Crazy With Angels

                                                    © Ty F. Webster

                                                “While still I may, I write for you

                                              The love I lived, the dream I knew…”

                                     —W.B. Yeats; “To Ireland in the Coming Times”

                                                       Chapter 19

                                                           lullaby

                        “A fire is the core of the home.  ‘Tis bottled sunshine.”

                              —John O’Shea; Lord Mayor of Dooagh, Ireland

I never cease to be entertained and amazed by a fire, because each one is different.  Unlike any other.  I’d venture a guess that humans have been watching fire since the day it was discovered all those thousands of years ago.  It’s like caveman TV.

A good bonfire is spectacular, and a campfire under the stars is a thing of wonder.  But there’s really nothing quite like cozying up to the fireplace in your own home on a cold night.  Lights off.  Watching the flicker of the flames and the glow of the coals.

Many of the fireplaces in Ireland these days are supplied with coal.  Wood is in short supply here, as most of Ireland’s forests were felled hundreds of years ago—long before “deforestation” was even a word.  There are only a few dozen trees on the island, and they all look like something the cat dragged in.  You only need to stand outside for a few minutes on a windy day to understand why.

My favorite fire is one fueled by peat, or “turf,” as it’s known here.  There’s something inherently fascinating about the concept of digging up shovelfuls of the ground and then burning it to stay warm.  There’s a wholesome-ness about the smell of the smoke you don’t get from other types of fuel.  Earth’s essence.  And the dance of the flickering flames of a peat fire seems to have an extra liveliness compared to other fuels.

Unfortunately, turf is becoming a scarce commodity.  The layers of compressed peat moss that constitute it grow incredibly slowly:  about a millimeter per year!  It’s being consumed much more rapidly than it’s being replenished, and thus joining entities like rainforests, elephants, polar bears, coral reefs and my happiness on the list of endangered resources.

But regardless of the fuel source, an open fire is indeed an amazing and entertaining thing.  It’s like your own private showing of the aurora borealis.  The glow from the coals is like taking a peek into the belly of the earth.  The dance of the flames is mesmerizing.  Trance inducing.  Thought dies away leaving nothing but calm and warmth.  It’s like being wrapped in soft blankets and cuddled to your mother’s bosom.  The whisper of the flames like a soft lullaby.

I could go on and on about the fire, but my eyelids are getting very heavy…

                                               *****************************

                                                      Chapter 98

                                               nothing going away                             

“The city drags you down. / Day and night / …This endless fight. / This endless flight.  —Duncan O’Ceallaigh; “City Drags You Down”

He spent the next couple of days cooped up in his apartment.  Sulking.  Although the physical illness had been eradicated, the mental malaise remained. 

To make matters worse, he was held hostage by a cold front that swooped down from the Arctic like a bat out of Dante’s ninth ring of hell.  Low temperatures plummeted to the nether regions where the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales converge—around minus 40.  Even boosted by the mid-day sun the highs were so low they couldn’t see zero.

On days like that it’s best to stay inside unless you’ve a very good reason to go out.  He did not.  In fact if there was a good reason to do anything, he couldn’t think of it.  He mostly sat in his living room, huddling under a blanket not far from the radiator, drinking multiple cups of tea.  Jotting sporadic thoughts in his journal, reading a couple of books and mindlessly surfing the internet with his laptop.  Trying to keep his mind occupied and the walls from closing in.

By midweek the walls were winning the battle.  Fortunately, the deep freeze had thawed slightly.  It wouldn’t have classified as warm with anyone but Eskimos, but outdoor pursuits no longer held an immediate risk of frostbite.

He bundled up and left the apartment about noon with no destination beyond somewhere else.   It was a dreary winter day:  an hours-long journey among shifting shades of grey—at first gradually lighter, then slowly darker—leading eventually back to black.  A low ceiling of thick cloud hung over the city like a dirty sponge mopping up the smoke belching out of chimneys and industrial smokestacks and the exhaust farting forth from cars, trucks and buses.  The no-longer-fresh snow on the ground and in various-sized piles along sidewalks and curbs was more drab-grey than white.

He meandered through the cobblestoned streets and alleyways of the warehouse district, under the expressway bridge, across a set of defunct railroad tracks and over a long stretch of barren, frozen tundra to the dockyards.  There were only two ships in the docks:  one red, one black, both in need of paint jobs.  Old rust-buckets that looked barely sea worthy.  He walked on out to the lighthouse at the end of the harbor and stared out at the empty bay.  Nothing was coming.  Nothing going away.

He retraced his steps across the dockyards to the nearest bus stop, caught the next bus and headed toward the lakefront.  In the comparative warmth of the nearly empty bus, he got—for the first time all day—what he would classify as a good idea: he’d go to the art museum.  It was right on the bus route. 

The city’s art museum has an outstanding collection of Georgia O’Keeffe paintings.  He made a point of viewing them at least twice a year, usually when he was in moods such as this.  O’Keefe’s paintings of blossoms and blooms had an amazing ability to cheer him up.  Some sort of flower power.  He could definitely use some today.  But moments after disembarking the bus, he got the sinking suspicion the city was conspiring against him.  The museum was closed for a private function.

Disheartened, he wandered aimlessly along the lakefront walkway in the shadow of the uptown skyline.  In summer the path would be streaked with joggers, bicyclists and roller-bladers, but today he met only one hardy runner—anonymously androgynous in a neoprene face mask and woolen stocking cap. 

At the abandoned municipal beach he detoured across the crunchy, crusty snow, occasionally breaking the surface and sinking up over his calf.  When he reached the shoreline, he kicked up a couple chunks of snow with his boots—unearthing a forgotten Frisbee in the process—and tossed the chunks into the water.  They splashed into the choppy surf then bobbed there silently like ice cubes in an abandoned cocktail.

He ambled back across the beach and on along the path, then ascended a hill away from the lake, toward Uptown.  He came to a big city park, empty save for a smattering of snowmen—half-melted, then refrozen—scattered here-and-there around the place.  It struck him as only minimally more dismal than in the warmer months when the park was packed with throngs of people sprawled out under the trees, hoarding patches of grass, feeding the pudgy pigeons and “oh-look”-ing at the scruffy squirrels.  Thoreau wannabes feebly attempting to commune with nature in their woeful Walden.

Half an hour later he was in the heart of the Uptown business district.  Buildings scraping the sky all around.  It was just past five, which put him in the midst of the evening rush hour.  He found himself surrounded by men with silk scarves sticking out of the collars of cashmere trench coats and women with shoes that cost more than the poor souls who had fashioned them together in foreign factories would make in a month or maybe even a year.  Everyone was evacuating the glass towers like space rats abandoning a sinking starship, rushing hither and thither, piling into limousines or fighting over taxis in a non-stop, rushing hustle bustle.  Sports cars and sporty SUV’s rolled endlessly out of parking ramps and joined the honking hordes on the jam-packed streets.  The vast majority had little red, white and blue magnets affixed to their tail ends.  The magnets—manufactured by overworked, underpaid comrades in communist China—urged him to “Support Our Troops” fighting for democracy in the Middle East.  He wandered on through the humdrum hubbub, wondering, “What’s the rush?  Where is everyone in such a hurry to go?”

He crossed the Mason Street bridge over the river—murky and steaming in spite of the cold—and strolled on through the downtown shopping district.  Incredibly lifelike mannequins draped in fancy dresses and dazzling jewels gazed coquettishly from shop window after glitzy shop window, filling him with an incredibly lifelike longing.  A longing for what, exactly, he wasn’t entirely sure.

He carried on away from the heart of the shopping district and found himself in the middle of the seedy near-north side.   Real-life mannequins in high heels and skirts so short that, in this weather, it could mean only one thing stood like leggy sentries on street corners.  Shifty-eyed men lurked in dark doorways.  He quickened his pace a step.  Took occasional glances over his shoulder.

He rounded a corner and encountered a legion of the obviously homeless standing, leaning, sitting and lying around—littering the ground like half-frozen casualties on a newly-quiet battlefield—waiting for the Salvation Army soup kitchen to open for the evening meal.  A strange thought crossed his mind.  He found himself wondering why homeless people in northern cities wouldn’t find a way to migrate south for the winter.  Couldn’t they panhandle enough money for bus fare or maybe hop a freight train to a more southerly clime?

But before his brain could question which dark hole the ignorance and insensitivity inherent in that query had crawled out of, he passed a metal newspaper-stand housing a stack of the evening fish wrap and was confronted with a more complex conundrum.  The hot-off-the-press headline declared that the nation’s tab for the war machine was chugging along to the tune of 200 million dollars a day.  A quick, through-the-glass perusal of the beginning of the ensuing article informed him the estimated final tally (if the war ever ended) would likely be in excess of a trillion dollars.  A trillion dollars!  How was it possible?  He’d recently read that the average number of homeless in the entire nation in a given year was about 3.5 million.  If you split a trillion dollars amongst them, every single one—man, woman and child alike—would have enough money to buy a quarter-of-a-million dollar house.  Now that was tough to comprehend.

He pondered it as he walked along for the next half hour, at which point he found himself in the midst of an upper-middle class, North Side neighborhood.  Rows of houses in neat lines, each a cardboard cutout of the next.  The snowmen here were all synthetic and inflatable.  Manufactured, he presumed, by more Chinese.

Although he hated the thought of strangers watching him in the comfort of his own home, he could never stop himself from sneaking a tom-peeping peek into other people’s houses when curtains were left open at night.  And although he’d concluded he would never understand how a government could justify funding a trillion dollar war when millions of its own citizens went homeless, he—in his voyeuristic pursuits outside the abodes of some of his more fortunate compatriots—discovered the answer to an earlier query.

In the flickering lights of the ubiquitous digital television sets and the zombie-like stares of those watching them in house after open-curtained house, it came to him:  so this is what the rush was all about; this is where everyone was going.  Rushing home to catch the latest prime time reality show, ballgame, sitcom, documentary news show…Maybe an old war history with the amazing black-and-white footage of tanks rolling ashore and flags being raised on foreign soil or troops being welcomed home to a ticker-tape parade.  But not a single image anywhere of modern soldiers or civilians killed this very day in Iraq or Afghanistan. 

It was enough to drive a man to drink.  Fortunately, one of his favorite neighborhood watering holes wasn’t far away.  It was one of the precious few bars in the city that felt comfortable, cozy and unpretentious.  More like a friend’s house than a place of business.  Maybe he’d been subconsciously heading there all day.  He peeled off a few layers of his wintry wardrobe and plopped down on a stool at the nearly empty wooden bar in the softly-lit joint.  His fingers were fairly frozen and he contemplated a hot toddy but decided he couldn’t pass up the evening special:  burger and a beer for five bucks.  Although he’d been mostly vegetarian for years now, he still got occasional cravings for a juicy cheeseburger.  He’d had one lately, and this place was known city-wide for its burgers.  He’d indulged his inner carnivore here a few times before and was never disappointed. 

But tonight, the conspiracy was continuing.  When he bellied up to the bar, he’d noticed the television in the corner was turned on.  Not wanting to emulate the zombies, he tried his best to ignore it but was inevitably drawn to it like a moth to a flame.  It was broadcasting one of those nature shows full of stunning cinematography of a distant, pristine place.  This one appeared to be Antarctica.  Lots of those too-cute penguins.  But by the time his burger arrived it was over, replaced by a graphic documentary about the horrors of slaughterhouses.  He tried even harder to ignore it but was morbidly compelled.  When his burger arrived, he could almost hear it screaming.

He ate most of the French fries and polished off the beer, then gave the bartender a transparent excuse about not being hungry, paid, left a five-dollar tip and headed back out into the cold.

                         what was it like?…

                         being the butt—

                         of a really bad joke,

                         or of a cigarette

                         in the gutter.

                         or both.

                                                        **********************

I watched the spectacle from my oceanside seat, serenaded by the ceaseless tympanic pounding and accompanying splash and hiss of surf against shore. 

Yes, the night was ending.  But as he watched her road-weary, maroon Toyota join the taxi-filled rush of late-night traffic, he remembered that initial look in her eye.  And got the feeling something much bigger was only beginning. 

I inhaled the misty freshness.  Breathing.  Really breathing, as opposed to merely taking air into the lungs.  Breathing freely and deeply for the first time in weeks.