FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

Abstracts and Brief Chronicles
By Ross Eldridge

PAGE TWO
As children, we had visited the couple often, until the wife died, and I always went to the kitchen door -- in Bermuda it is unusual to use a front door, no matter how grand the occasion -- and rarely stepped inside. Rather, we might be offered a cold drink on the back patio and a look at the friend's cats. This week, with one part of me in the past and another part a bit worried about the present, I went to the kitchen door. It was closed, but there was a doorbell, and I pressed on it. I heard the "pong" inside.

A voice called out my name, "Ross, you'll have to go 'round to the front door, the back one's jammed shut." I walked through the garden, noting how overgrown it was, and how the house was in poor condition. The shutters were closed, and had missing slats and hung crookedly, paint peeling off them.

The closed shutters were not all that surprising as our police force and security people now tell us that we should not only close and lock our homes when we leave them, but also when we are home. We should lock ourselves in. As a boy, I believe I could have walked in and out of two dozen houses in our neighbourhood without worrying anyone and not needing to force a lock. I could call out: "It's Ross!" without frightening anyone. I might be given a cookie and a glass of milk, from a real bottle, milk with the cream on the top. If it looked like rain, I'd take the neighbours' laundry in from their clotheslines if they were not home, or were taking a nap from the humidity of a summer day in Bermuda.

I rang the bell realizing that I'd never been through the front door at the old friend's home. His wife grew African violets in the reception area so many years ago. Those did not interest me then, though it might have been an emotional moment to find them now. The main door opened, and I saw it had been pushed into the closed position by several large bricks wrapped in cloth on the floor. We got the door open, and the reception room had no plants at all in it. Things change, I thought. Shaking a very firm hand, I stepped into the darkened room.

I was offered several seats, as my host settled back into his own reclining chair. I sat near him, and directly faced him. I knew he was blind in one eye and had limited vision with the other eye. We both felt awkward, and I wondered what to say to get things going.

"How's your health these days?" was how I started. I'd noticed that besides his firm handshake, he was well dressed in clean, casual clothes, and had nicely cut hair -- more than mine -- and a trimmed moustache. There was no odour in the room, and I know about those from visiting my grandmother in her upscale residence. There was no dust on the coffee table in front of me, but there were several boxes on it holding medallions and ribbons below glass lids. I knew enough to appreciate they had been awarded to my friend's wife by the Crown.

"I'll start at the top," he replied. And we got through headaches, dodgy hearing, a blinded eye, sore throat, tummy troubles and gall bladder surgery. That was as low as I wanted to go. I mentioned that he'd certainly trumped any aches and pains I might confess to. And then I asked how long it had been since his wife had died. He told me the exact date and time, 17 years earlier, and in the darkened room I noticed that the house was not furnished the way an elderly gentleman might do it. Everything was set in its place, upholstery was worn and split, photographs and portraits on the wall remained from the days I'd seen them as a child -- old men with beards, now I noticed they'd been done when the subjects were much younger than I am now -- and the paint on the walls was peeling in sheets. Curtains slumped next to the shuttered windows.

Odder still, were several quite lovely cigarette boxes and lighters -- his wife was a smoker, and died of cancer -- I wondered if the boxes might contain cigarettes still, 17 years later.

There was something different, unusual: The dining room table was heaped in bottled water containers. He offered me a drink, "Water or Sprite?" He explained he took a diuretic for his blood pressure and peed a lot and needed to replace the fluids. The water in the tank under his house was not potable, and he only used it for laundry and flushing. He used bottled water for everything else.

At that moment, he went off to pee and I opened my knapsack and took out a newspaper and slices of plain cake and fruitcake, and rested them near all the water bottles.

"What's this?" he asked at his return.

"Ah, I brought the newspaper, thought I'd read it to you if you wanted."

"Can you leave it for me?"

"Of course."

"Cake?"

"I figured you probably were told not to eat cake, and you could enjoy some."

"Oh, yes."

The spell was broken. We talked about old times, really old times, when their home was built a few months after my parents' place. Neighbours that we shared. We quickly realized nearly everybody of his -- my mother's -- generation on that street had now died. But we raised them up for an hour.

This old family friend revealed that he only went to the grocery store once every three weeks with a volunteer who took him in her car. I asked, "Fresh vegetables?" and he shook his head. "Many visitors?" and he shook his head again. I'd noticed a radio, but not a television. He listened, he said, to call-in radio shows. I told him that I found those too confrontational. I confessed to having a home computer, one nine years old now. "I mostly write these days," I offered. "It's a compulsion. I have to get things down on the page."

He reached over to a table at the side of his recliner and drew several pages from a yellow pad. He studied them carefully, put a few back and finally handed two pages to me.

"These are some poems I wrote recently." He explained. "Would you like to read them?"

"Of course, let's have a look."

They were written in impeccable handwriting, in ink -- he had been a bookkeeper at the bank so many years ago -- and two lines into it I realized they were comedic. The first was about his poor, worn out body with everything broken or bent or missing, and all written in clever rhymes, and going south of the gall bladder that we'd discussed earlier. He'd written it very recently. I was reminded of a famous gravestone that reads: "I told you I was sick!" Might it be Mark Twain? No, don't think so, but worthy of Twain.

The second poem was a commentary on the loss of innocence here in Bermuda: Crime, gangs, fear, high prices, shortages, rude children and their rude parents, and endless industrial disputes. In the poem he had not written in so many words that he missed his wife, though as I read his couplets, I appreciated that he missed her more than anything else, but was glad she had not lived long enough to see these days.

The house they had lived in, closed and shuttered against time, the master of thieves, is still as it was the day she died, only the dust has been removed.

I did not offer to open any windows. This poet had almost completed his love affair with his wife; it was still evolving.

When I left, returning another firm handshake, I warned I'd like to come back soon.

"Yes. That's OK, Ross," he said.

"Don't forget the cake."

"Oh, I won't!"

Walking out of his garden that was so unchanged, I passed the house my mother lived in for 40 years until her death 12 years ago. I knew it had been rebuilt. The house itself had been rundown but the land was valuable. The hedge of bougainvillea and hibiscus that I'd planted for my mother was now so high and thick that I could not see the house behind it. I saw some children's toys in the driveway.

And I walked to the bus stop. Feeling good about love.

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