memories, his ideas; his continuous generating of thoughts, as though he was trying to accomplish something important, possibly convince her of something.
But what?
He was sad a lot of the time. He had crystal clear imagery of a thousand tragedies, like life had dealt him so much heartache and injustice he could hardly contain the memory of it, while he would speak the ongoing contradiction of gratitude to be alive, inexplicably alive when it would have made more sense that something or other would have taken his life. It was clear his fates had stolen his very breath from the jaws of oblivion, like the thing that had happened to her, that one time her body had revolted against living. God Himself had stolen her demise away from the impossibility of continuing life at least once, and the man seemed to be able to remember that God had stolen his from the clenches of death a thousand times. He seemed to need – even delight – to talk about every one of those times, one after the other, as though his memory made him more alive.
She seemed to understand him, for all he could tell.
The man had odd habits. Reading stories that took only a half an hour to read from start to finish, crocheting like a little girl till late at night, keying his thoughts into his laptop when he ought to have been sleeping, drowsing all the livelong day in his armchair, when he could just as easily have been busy at the same time the rest of the world was.
He revolted at the idea of being like the rest of the world.
But he wanted to remember this feminine person in the late evening, as if it would bring her to him. It was fast becoming late at night. He'd slept all day, and the hour was immaterial now. He was not tired, and cared nothing for the passage of time. He wanted to remember her, the way her hair revolted against all her attempts at parting it. They had that in common. The way she would snatch an irony out of thin air, before he could consider such a thing, and her idea would be past him, out in the open air and gone before he could grasp it. He would remember later, and laugh like a little cheater, cheating her out of the satisfaction that he understood her irony anytime soon enough for her to know he got the joke.
He was slow on the uptake, but honestly laughed so heartily later, when they were together, it might have been reasonable to question whether he laughed or cried.
She wondered at his object, he supposed, but he wondered about it himself, what he might want, what he might hope for, what he might offer to this other singular human being. His humanity was full of suggestions, but he'd rather entertain her at her own preference of activities, smoking and sitting was just fine with him.
Having and being a friend was intensely important to him now. She was not a glamor girl, a wonder child of false impressions, like that callow youth he'd been betrayed by so recently, whose only interest in him had been the overly estimated possibility of his having money to pilfer with false hugs and false kisses. That was a girl. This is a woman we're considering here.
This woman was different than that girl, every bit an adult as anyone, and clearly no child of childish games, to his great relief. They would get together and