I have a plan, see, to make my house a home. It has been a house for ever so long. I mean, what’s a guy that’s lived in eight by eight foot spaces and the back end lofts of aircraft hangers with plastic bags for plumbing know about home making?
I’m not talking about jails either – maybe it was nine by nine. Well, whatever. The military uses some basic number, I’m sure, and that’s the one I’m thinking about. It is.
Anyway. I’m rummaging around today for the slip of paper that has the tile part number on it that I want to use for the bathroom – I have to select wall paper and stuff and thought I’d get some more of that floor tile I used in the kitchen for behind the stove and the ceiling tile and wall paper all in one shot. It’s the economy thing, you understand.
Like I said, I was rummaging. Some times I’ve used that word when a female asks me what I’m doing (usually that happens in the early exploratory stages) and I tell them I’m just rummaging.
It sounds better than saying I’m feeling you up. It does. It also allows me a graceful escape when the female tells me I’m not doing so hot, if that is what you’re doing.
Sigh.
Well, I was rummaging and came across a few notebooks. One in this drawer, one in another; I started gathering the notebooks. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get all of the notebooks. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to find all the notebooks the first time around, you see, because I got to rummaging through the books once I’d collected three or four, or five or so.
The first book I rummaged caused me to pause. It did. I hadn’t remembered I’d written that. I looked at that page and I looked at those books and thought me, I’d best find the shredder. I did. And I did, find it that is. The shredder. Mmm.
Having found the shredder, I set it up over there by the notebooks. Within comfortable arms length. And I settled myself on the floor again amongst the notebooks and started flipping pages.
Old screen names, passwords (names and password forgotten), names of poker sites now history, fading into the limbo of poker detritus, code to activate programs I no longer have; want or, for the life of me, know why I wanted them in the first place. Though I’m sure it was critical at the undated time recorded and I spent money getting it.
As I said. Amongst these pages a name slowed me. It brought me to a complete halt.
History. Personal history. That name. A teeny-tiny bit of personal history that amounted, at the time, and now, to little or nothing, but was all the name had. And his history is done. He’s gone. Died.
But, I remembered, when I saw it in that notebook, that I’d written his name down so I’d not forget it and as a reminder that for a brief bit of time our worlds touched. But as I said, I’d written his name, in that notebook I’d forgotten I had until I began rummaging, both through the drawers and then through the pages.
Jimmy was his name. That is the name I wrote down. I could find his last name, I suppose, if I were so inclined, but I’m not. Inclined.
He came from this same little town I now live in. That’s true. He did, and he died here, and is buried in the cemetery up on the hill a mile or better north of my place.
But even through all the years since meeting Jimmy I didn’t know he came from this town. Didn’t. Wouldn’t have wanted to know, and it was months after moving here I even knew he still haunted the earth. Last thing in the universe I would have suppositioned. It is.
But I’m not here talking about Jimmy’s life so much. I’m speaking about his dying.
I wasn’t there for the dying. I was sitting drinking coffee listening to the Government Employed Care Giver tell me about Jimmy’s dying, some many months after he performed the act, how he died. She was telling me because she was . . Well, there administering to him when it happened.
And that is why I wrote down the name in that notebook, you see. So I’d remember.
Jimmy wasn’t an active person. But he liked to eat. I’m given to understand inactivity and food combined produce fat and fat aids diabetes, which Jimmy got a lot of both. The diabetes got so bad they took off his foot and he bummed about town in one of those little electric go chairs, fat absent skin flaps flopping and wearing nothing but skives, bandaged stump propped on the little “U” with a tail they’d fixed on the foot rest of that chair to hold the leg up out of the way. Hard to forget that Jimmy had a place in town, bad as it was, it was hard to over look and forget.
Those skin flaps of Jimmies came after the government gave him a care giver and a three times weekly registered nurse to save his life, you see. They (those care givers) put him on, and pretty much kept him on, a diet. Worked for a while, until Jimmy decided Bon-Bon, Ice Cream and candy from the Con-Store, before it closed, were better than boiled squash and balanced diet.
No matter. Things progressed pretty much as experience dictates. Jimmy got fat again, confined himself to his house, then to a chair in the house, and then couldn’t pee.
So the nurse and the care giver had to Cather Jimmy twice a week, or did it twice a week when they came in to care for him.
The care giver I was talking with over coffee put it this way; she said that Jimmy died the way all men want to die – two women playing with your Dick and Balls. She said that she was holding Jimmy’s dick and balls out of the way and in position for the Nurse to insert the catheter when the Nurse told Jimmy he was suppose to piss for them. He had to piss you understand, so we’d know the cath was in correctly. Anyway, Nurse told Jimmy twice to piss and he didn’t, and I (the Care Giver) looked over her shoulder and noticed Jimmy was blue.
The nurse sent Jimmy off to hospital, but it didn’t help.
*
I shredded the page from the notebook with Jimmies name on it.
_____
From the reaches,
Ten Mile
