First, I look out the window to see a man in an orange, yellow, silver vest, the type for road crew and now the Costco set that buy them as walking accessory, the new left who throw themselves in front of speeding cars imagining that if they’re killed in the solid lines of the glittering crosswalks they’ve served the community in some non-violent, activised way. These are the places of retired wealth who claim to be living simply, shop-bought organic.
I point in which way I’d like to go, to the clown dressed man and his stop sign, down towards the nine o’clock appointment with white shoes, the non-for-pay, state crisis worker I’ve been seeing for some years now, for no very particular reason except that he has become an anchor of nothing-styro in the seafoam of not being able to unstick myself from long-held sticks, perhaps century-long beliefs?
Then, it was another patch of road crew work at the Fort George Brewery, sticky situations when you have to rip up the plumbing inside of a wrought-iron-fenced rose and fennel garden. I see a white haired woman in hot pink racing on her handicap cart towards the barricade, but I have no time to stop and watch the crash of talk or body beyond that. Will she be another of these handicaps that will test the disabilities act by riding her go-cart into a pot hole under the crane that drops an ingot of steel, okay, I know I’m exaggerating now, will drop a long length of PVC pipe that scrapes her eye glasses off of her face and broken, out of arms-length, into the pit.
And, then, after circling the building for no parking, a blonde nurse with bouncing boobs she can’t keep held in her camel-colored-cardigan pitches herself into the white lines, I slam on my brakes and she doesn’t even look at me. The elevator is out of order and I must walk four sets of stairs and that fat man I meet in there tells me they’re forcing us to get our exercise this morning as I suck in my stomach and my own boobs so we don’t touch in our passing. Five after, I am there, a sitting duck in the waiting room, but must wait until ten after for the giant tennis shoes to peek out from behind the heavy door, come and invite me in.
Better Homes and Gardens, I read through the screened, metal holder bolted to the wall. I thought a holiday issue, three wise men, but how strange they’d be doing a nineteen seventies religious affiliated cover? Realizing they must not be, I imagined they might be three sweet, bread loaves and there inside will be the recipes, very tiny print, near the back. But upon squinting my eyes I read Happy Fourth of July this November morning and realize that these are not three wise men, but hotdogs with various ketchups and mustards and relishes.
Another woman, the only other, also waiting, is younger and pretty wearing bedazzled jeans and she has her own cup of overflowing coffee she’s brought from home. I had spoken out loud to myself before leaving home that I didn’t need to bring my own mug of coffee, I could leave it on the counter and have more after, after all, my teeth white after brushing. And this younger version smiles at me and I back and I marvel at her hope and happiness in this place of no help and promise of everything, nobody is turned away.
I smell her perfume covering her morning cigarette and think of how I always liked that smell, how I no longer smoke, but like to, how my father told me once I smelled like a French whore, yes, indirectly, but it was after I’d worn his long, burgundy wool sweater over my striped peg legs to school and he’d smelled it in front of my mother, his face cramping disgust, bringing to baring his crooked, yellowing teeth as he brought it to his nose and made his declarations.
Once a smiling teenager from a port town, Seattle, Bothell, the states of the rich by water, now a drying husk of only-just dreams in the desert, sent overseas to be leveled in Vietnam and I was his daughter.
Side note: Geographically speaking, my home state was once covered by ocean and seas, a place once at sea level now with elevations ranging between 2000-13,528 feet, hence the pic of where once a sea...