NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right. 124. Hand Writing.
White oak blossom, short, snaky, dark yellow danglers, falls and clogs gutters. Pollen is washed out of the air in rain that pours off the roof. The sun comes out. We walk along the driveway.
“Roses of Sharon are coming up everywhere.”
She bends, and with both hands, heaves up some deep-rooted seedlings from the side bed.
“Easy to pull them out of this wet ground.”
“Yes, I see a lot of redbud seedlings too.”
“Sure, and garlic mustard. That stuff can spread between blinks.”
“You have some milkweed there, look.”
Diddlie isn’t looking.
“This must be the coldest wettest Spring in years.”
She turns and looks up past the roof as we move on. Rain starts again. We cross the road from her driveway. One of the points of her umbrella sticks in the sleeve of her jacket, low on her wrist. She holds the umbrella away from her sleeve, out towards a strip of orange just above the horizon and releases it again. It opens and catches a cold gust which pulls it sideways.
“Let’s not do this!”
“You said you wanted to go to the Fauxmont Farm Market.”
“That was before this latest weather change. It’s too early. Wait until they have more stuff, next month.”
“Well, okay, but it is going to be sunny in a minute. Look over there.”
“It is too cold out here for May. What happened to global warming?”
“This is weather. Global warming is about climate.”
“It is about to drive me in the house.”
She turns and walks back to open her front door.
“Come on in. I have a little project for us.”
She unzips her purple slicker as we go down the hall to the kitchen. The Red Queen is perched above the stove on the old-fashioned plate rack. Diddlie hangs her umbrella on the doorknob, fills her ancient copper kettle and puts it over a high flame. The Red Queen notices the warmth as Diddlie takes off her slicker and flutters up from the stove with the rising heat to settle on her shoulder. Sliding off again in the instant it takes her to remove her jacket.
“Queenie, what are you doing?”
The bird flies off, to the top of the open door to the hall and Diddlie puts her jacket over the back of the vacant chair next to me, at her kitchen table.
“You remember my British cousin?”
“Ah, I remember you talking about him.”
“Okay, right, well, I just got three letters from him.”
“But I thought you said he had died?”
“He did.”
“So?”
“He died a year ago and the executor of his will posted these letters he left behind.”
“As directed, I presume.”
“Well, I don’t know that either, but they were in envelopes addressed to me and he never mailed them.”
“How odd! Did the executor read them?”
“Maybe, but I don’t think so. She said she found them sealed with stamps on them. See, look at these, Game of Thrones, series.”
The kettle whistles with a shot of steam and then a continuous rising note. The Red Queen takes off from the top of the door and lands on the curtain rail. When the whistle reaches its maximum pitch, Diddlie lifts the kettle and pours into her green pot. Sun is coming in the window and breeze-blown leaves animate the yellow wall with their shadows.
“You want milk and sugar?”
“No, well, what kind of tea is it?”
“Earlgrey, the real thing too. Not dust in a bag!”
“Nothing in it then.”
She sits and opens the table drawer at her waist.
“I don’t see the strainer.”
Gets up and opens more drawers under the counter by the sink.
“See, this is what happens when you are in the habit of using bags.”
“You might try a coffee filter.”
“Ian uses loose tea. I mean it has whole leaves in it. Tastes much better, and now I am into the leaf thing, big time!”
“SQWILGE THE BILGE!”
The Red Queen, says no more. Diddlie looks over at her.
“What was that Queenie? Oh! We can use that!”
She notices a small strainer hanging from its blue handle on a nail in the trim descending from under the parrot.
“Now for tea.”
She pours.
“Fred, I want to share some of this with you, okay?”
“Some of what?”
“This!”
Diddlie opens one of the envelopes secured in her fruit bowl by the weight two ripening mangos.
“Looks like a thick one.”
“I don’t know if I get it or not.”
The red Queen swoops over Diddlie’s head and settles on top of her jacket draped over the chair.
“OFF TO BED, OFF TO BED”
“No, not now Queenie, dear.
She pulls out a half a dozen, or more, small sheets of paper.
“Okay, so here’s what I am getting from, like, the dead, or from the past or something. I mean its spooky. Dated July 2018.”
Queenie cocks her head and listens.
“Dear Cuz D,
Sorry I was too busy to say goodbye properly. Your departure came at a critical point in cyberspace.
Now escaped its allure and reveling, quite lost, in a cloud of nostalgia. Got out my fountain pen. Remember those? Inky finger, gravity, flow, nibs, writing paper, blotting paper, maybe not. I’ll bet you used ballpoints. Much more high tech. Anyway, your recent visit took me back to our childhood, or mine at least, and your childhood visits. So, here are a few blobs of blue in recognition of your recent sojourn and sorry things romantic didn’t blossom forth for you when you were in Chester.”
“Yeah, well, I am going to skip that part, Fred. It’s embarrassing. He caught me in a lie. Enough said!”
Diddlie goes on reading silently for a few moments.
“You know his handwriting is still pretty good.”
“Some schools, don’t teach cursive anymore. I mean people are unable to sign their names!”
“They don’t need to! They all have phones, and passwords, and all that.”
“All we need are our thumbs!”
“I can’t do it with my thumbs.”
“Text, you mean?”
“Yes, it’s a verb, now.”
“Okay, okay, read on, Did.”
“We humans have done our best to kill each other all through history.… brought success…”
A low flying jet drowns her out.
“Did, start again, from ‘success’. Can’t hear a thing.”
“God! Heard that though! I thought it was landing here. Okay, try over.”
The A-bomb might have brought success, but we haven’t used it effectively yet. We might yet wipe ourselves out through bad land use, pollution, and climate change. Would our success be deserved?”
“Well, who’s to say? ‘success’? ‘effectively?’ I mean, what’s with all this death stuff?”
“He seems free to unburden himself, alright.”
“What about the weight on me?”
“Maybe that’s why he never mailed them.”
“SQWILGE THE BILGE!”
“Queenie, get off my slicker. Your punching holes in it with those claws.”
Diddlie waves the parrot off, but she side-steps along the chair-top, out of reach.
“No, I am not reading to you, shoo!”
Diddlie gets up and the bird flies off down the hall. She closes the kitchen door and
sits down again.
“He seemed isolated last spring when I was visiting. He told me he was into some online game.”
“Yes, he mentions cyberspace at the beginning. Those games can become an alternative to life.”
“Right, Ian said that’s what he needed, but also that he wanted to stop.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he stopped the wrong life! Listen to this:”
“Is writing a good in itself? I never post these letters. Will you get them? I don’t know.
What is the point if no one reads them? I am writing to something you left in me. The emotional residue of all our talk. The Romantics would call it your spirit, but that crap is over now. If writing doesn’t earn any money, it is outside the economy. Just my seed spilled on black tarmac of isolation, a useless road to masturbation! Well, at least masturbation might be a distraction.”
“His seed? Seed for what?”
“Seed for thought?”
“That’s too much for me. Masturbation? I don’t want to hear about it!”
“Must be part of his noctuary.”
“His what?”
“You know, journal of his night-life.”
“Let’s not go there.”
“He knew you pretty well.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he never mailed the letters.”
“Well, why write them?”
“That is what he is asking, himself.”
“He is mixed up. Even more mixed up than you are, with that blog of yours. Now he goes on about God. He seems kind of troubled, don’t you think?”
“Take it from a blogger, life can be troubling.”
“Okay, listen to this, I mean obscure!”
“The famous mustachioed philologist said,’ God is dead’! Well, his ghost is haunting some acquaintances nearby, who mentions Jesus so often that his name becomes nothing more than sound and then grows into monotonous noise. No, God is not dead. We have lost touch. We are looking for god through our inner telescopes. Constructed by the Ancient Greeks out of their new found logic and their Platonic dualism. Our current usage can’t hold it. We can’t talk sensibly about it. Yes, it, not the ‘Guy in the sky’ but the molten driver of all our energies. That’s where the ‘mustache’ was pointing until ‘Der Fuhrer’ gave him a bad name.”
“You know who he means by the ‘mustache’?”
“No Fred, and I don’t care. He never talks like this.”
“Yes, he is doing a brain dump.”
“Fred, do you have an ‘inner telescope’?”
“If he means introspection, then we all do.”
“’Molten energies’, he sounds like a sun-worshipper to me.”
“Yes, much metaphor.”
“Well, okay, could mean all kinds of things, I guess. So finally, he gets away.”
“I went to the beach. You know, trying to quit the computer game thing. Which beach was it? Can’t remember, but anyway, it was all pebbles and very hot. The waves were bringing in the tide full of plastic, waves of pessimism. After listening to all those rattling rocks, I went in and listened to the toilets flushing all through the boarding house. (All I can afford, these days.) Should have rented a caravan, more privacy. Have I sunk that far? No, I wasn’t listening. I was assaulted! Did everyone else have dysentery? An hour of that and I was in the car and away.”
“I just didn’t realize he was in so much trouble.”
“He seems thoughtful, and that can leave you troubled.”
“Why didn’t he have anyone to go with? You know someone to talk to and all.”
“Why, indeed.”
“He thinks I am his diary! Oh, listen to him rant about Brexit!”
“Brexit! Remain! Get out! Do something! What an absurd contraction. It is our national nostalgic fart, fruity to some and disgusting to others. We are riven with lies. They are crawling and wriggling about in our minds, consuming far too much time and heaving with life in Britannia’s cadaver.’ Britannia rules the waves,’ of nausea, that is Brexit, the emperor’s clothes, our vacuum of doom!”
“’Britannia’s cadaver, vacuum of doom’ How creepy! Is this a troubled mind, or what? Well, that’s enough.”
She scans another page and then, looks over to the shadows projected on the wall.
‘I can still see him, now. He isn’t much taller than me, with very thick black hair, gone grey. He is getting fat. His jeans are too tight, and he is wearing a dress shirt with open collar, yeah, and bulging buttons on his gut. You know, the backs of his hands, are kind of sexy.”
She looks back at the last page of the letter.
“Oh, wait a minute. This part really bugs me.”
“Too bad we couldn’t marry Did. What do you think? I know we are cousins but at least we used to get along. When, you-know-who, left me, I gave up on the idea of marriage. I was so taken with her voice. I thought, ‘I don’t care what it is saying. Just let me hear it forever.’ How long did we last anyway? It was too long. It wasn’t long enough. It was an impulsive decision we made together.
Probably the only thing we ever really did together.”
“How sad! He was kind of sweet and always was a little weird, even as a kid. There’s two more of these, not even opened! I always liked him though. I can’t imagine being married to him, oh no!
“Sqwilge the Bilge,” The Red Queen shouts through the door, from the hall.
