I won’t wait until I’m old September 12, 1985

 

 It’s after noon.

I slept the morning away like a child, deep under the covers; it’s that cold.

The change of season sprung on me out of nowhere, a drastic drop from previously intense heat. I can’t remember about the change of other seasons, but this went quick. Newscasters, however, tell me this is normal.

Last week, when heat scorched us, they talked about setting records.

I suspect it has to do with the long wait for spring and how long it took for the earth to thaw have a particularly chilly winter.

It takes nine months to build a body in a womb; sometimes it takes only an instant to die. And it somehow seems unfair, time twisted up inside of us, distorting our sense of reality.

The sudden coolness disrupts the pattern I had accepted from too much heat. I don’t like it hot; I just got used to it.

I guess I just expect things to keep going on the same way forever.

I expected Garrick and Pauly, Lewis and Jewely to stay in Passaic forever, too, and though they left after Chet and Stella sold the complex five years ago, I got used to that existence, walking out my door and seeing their familiar faces, as if we had built a permanent settlement here in the middle of the ghetto.

When I was younger, in my teens, I appreciated Spring and Fall more than I do now, because they were somehow different, a jumble of hot and cold, rain and sometimes snow springing on me unexpectedly, changing day by day; I loved Fall more than spring because of the colors and the more dramatic changes. Spring always crept up too slowly, the landscape taking too long to resurrect from the death of winter.

Fall is always unexpected, just as dying is, and it scares me to think that I’m in love with the process of death rather than the one of birth.

This year confuses me since it has been a year of constant changes, of people stepping out of my life, Mary Ann leaving for the west, Pauly moving out to live with Rick, Dylan the night guard left, followed by Billy in July and Joe in August.

It has been a horrible summer in this regard, although it started from the start of the year, when Fran made it clear she didn’t like the way things were going between us. I drifted from one Dunkin to another and then back again, and from Dunkin to Fotomat, then back again as well, desperate to find a job that would allow me to create yet would not require me to starve. I either worked too hard to create or got paid too little to pay the rent.

Michael excuses his current lack of creativity by claiming that the real art only comes when we are old; we manage one piece of brilliant work when young, then sit on it until we master our craft.

This is a little like sitting on the edge of winter, driven to create by the fear we might not have enough time left to do so, a time when in retirement we have time to be free, but not a lot of time left to be free in.

I tell Michael he’s wrong that living and creativity are combined, reflecting our lives and the conditions we live in.

We are not merely fine tuning our craft for when we get old, we create as we go.

We are plagued with sudden changes in the weather, the ups and downs, the sideways twists and other stuff the tests our ability to create under fire, testing our creativity.

It takes a lot to sit before a typewriter for so many hours a day, pecking away, hoping that the result is more than just tinkering.

 

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