Author: djgourdoux

Sanctuary

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

Ben Williams found himself in the chilly darkness of an unfamiliar city, off of the main drag, the street dimly lit and the buildings mostly darkened warehouses with empty loading docks dotted with fresh puddles. The night air was heavy. He could smell the salty odor of decay and dampness, like it had just finished raining, but that had happened before, before he found himself in the strange city. In the distance he heard a siren ringing, and he knew with an unmistakable certainty that he was being pursued, that he was in danger, but he had no idea why, or who would be after him, or where he was or how he had ended up there.

He thought he heard the sound of footsteps on the pavement behind him, getting closer.  He found the unmarked door to a darkened building and tried opening it; to his surprise it was unlocked.  He stepped inside to an empty theatre.  It was dark except for the yellow floor lights that lit the aisles that sloped down to the stage. The stage was dark and empty, as were all the seats. It struck him that this was the perfect place to get off the street for a while, to get his bearings.  He sat down in a seat in the back row, furthest from the stage, closest to the door he came in through.

He sat there, thinking hard, trying to find clues that would help him determine where he was, how he got there, and who was pursuing him, but nothing came to mind.  At least it was warm in the theatre.  He was wearing a t-shirt that was inadequate outside in the cool night air.

Ten minutes passed and nothing came to him; at the same time, nobody else entered the theatre.  I must have thrown them off track, he thought, I’m safe in here.  Then a single spot light beamed out of the dark and lit a small circle on the stage. An elderly man, wearing an expensive looking suit and a black fedora, stepped out of the dark into its glow. Ben ducked down in his seat and started crawling towards the aisle, afraid that the man on stage would see him, when the man stared speaking.

“Billy didn’t know where he was,” the man said. “But inside the small auditorium he felt safe. Outside the police were looking for him. They’d found the woman’s body, in an alleyway, carved up and bloodied to the point of being unidentifiable.”

Then the entire stage lit up and the man was gone.  It was empty, there was no set, no props, just two empty kitchen chairs on the far right edge of the stage. A man and a woman entered from the left side of the stage, the man about thirty, thin and muscular, wearing a shirt and tie and dress slacks.  The woman was beautiful, with feathered red hair and piercing blue eyes, wearing a sleeveless blue sweater and tight pants that hugged her hourglass figure.

“Thank God that’s over,” the man said.

“It wasn’t so bad,” the woman said. “I actually had fun.”

“Sure, you did. Flirting with the entire faculty.”

“I wasn’t flirting,” she replied, and Ben realized that he was watching the performance of a play.  He was certain the actors couldn’t see him, crouched down low in his seat in the back row.  If they couldn’t see him, then they were playing to what they had to think was an empty theatre.

“You’re just too hung up to have a little fun, to have a good time,” she said. “It was nice getting out of the house for a change.”

Then the man had a huge knife, a machete, in his hands. He raised it high. The woman screamed, and the man brought it down on her shoulder, gashing it deep, blood flowing bright and red from the wound.  The man took the knife and slit the woman’s throat, ripping apart her jugular vein, blood erupting from her neck and spraying all over the stage, all over the man.  She collapsed in a lifeless heap on the floor, but the man didn’t stop, he continued swinging the machete, cutting her up until she was unrecognizable. The lights went down. The amount of blood on the stage was staggering.

And it was all real.  He’d just witnessed, crouched down low in between the last two rows of seats in the auditorium, a brutal murder.

Then the spotlight came on again, and the elderly man in the fedora returned.  He said, “Billy’s really done it now, hasn’t he? Now, let’s enjoy the comedy of Assault and Battery.”

The sound of canned applause echoed through the auditorium as two men, in old gray vaudeville suits and bow ties, entered from stage right and took their places behind two microphone stands.  The first one said, “Hello, I’m Assault.”

“And I’m Battery,” the second man said. The man claiming to be Battery was the same actor who’d murdered the woman. A pool of her blood was visible on the stage behind the pair.

“Say, Battery,” Assault smiled. He was wearing a black top hat that made Ben think of Fred Astaire.

“Yes, Assault?” Battery replied.

“Who was that lady I saw you with last night?”

“That was no lady,” Battery answered, smiling broadly. “That was my no good slut of a wife.”  Canned laughter played through the theatre’s speakers.

“Women,” Assault began. “You can’t live with ‘em …”

“…so you might as well kill ‘em,” Battery inserted with perfect timing. The laugh track played again.

Suddenly Ben felt the presence of someone, some thing, in the seat next to him.  He looked and in the dim light from the stage he could see a man sitting next to him, not moving, stiller than still. He remembered the tiny flashlight he had on the key chain in his pocket, he took it out and shined it in the face of the man next to him. It was the face of a corpse, white and colorless, and he could tell that the theatre, which had been empty just a moment before, was now filled, with every seat except his occupied by a silent and unmoving corpse. They didn’t move as Assault and Battery droned on, the rhythm of their act punctuated by the occasional playing of the laugh track.

Ben ran to the aisle and turned toward the exit when he heard the voice of the old man in the fedora, from the stage, say, “Don’t forget, Billy, the police are outside. It’s not safe for you out there. They’ve found the body and they know you did it.”

“I’m not Billy,” Ben said, turning to face the old man.  He was standing on the stage again, alone in the spotlight.  Assault and Battery were nowhere to be seen.

“Sure you’re not,” the old man smiled.

“And I didn’t kill anybody.”

Then the overhead lights came on, lighting up the entire theatre, momentarily blinding Ben. When his vision recovered he could see the empty stage and the empty seats, and he saw the first police officer enter, his gun drawn and pointed at Ben.

“Freeze,” the office said.

Ben knew that running would be pointless, so he put his arms in the air, and in his mind he saw, he remembered, her in the alleyway in the rain, red and crumpled beneath him, the knife cold and wet in his hand.

Stories of Life and Death

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

It’s a subject we write about all the time.  Especially fiction. Good fiction always has to have something valuable at stake – and what’s more valuable than life itself?  But what do we really know about death, other than eventually it takes us all?

The thing about death is the older we grow the nearer we get to it. Also, the older we get, the more familiar it becomes, as we experience it through the deaths of friends and family as well as public figures and acquaintances.

We, the living, all look for meaning when somebody dies. Some look for cosmic meaning – where will the deceased end up, is there an afterlife and what does it all mean.  But I think most of us look at the story a given lifetime tells, and like any story, we want to learn from it. Was the life worth living, was it lived well? Did it touch other lives? How was the world changed by its existence? What obstacles was he able to overcome?  Unable to?

Stories are so important to human beings because when you come right down to it they all deal with our awareness of our own mortality. Stories, like a life, have a beginning, middle and end. If we weren’t aware of the inevitability of our own death, stories wouldn’t be so important. People live on in stories after their death – Grandpa used to get up at 4:30 every morning to start the milking, he sure was a hard worker is another way of saying grandpa’s life wasn’t meaningless, and as long as we remember him, he lives on, at least in our memories, like the drawings of hunts on cave walls still tell the stories of our prehistoric ancestors.

So recently, after experiencing chest pains and having emergency heart bypass surgery, the nearest to my own death I’ve been so far, what was the first thing I did when I started recovery? I started working on stories, figuring out what I’d tell people about my experiences, about the anxiety I felt, about the pain, the doctors, the nurses, the pain pills and the hallucinations I experienced under their control, everything.  This is a big deal, I told myself, I could have died. Everybody will want to hear about this.

But now, almost two months later, the experience is already in my rear view mirror and fading. I’ve made changes to my diet and lifestyle that will be permanent, but otherwise, my life has returned to a normalcy and comfort that doesn’t feel much different than before.  And it’s happened much quicker than I thought it would.

Last Friday, a member of the writers group I belong to, a woman named Marguerite McClelland, passed away. I didn’t know her all that well, just what she’d shared with us in her writing.  She was seventy one years old, having been born in the Alsace region on the France-Germany border in 1943, at the epicenter and the height of World War Two.  She never knew her father, who was a casualty of the war.

I know these things about her because of memoirs and poems she’d written and shared. Stories of her life.  Stories that will live on now even though she won’t. Marguerite’s stories will live longer than most because they are so well written, the language is so evocative and beautiful.

It’s estimated that each hour, 6,390 people die.  That’s 153,000 per day, and 56 million per year.  It’s estimated that 107 billion people have lived in the history of the earth, and that 100 billion of them have already died.  Think of the people you’ve know who have died. Maybe there’s fifty people, one hundred if you count famous dead celebrities you’re familiar with. That leaves 99,999,999,900 dead people who you know nothing about.

But each of those 100 billion lives that have begun and ended had their own unique stories and left their own indelible mark on the world. Every life, no matter how short or seemingly inconsequential, impacts other lives, in ways known and unknown.

And when a beautiful soul like Marguerite passes, we who were lucky enough to have known her even for a short time are stronger for the story she told.

Panther Sighting

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

(A short draft of fiction inspired by 1) the true story of a cougar that had wandered all the way from South Dakota through Wisconsin only to be shot by police in Chicago and 2) the song “Panther in Michigan” by Michael Smith)

Looking down at the pile of feathers next to his chicken coop, Ben’s first thought was coyotes again. Coyotes are very common around here; if you listen, late at night, you can often hear them, yipping and yapping at the moon or in response to some distant police or fire siren.  They live in the remaining farm fields and little patches of woods that carve up the urban sprawl, and it isn’t uncommon for people who raise chickens to wake up to find a trail of feathers and hair (you’d be surprised how many suburbanites raise live chickens) from an undetected nocturnal raid. Some people who have small dogs are nervous about coyote attacks, but I’m not familiar with any documented instance of somebody around here losing a dog to a coyote. They primarily feed on small rodents, field mice and moles and shrews, and cottontail rabbits.

So when the young couple across the street woke up that January morning to find a pile of feathers outside of their coop, they presumed the culprit to be a coyote.  Or foxes.  We’ve had a family of red foxes denning in the neighborhood for the past couple of years.  One year they seemed to be living in the culvert under the driveway of the house three doors to the north of us.

Then Ben saw the tracks of a large cat in the mud.

For the past three months or so, we’d been hearing the stories about locals seeing a cougar in the farmlands around the Illinois border, to the west and south of here, about twenty or thirty miles away.  Then one late afternoon in December it made the local Chicago television news, how drivers on the Illinois toll way saw a cougar chasing a deer in a forest preserve field.

Ben seeing the tracks meant the cougar had been just across the street from me.  I walked the two and a half acres of my property, looking for sign in my back and side yards. Just to the south of my barn, in the patches of un-melted snow, I saw the unmistakable tracks of a large cat.  There were small traces of blood on the tracks, and I followed them, stopping when they led into the barn, through the open door that years ago horses were let out of their stalls through.  The stalls, three of them, were still there, but empty for the past five years, ever since we sold Bessie, my wife’s quarter horse mare.  There were still about a dozen old bales of hay stacked in the spare stall. I looked at the blood speckled tracks of the large cat leading into the barn and didn’t see any leading out, and I thought, what if it’s still in there, what if it’s wounded and angry.

I backed away from the barn and crossed the side yard and went inside and called the local DNR agent, a big guy named Andy who was just out of college.  It was dark by the time he made it out. He was carrying a service revolver and a big flashlight as I took him to the tracks.  “Well, you got a cougar, all right,” Andy said, his flashlight illuminating the tracks.  We followed them into the barn.  He asked if there were any lights, and I explained that the switch was on the other side, the front, of the barn. I walked across the darkened barn, my heart pounding, waiting for a mountain lion to leap out of the darkness at me, until I finally reached the front of the barn and the light switch. I turned it on and everything lit up.

Andy was still inspecting the area, having followed the tracks into the spare stall. He looked at the stack of old bales of hay and said, “Looks like he used this for his daybed. You can see here on top of the hay where it’s flattened out a little bit. And there’s traces of blood up here – see?”  He showed me where the blood was and where the hay was matted down.

“What about the blood?

“My guess is it’s from a superficial wound, maybe he stepped on a nail or something. Anyways, I’ll take a sample back with me and see if they can do DNA testing.  Plus there has to be some scat somewhere around here.”

“Is this the same cougar that’s been on the news?”

“Almost undoubtedly, yes.”

“Will he come back to my barn?”

“That’s hard to say.  He might show up again, but for some reason we haven’t figured out yet, this guy’s on the move. He doesn’t stay in one place very long. We have reason to believe he’s come all the way from South Dakota.  But he did bed down in here yesterday, after killing your neighbor’s chicken. If there is easy food available around here, he might use your barn as home base for up to a week or so.  But my guess is he’s already gone.”

Andy collected a sample of blood and some fine hairs he found in the hay. He asked me if he could mount a trail camera in my barn, saying that he didn’t expect the cat to return but just in case. I said sure, and he promised he’d be out every day to check on whether it picked up anything or not.

I went to bed that night thinking about the cougar in my barn. Thank God my kids were grown and out of the house. Thirty years of being a parent conditions you to think about your kids when something like this happens.

I fell asleep and dreamed about the cougar, about me stepping into the barn in the middle of the day and it leaping off of the hay onto me, its claws ripping into my coat, its teeth penetrating my neck. I woke up in a cold sweat and went to the window.  There was a full moon that lit up the night, my yard was a series of white patches of snow and hard gray turf, and from my second story view I looked down on it, on the shadows cast by the trees, and I looked for the cougar. I imagined what it’d look like, its shoulder muscles rippling and flexing as it walked that slow cat walk, its eyes glowing green in the dark.

In the upcoming weeks and months, there was no word about any other sightings until mid-April, when it was seen carrying away a small dog in its mouth in Lake Bluff, Illinois, about twenty five miles south of me.  I never saw any more sign of the big cat, and after a couple of weeks, Andy came by and removed the trail camera from my barn.

Then in May came the news accounts about the Chicago policeman who shot a cougar that was trapped in an alley in the middle of the day.  Andy called me the next day to tell me that DNA testing confirmed that it was the same animal that had spent a day in my barn, and that it had, incredibly, come all the way from the badlands of South Dakota to end up shot to death by a police officer in a Chicago alley.

Three years later, and I’m still reluctant to enter the old horse barn. I still see, in its darkened corners, the glowing green eyes of a monster that could rip me to shreds, the same eyes that visit me from time to time in nightmares.

My wife says we should tear the barn down if we’re not going to use if for anything, but for some reason I silently resist.

Sometimes, late at night, I get up and I look out my bedroom window, and I swear I can see the black shadow of a large cat, stealthily stalking its unsuspecting prey.

How to Drive Your Wife Crazy, Number 773

/ djgourdoux / 3 Comments

I’ve been married to the most wonderful woman in the world for almost 34 years now.  She’s been such a great companion, a soul mate, really, and she’s stood beside me through thick and thin, and our love has grown deeper and stronger with each passing day.

What’s the secret of our happy marriage?  To what do we attribute such longevity?

Well, there are lots of things, mostly little things.  High on any list would be my repeated attempts to drive my wife crazy.

There are three main categories my schemes fall under.  One is the stupid remark repeated every chance I get.  For example, if we are leaving the house to go somewhere, she might say, “Should we hit the road?”  To which I always reply, “Why, what did the road ever do to us?’  Or if she observes that I need a haircut, I feign hurt feelings and say, “Is that some sort of bald joke?  I need “a” “hair” cut?”

These remarks have been repeated hundreds of times over the years.

The second category is making stupid remarks based upon a theme.  An example of this was observed  just a couple of months ago. It was a Sunday morning, and we had a few errands to run. My wife was driving.  First stop was the lumber yard, and my wife parked a fair distance from the front door. As I exited the vehicle, I asked her, “Do you have your cell phone with you?”

“Yes,” she replied.  “Why do you ask?”

“Because we might want to call Amtrak and see if they have any trains that run from here to the store.”

The next stop that morning was at Target, and this time, as I got out of the car, I asked her, “Do we have any empty bottles in the car?”

“No,” she said.  “Why?”

“I was just thinking that it might be quicker to leave a note in a bottle and wait for it to wash up at the store front than walking all this way.”

The third category is just acting childish and stupid.  For example, this afternoon, while grocery shopping at the supermarket, I had an inspired idea.  I shut my mouth, and didn’t say anything, answering only with non-verbal nods of the head. I think my wife was enjoying shopping at this point. Soon I got the idea that I’d pretend I was mute, and could communicate only through sign language.  I don’t know the first thing about sign language, but that didn’t stop me from moving my fingers frantically, trying to tell her that we’d forgotten the black olives in Aisle six (which I’m guessing is a message that even an experienced user of sign language might struggle with). She didn’t appreciate the humor in my gyrations, and slapped me on the shoulder, saying “knock it off.”  At this point I saw the other woman, standing behind us, and the look of horror on her face as she witnessed the woman abusing her poor mute husband.

It’s no wonder in moments like these that we’ve lasted as long as we have.

Strength

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

The first night I was home, I didn’t sleep well.  I was back in my own bed, after a week in the hospital. My wife had fluffed up my side of the bed with extra pillows so I could lay on my back with my head raised, like I did in the hospital. I still had a lot of pain in my chest from the incision, and moving was difficult and painful.  I had a walker positioned next to my bed, and we left the bathroom light on, so I could find my way if I had to pee during the night. Just in case I couldn’t make the journey to the toilet in time, there was a little plastic bottle on the edge of the bed, just like the one’s I’d mastered in the hospital.

I still had a great deal of pain in my chest from the bypass operation, but the pain pills I was on plus all the preparation of my wife made me feel as comfortable as possible.  Despite all of this, and despite the thrill of being in my own bed again, it took me a long time to fall asleep.

I laid there on my back, and I could see my wife beside me, sound asleep, and I could feel the rising and falling of her sleeping breathing, and I became aware again that she is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.   And I watched her sleep, deep and peaceful, and I started to become drowsy, but I wouldn’t let myself fall asleep.  It was too perfect, the dim light from the bathroom, her face, her hair on her pillow, and I just wanted to lie there and absorb it all.  More than anything, I didn’t want to fall asleep, I didn’t want to close my eyes, because I was afraid that if I did, I might not open them again.

I’ve been home now for about three weeks. I’m recovering. I go to cardio therapy three days a week, where, under the close supervision of an outstanding staff of therapists, I follow an exercise regime designed to increase my stamina and strength. I’m learning about changes I have to make to my diet and lifestyle. I’m still weak and a little sore from the surgery, but every day I’m getting stronger.

It’s been drilled into us for thousands of years, it’s a part of our DNA that the male is supposed to be the physically stronger of the sexes. We are the hunters and gatherers, we are supposed to provide for our women. And you can laugh all you want at these sexual stereotypes, at how outdated and primitive they are, but deep down, we all recognize some fundamental truth in these cliches.  Men are the physically stronger of the genders, while women tend to be emotionally stronger and more sensitive.

But what happens when a man loses that strength?  When he becomes weak, and when the woman needs to take care of him? It can be quite a blow to the already fragile male ego.

My wife and I have been married for almost thirty four years now. There hasn’t been a day in those thirty four years that I haven’t realized she is much stronger than I am. And that’s never bothered me.  I’ve drawn strength from her strength.

The source of any strength is our capacity to love. Love is the reason we fight death, love of life, love of family, love of a partner. It’s what makes life meaningful and worth living.

They say that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.  What makes me stronger is the fact that I love my wife, and that she loves me, too. Love is cumulative and irreversible. Once experienced, it stays forever, absorbed by the soul.

So while my muscles might be weakened and my stamina shortened, I am already stronger than I was before the surgery, thanks to the love of my wife and family and friends.  So what if I can’t lift anything greater than twenty pounds, I carry this love with me every moment of every day, in every breath I take.

And it’ll be there when I open my eyes tomorrow morning, weaved into the lining of my soul and riding on the shafts of sunlight that stream through my window shade.

Thank You

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

Just over two weeks ago, on April 7, my chest was cut open and blocked arteries were bypassed by sections of veins cut from and taken from my legs.  The day before, I experienced pains so severe that I thought this might be it, this might be the end.

Today, I had a follow up appointment with Dr. Stone, the heart surgeon who quite simply saved my life.  Nearly all of the incisions, the several cuts to my legs and the deep channel down the middle of my chest, have either healed or are well on their way to completely healing.  He told me that other than lifting or pulling or pushing ten pounds or more, all restrictions are lifted.

I still have some pain and tightness from the incision in my chest, but even that’s improved to the point that I’ve scrapped all the prescription pain pills in favor of the occasional Moltrin.   I still have ten weeks of cardiac rehab (I go three mornings a week, and am in the middle of my second week) to complete, so I am by no means a finished product just yet.

Still, it boggles my mind how far I’ve come in these fifteen days since I was sliced open.  It’s taken a team of nurses and doctors, led by Dr. Stone, as well as the kindness and support and aid of friends and family.  I owe these people everything, and intend to start the payback by taking the rest of my recovery as seriously as possible. I have no choice -it’s going to take a mighty strong heart to express the love and gratitude that these remarkable people have all earned.

Today is Earth Day, and my normal impulse is to rail against the selfish and thoughtless harm that humans, in their greed and self-absorption, have enacted on this amazing planet. But while those sentiments may be true, this year I’m also aware that I have benefited from the incredible capacity for kindness and caring and love that is the best of human nature, and I’m reminded that we’re all in this thing together. I am convinced more than ever that we can and we will fix this planet, and that we can overcome our petty differences and do what is right for each other.

Whatever I can do to help – well, sign me up.

Sunday Morning

/ djgourdoux / 3 Comments

Saturday was hustle and bustle, my daughter home from college for a short weekend, my sister driving down from Oshkosh to visit, my brother-in-law over and doing yard work for me, and my oldest son having flown in from the twin cities. It was a beautiful and warm spring day, the sun shining and the sky blue and cloudless.  In the late afternoon, my wife prepared a big dinner, and my mother-in-law joined us.  And there was laughter and smiles, the whole day was just about perfect, and it wound down into a quiet and comfortable night.

Sunday morning arrived with more sunshine pouring through bedroom window shades.  We woke up and my wife helped bathe me, patting down my sutures, and helping me get dressed.  We were up and about while my son and daughter slept in, and as I ate oatmeal for breakfast, I looked out to the living room to where my wife sat, in her reading chair, the morning sun bright behind her. She reflected and glowed, and it struck me how perfect everything –the oatmeal, the sun, my sleeping son and daughter, and my wife – is, and how grateful I am for this chance to still be among them.

Each day I’m getting stronger. The scars are healing and the pain is lessening. I’m being very careful not to overdo things, not to do anything that would jeopardize a full recovery. I am doing my breathing exercises and taking my medications and following all of the instructions I’ve been given.

I have to be very careful because there are such heavy demands on my heart, there is so much for it to love, so much perfection and beauty to appreciate, that not one beat can be wasted.

Coming Home

/ djgourdoux / 5 Comments

Last Thursday, I missed the first big spring storm of the season. It occurred without me, and it left behind a fresh layer of dark green on the grass, and gave birth to flowers that popped up from the softening earth and blossomed and bloomed. It’s an annual rite of passage, the announcement that spring is here to stay, and that the warm air and the music of songbirds will be the norm for a while.

I’d heard the rumble of its rolling thunder in the night, but I couldn’t look out my window to see its driving rain, the puddles that formed on the sidewalks, the sudden creation of backyard rivers and lakes. All I had was sound, the sound of tumult and violence, and the driving waves of rain against my window. Beyond the window was a foreign darkness that revealed nothing to me.

I was far from home, in a foreign place. According to Google Maps, the distance from the hospital bed I laid in and my home was only fourteen minutes by car.  But measured in terms of where I was and where I’d recently been, I may as well have been galaxies away from home.

Home is an apparition, a state of mind, a moment in time, longing, things lost. It’s familiarity and comfort, it’s the aggregation of all we care about and love. It’s illusory and tangible, both real and fabricated. It’s memories suppressed and exaggerated.  It’s sacred.  It’s the place we all hope we’ll return to at least one last time.

Last Tuesday, I had emergency triple bypass heart surgery, after checking myself into the ER on Easter Sunday with bad chest pains.  I came home yesterday after just over a week’s stay in the hospital. There was a period of time that I wondered if I’d ever see home again. In fact, on Monday morning, the pains were so severe that I actually had the conversation with myself, the conversation that asks the questions, what if I die, right here and now?  What if this is it?

During the operation, they cut about seven gashes in my legs, to harvest the vein segments they’d use to bypass the heart arteries that were as much as 99% clogged. The gashes in my legs look harsh and violent, but are nothing compared to the one that runs deep and wide from the top of my chest to my abdomen.  But as I began healing, it became clearer that I would recover and make it home again.

My wife took me home yesterday, in the middle of a bright and warm spring Monday afternoon.  I marveled at how, while I was away, the landscape had transformed from brown and dead winter grasses to the bright green and growing carpet that now covered the ground.  And it occurred to me that a storm that had taken place in my heart had transformed me, too, driving seeds of rebirth and regeneration deep into my moist soils.

Spring is birth and growth, promise and opportunity. Home is the place where these things are realized, where they come into fruition.  Home is the reason for spring, and the place where we rest our souls and nurture our beating hearts.

Main Street

/ djgourdoux / 2 Comments

(a very rough draft of a short piece of fiction – needs a lot of work)

I’d see him from time to time, his black hair thick and matted, his beard a gnarled hornet’s nest. He looked to be in his late thirties or early forties. He wore a quilted acrylic vest over a faded flannel shirt, even on the warmest days of August.  He wasn’t small, standing about six foot, with a stomach that protruded beyond his belt.  He would shuffle down the sidewalks, muttering to himself.  Stepping off of or up onto the curb while crossing the street was always a challenge.  He’d get to the end of the sidewalk and stand motionless before lifting a leg and raising a foot to knee level, then take an exaggerated step down onto the street, often times stumbling onto the pavement.  I’d never seen him fall, but his worn and weathered face usually had a scar or contusion on his nose or beneath one of his eyes.

He’d shuffle up and down the Main Street sidewalks on the north side of the street from their beginning at the stop sign at Highway 67 to the west to the A & W that marked the end of the business district to the east. He walked so slowly that it would take him a couple of hours to complete the mile long trek.  He’d sit in the inside dining area of the restaurant for a couple of hours, then he’d leave, cross the street, and walk the mile back to Highway 67, walking west this time, on the south side of Main Street, the whole time mumbling an incomprehensible murmur.

I asked my co-workers at the window factory about the man, and they’d all seen him, but no one knew who he was.  He just appeared in town sometime between June and July, about a month before I moved in to the Mayflower Hotel.  Someone had given him the name “Mister Stinky,” and that seemed to stick. I’d describe him to people and they’d scratch their heads, but when I said “Mister Stinky” everyone knew who I was talking about.

August turned to September and I started dating Amy, the girl who worked in the office. She had dishwater blonde hair and big breasts. She worked days and I worked nights, second shift, so the only real time we had together was on the weekend, Saturday nights.  We spent most of them in Gene’s Place, a neighborhood bar near the factory where a lot of the workers hung out, or The Uptown, the new place on the east side of town that had a dance floor and catered to the eighteen to twenty one year olds.  They had big speakers and an impressive sound system and a DJ who would play the top forty hits of the day, everything from the Bee Gees and Donna Summer to The Cars and The Knack. It was 1978, the time in Wisconsin of the eighteen year old drinking age. I was nineteen and new to town, Amy was twenty and had lived in Neil all her life. She still lived at home and the manager of the Mayflower, Mr. Williams, didn’t allow unmarried tenants to bring girls in, so our intimate time was spent parked in my 1976 Chevy Nova outside the town limits in the dark of County Highway T.

Meanwhile, as far as I could tell, Mister Stinky was gone, just as mysteriously as he’d appeared.  No one knew exactly when he left.  The day came when everyone realized they hadn’t seen him for a while.  I think I saw him once in October, I seem to remember the trees having changed, but it’s fuzzy.

Amy and I started growing apart. Turns out we didn’t have that much in common, and it became apparent that our episodes out on Highway T didn’t have the same impact on her that they had on me. The week of Thanksgiving came and I spent it with my dad at our cabin deer hunting.

She broke up with me on the Monday after Thanksgiving, over the phone, which was ironic, as my apartment in the Mayflower didn’t have a phone.  It started during the day, when I tried to call her at work from the payphone on Main Street.  She said we had to talk, and asked me to call her at home that night from the factory when I was on break.  I did, and she told me it was over, that she wasn’t happy anymore, and that she wanted to date other people.

It was cold that night, around fifteen degrees when my shift was over and I walked out into the parking lot. I was tired and pissed off and feeling sorry for myself, and things only got worse when I tried to start my car and got the clicking sound of a dead battery.  I finally gave up and decided I’d take the thirty minute walk home to the Mayflower, thinking that the cold fresh air would clear the debris Amy and my car had clouded my head with.  It was already 12:45. I turned the collar of my army fatigue coat up and headed up hill on Mill Road into town.

The air was cold and heavy with unfallen snow, but it felt clean and pure. I turned onto Badger Avenue. All of the houses were dark. The sound of my feet on the sidewalks echoed between the gusts of wind from the north.  I was thinking about Amy, about the shape of her breasts and the cool smoothness of her skin, and how that was over, how my fingers would never trace the curve of her back again. We weren’t in love, even in the cold midnight darkness I knew that, but I loved the feel of her body, the scent of her neck.  I’d never experienced such heightened physicality before Amy, and now I couldn’t help but wonder if I ever would again. As I approached the A & W, it started to softly snow.  I turned onto the beginning of Main Street, the sidewalk on the north side. From the A & W, looking out to the west, in the streetlights’ soft glow, I could see all of Main Street stretched out before me.  It was empty, the wind blowing snow dust around on the sidewalks.

I made my way past the auto parts store and the pharmacy, the empty storefronts shielding me from the cold north wind. The clock on the bank said it was 1:15. I was a block away from the Mayflower and home. I was tired and cold and all alone on the sidewalk. I thrust my hands deeper into my coat pocket and studied the accumulating snow on the sidewalk, when to my right, my eyes caught the sight of a shapeless dark mass on the ground in the doorway to Richardson’s Appliances.  I stopped and realized it was a person, a human being, curled up in a ball, his legs and shoes sticking out from under the wool coat he’d tried to cover up with.  I could make out enough of his face underneath the stocking cap to see Mister Stinky, sound asleep in the cold. Curled up like he was in the cold doorway he looked small and slight.  I didn’t know what to do, my first thought was to wake him, but it occurred to me that might be dangerous, there’s no telling how he’d react.

I decided to go back to my apartment and get some warm things.  I ran the rest of the way to the Mayflower and climbed the stairs up to my apartment.  I took the extra blanket off of my bed and my blaze orange deer hunting coat and bundled them up in my arms and ran back down the stairs and out the door, under the red neon of the sign that said “Mayflower Hotel.”

Main Street was still and empty and silent, the snow coming down harder now. I thought I’d let him sleep, and lay the blanket and my hunting coat across him, and then I’d call the police from the pay phone, and he’d be warm while we waited for them.

I got to Richardson’s Appliances, and the doorway was empty. It’d been no more than five minutes since I’d left Mister Stinky there.  I must have woke him, I thought.  I looked up and down Main Street but there was nothing. The snow was coming down harder and coating the sidewalks.  I looked down and I could see my footprints and it occurred to me that wherever Mister Stinky went, in that slow and shuffling walk of his, he’d leave tracks, too.  But the only tracks I saw were my own.

I ran up and down Main Street, looking into every doorway of every locked and darkened storefront, cradling the blanket and hunting coat in my arms, but I never found a track, not a single footprint.  I looked in every alley, every nook and cranny. I stayed out for what felt like another hour, the snow coming down harder, but I never found a trace of him.  Finally, with the bank clock reading 2:00 and the blanket and coat in my arms wet and covered with a fresh layer of snow, I gave up.

I went home and crawled into bed, exhausted and confused, thinking about Mister Stinky, wondering what had happened to him. Did I really see him? I’d decided not to call the cops, knowing that the town’s two officers were off duty at that time of night, and that without any evidence of Mister Stinky it wasn’t worth rousing one of them out of a warm bed to look for an apparition. But as I laid there in the darkness of my apartment, I wondered if I’d done the right thing, if I should have called them. If I really did see Mister Stinky, he was still out there, and it was still snowing and cold.

The next thing I knew it was light out. I looked out my third floor window, and the town had awakened. It was still snowing. People were digging out, clearing driveways and scraping car windows, and out over the river cars were crossing the bridge. The day had begun, and the streets that had been so silent and empty a few hours ago were bustling with life, and I knew that out there, in the middle of it, there was my parked and dead car, and Amy, and Mister Stinky.

I never saw Mister Stinky again, and as far as I’m aware, neither did anyone else.  But I swear in that lonely night he was there, huddled in the doorway of Richardson’s Appliances, and then he was gone. I looked for him in that cold and snowy night, and I’ve looked for him in every darkened doorway in the almost forty years since.

Someday I’ll find him.

The Day the Egg Stood Still

/ djgourdoux / 1 Comment

In the future, just a few years from now, egg salad sandwiches will be illegal, and anyone caught with possession of one will be sentenced to two years of hard labor and torture, including being locked in a small five by five foot cement block cell with an insurance salesman for an unspecified time.

At first, the public will be uncertain as to the intent of this law, if the newly elected president, Chester B. Chester, intends to seriously enforce it, until during his first press conference Chester detects a dab of egg salad on CNN reporter Wolf Blitzer’s beard. He aggressively interrogates Blitzer, calling him up to the podium where he sticks his nose in Blitzer’s chin and loudly sniffs, finally exclaiming “That’s Hellmans!  I’d know Hellman’s anywhere!  You thought you could slip a little bit of Hellman’s past Chester B. Chester!  Ha!  That’ll be he day!”  He then announces that he is mobilizing the twelfth division of the U.S. Army on a reconnaissance mission to overtake and occupy Blitzer’s beard. ”It’s my prerogative as commander in chief,” he added, before he announced that the rest of the press conference would continue as planned but that he would only take questions about egg salad. “By the way,” he added, “if anybody knows what the word reconnaissance means, please let me know.”

Three hours later, after fielding fifty seven questions about egg salad, Chester returned to what used to be referred to as the oval office.  Chester had renamed the room the Egg Salad Emporium, and in the hallway, he’d replaced all of the portraits of past presidents with tasteful artistic renditions of egg salad. They were tasteful because the canvases were actually made from egg salad, and Chester had already taken bites out of several of them.

“Where’s my secretary of Egg Salad?” Chester barked into the intercom on his desk.

“He’s just arrived,” his receptionist, Alice Tinkerton responded.  It wasn’t common knowledge but in her previous career Alice TInkerton was an engineer who had developed one of Chester’s favorite egg salad recipes.  “I’ll send him in.”

Egg Salad Edwards, as Chester had renamed the man, entered the Egg Salad Emporium and took a seat in the chair across the desk from Chester. In his hands he was holding a portfolio filled with important documents.

“Is that the report?”  Chester asked.

“Yes. Do you care to read it?” Edwards replied.

“Just give me the highlights,” Chester said.

“Well, sir, I am pleased to announce that all egg salad manufacturing plants across the country have been shut down.”

“What?”  Chester’s voice thundered with rage. “Why on earth would you do such a thing?”

“But I assumed,” Edwards replied, “that when you signed the executive order banning all consumption of egg salad, that you also meant to halt all egg salad production, too.”

“Edwards, you fool!  Can’t you see?   And to think I picked you to be my secretary of Egg Salad.”

“Sir, I’m sorry …” Edwards studied his shoes, his head down in shame.

“And to think I even renamed you Egg Salad Edwards.  What was your name before again?

“Um, Joe.  Joe Malone.  From Dubuque Iowa.”

“And what did you do?”

I was a shoelace salesman.”

“Well, I’ll give you 24 hours to get all the manufacturing plants in operation again.  And I expect to double, no triple, their production level. We need a healthy GDESP. ”

“GDESP?”

“Gross Domestic Egg Salad Product.  For a guy named Egg Salad Edwards, you sure don’t know much about egg salad, do you?”

“I guess not. May I ask, sir, if the consumption of egg salad is illegal, why do we need to increase production?”

“Oh, Edwards, Edwards, you are an idiot, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am, sir.”

“It’s for me!”

“What’s for you, sir?”

“All of the egg salad. All the egg salad in these United  States will be mine and mine alone.  Then we’ll expand until I have all of the egg salad in the western hemisphere.  ‘Ensalada de huevo’ as they say in the Spanish speaking countries. Then …. the world!”

So it begins, the most glorious period in the history of the world.  After declaring martial law, Chester will continue to rule the United States, consuming nothing but egg salad for the next twenty seven years , making the U.S.Egg Salad (as Chester eventually renames the country) the undisputed dominant superpower in the sandwich salad race. Russia will make major advances in chicken salad, and China in tuna salad, but neither will come close to Chester B. Chester and his vast Egg Salad empire.