Spring Commute

Posting a new-ish piece of writing that I've been meaning to edit.  Comments welcome!

 

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Spring Commute

 1.

Heading down the 401 with the Barbaras and Bonnies and Brendas before seven in the morning.  The sun is still low in the sky, just a suggestion of light climbing the tops of the trees.  All the women named Barbara and Bonnie and Brenda drive sensible, North American cars, Regals and Luminas and LeSabres.  Their make-up looks practised and sedate, their suits appropriate and professional.  They are beating the traffic, going to the places where they hold responsible jobs in office administration, finance, human resources, but there’s something around the eyes or their grip on the steering wheel, something pursued and worried.  It’s as if they are dogged, even on the morning commute, run to ground by the Lisas and Kellys and Jennifers nipping at their heels.  As I pass Barbara (or maybe Bonnie or Brenda), she clutches the wheel, eyes steely and straight ahead.  No matter how much faster I go, I get the impression Barbara is miles ahead, ready and girded to meet her pursuers.

 2.

Monday morning.  Another spring commute.  To ease the boredom, I start to take a body count.  Putting aside the parts of corpses, the clumps of hair glued to the asphalt with guts, some of the corpses reduced to woolly sweaters discarded on the road, indefinable carnage, London to Woodstock looks like this:

Raccoon, raccoon, rabbit, raccoon, deer, possum, raccoon, raccoon, raccoon, groundhog.

I’ve barely crested the hill, Woodstock spread out across the saucer of its valley like an apron draped on a warm lap, when the sky warms like an oven element.  On a morning like this, who could maintain a death toll?  I look to the shoulders and start counting the strips of discarded tires from transports.

1, 2, 3, 4 …

3.

Traffic thins so I contemplate the morning drive. 

Don’t get me wrong:  I feel a kinship for the Barbaras and Bonnies and Brendas.  But as I pass out of Oxford County, I drive into an imaginary landscape.  A gauzy blanket of fog lies atop the sleeping fields of soy and corn, juvenile plants wriggling their toes in the rich earthy bed.  This is a dream place, or a place I dream.  I start to imagine the Barbaras as the roadkill, the tires of their Regals and Luminas blown out, scattered on this asphalt ribbon.  In this imagined geography, passing, passing, are we as good as the strewn remains of the dead?  Are we as good as dead?  Am I just another casualty of the commute, another bit of the flotsam, weighed and considered and preyed over by ministering crows?  I am turning this around in my head and driving almost unconscious amidst occasional swirls of ground fog, for the moment, making good time.

Back from the dead and disappeared ...

After some time, I felt compelled to put something new up.  Not sure why, really.  Perhaps I've broken free of the grip of self-doubt and excuse-making.  Regardless, here's a piece that I wrote some time ago, on a now distant warm August day.  Not sure if this is a return, or just a Christmas card from an all-but-forgotten old friend.  In any event, I hope others might find something they like.  Having just re-read it for the first time in a while, I realize it does suffer from maudlin romanticism, but I still think it may have some good bits.

This is for Char, who believes in me when I don't believe in myself.

 Enjoy.

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End of the vacation

 

You kissed me violently and threw your head back with a laugh, kicking off across the top of the pool like an otter or some half-glimpsed siren.  I sat in shallow water at the foot of your wake, small waves lapping my lips.  Sparrows averted their eyes, before flying away.  The breeze came up and filled the sail of clean sheets on the clothes line, lifting up the day as if we might take to the high seas, set a course for uncharted waters.  You gestured to me from the other side of the pool, inviting.

I had just read the story of a woman who built her bed above the tomb of her husband beneath the bedroom floorboards.  Taken too soon, he’d always promised he’d never leave her or the home they’d made together, and she took him perhaps too literally.  Slept every night next to him, until she would eventually join him again.  It was gruesome and romantic, in equal measure.

You kept gesturing me to your side.  I was not a strong swimmer, and you knew it.  The breeze kicked up tiny breakers between here and there.  It was the last day of vacation.  The last day of too many cigarettes and too many beers in our scorched yard.  I felt sun-weakened and paper-thin, parched.    You latched me with your eyes, and the wind blew up a gale in my ears, filling the sheets, and the pillow cases looked like hot-air balloons.  I could taste something that was ending as the pool-water formed waves, crashing on my head.  Through sheets of spray, I saw you smiling and wondered how I’d look laying on the bottom, all oxygen pushed out of me, something wrecked and water-logged. 

In an instant, I made up my mind.  Better to be driftwood than flotsam.  I threw myself into the pounding surf, flailing arms and kicking legs, thrashing through the water to where I imagined you’d be on the other side.  Knowing that without reaching you, I’d forever feel your arms, lifting me up, pulling me from the pool.  Laying me on the stinging concrete, your lips pressed to mine, with the sun beating us down.

I knew as I took in mouthfuls of pool water that wherever I made land, you’d be there, forever beside me.  And the sun would be shining on your cappuccino skin, glinting electric in the silver of your hair.  And you would gently lay me in a shady spot.  You would lie down beside me.  Even if I sunk like a stone from too much of everything, you would make sure that our promises were kept.