She is secure for the moment, in close contact with what is strange, keening kee-mo ki-mo into the space between her weathered brown leather chair and the muted television, but then the present lurches forward only a fraction of a second and she is jarred from her intimism by a two-tone chime and the appearance of an adult child on the videophone, Kevin is his name, has always been, but she calls him Kecalf, inside joke in a sense, that’s Aretha’s kid, she says Aretha like she knows her, and maybe in a way she does, in the same way you know an airplane when you’re parked at the edge of the airport, watching takeoffs from the hood of your car, she sees (hears) another takeoff in her mind now, the first sung words of “Save Me,” and that patches the gouge that’s been left where the chime scraped into the Chubby Parker, but then there’s a channel carved next to it, a channel that runs to her heart, where she’s pained to see her son’s face, at the mercy of his own vulnerability, he’s had a bad year, wife left, children won’t talk to him except when they want a check in the mail, does anyone say that anymore now that money rarely travels in the mail, and as she’s simultaneously drawing and erasing the picture of her son sadly depressing a button on his keyboard to educate one of his three ingrate children, who are also lovely children, of course, only right now stretched on the rack of family pain, at that very moment, with his drawn almost erased finger poised over the drawn almost erased button, she remembers that he is tending to her, that she’s the diagnosed one, that the tumors have invaded her body, except that she feels fine, feels that the lymphoma she has heard tell of from the doctor—this is the only phrase she’ll use, “heard tell,” protective irony clad in the clothes of an overdetermined folksiness—is an approaching train more than it is a station in which she stands, and she leans toward the screen so her son will see her, see her in health even as she is also in sickness, but that blocks what’s behind her on the table, the leavings of her lunch, the vase her bought her last birthday, but also the papers, what she had been arranging before putting on the music, before the banjo, before the “King-Kong-Kitchie-Kitchie-Ki-Me-O,” and her thought then returns as a thought now, which is that what is wanted most devoutly by an aging woman or if she’d prefer a woman of her age (and she would) is the the discovery of a cache of papers at death, papers that contain, in a crabbed but legible hand, brilliant things, surprising, meaningful, profound, so many of them stacked one upon the other then no one will be able say that the life that produced these papers and then surfaced them by going/not-being, that invested them with a preciousness borne from the fact that they are now a sealed set, that no one no matter how petty, no one no matter how vicious, no one no matter how hemmed in by agenda, will say that that life was wasted.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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