I don’t know where it really began, the sense of it, the tell-tale
signs one reads in silence, in awe, in harsh understanding as if
proof is not enough. But in small circles it started to surround me,
in what I touched, reached for, dispositioned for one measure or
another. From my earliest years I had heard my grandfather and
father say, “Get the words with handles on them.” Now they were
reaching for me, those words.
I suppose the best way to get past the initial stages of realizations
is to treat them as silly self-doubt fancies, silliness to use another
word. There were a few of them, but they seemed to marshal
themselves in a parade of time.
I used to jump into my jockey shorts. I did so until I was in my
late seventies (which I can call as from 72-79 to give myself an edge.)
One bright morning, the sun slanting into the bathroom after
taking a shower and shaving, up to my old standards, I started to
don my jockey shorts. One leg in like it was greased. Then, on the
cusp of the FOL (Fruit of the Loom) band, my left little toe caught
the ribboned band of the elastic. Oops! Against the wall I fell,
barely missing the shower door, the glass pane, who knows
whatever waiting for me to happen.
FOL has never been the same again. Nor the morning jumps into
them. And a late association, just a few days old in this FOL
odyssey, I note I do not drop them and bend to pick them up for
laundry dispersal, but catch them on my toe-line and sort of flip
them into a target area, thereby reducing the number of actions
needed.
Running up or down stairs has ceased, the knees objected too
much, and with odd noises at odd hours, as in sound sleep
suddenly disturbed by one step up or down too-many on the day
just ended.
It was so revealing that a line of poetry crawled out of the pain,
saying “You can tell if you’re halfway up or halfway down.”
Steps in the dark are more gingerly taken, not that you have pain,
but the threat of a fall seems to have, in one night or in one small
escape, imbedded itself.
Words, like Time itself, get elusive, hide out in the plainest sight,
play their games with me, lose some, win some, winsome me.
—