Man, Interr…Ah, Dammit: Part I (TGL)

~Rambling Thoughts on Learning American Sign Language~

[The Giverny Life quod vide]

~Nemo surdior est quam is qui non audiet

Wednesday night, and the coffee house was a-chattering, to say nothing of a-gesturing, a-quivering and a-fluttering, with all manner of conversation.  Great oaths were being sworn, petty promises were being made, and lots of intermittent rational discussion was being had.

     Or so I assumed.  I actually couldn’t understand any of it.

     For once, however, I could actually tell the scope of the conversation filling the room.  It was as noisy as a rave, with 83.6% less saturated Poor Decision Making, and yet it was virtually silent even by my not overly strict standards.  Perhaps a vague rustle in the background, the crinkle of paper and clank of mugs against wood and squeaking scrapes of chair legs sliding over hard tile.

    None of which I could actually hear, just for the record.

    To avoid accusations of coyness, for coyness I’ve been accused of on occasion, I’ll go ahead and note that the conversation – gestures and quivers and flutters alike – was taking place almost entirely in sign language.  I will go ahead and say ‘American Sign Language’ (AMSLAN) because, although I couldn’t tell AMSLAN from SLAMBAMTHANK YOUMA’AM¹ at a glance, this affair was most definitely taking place in America, with thousands of miles separating the coffee house from the nearest foreign country.

     I’ve always been excellent at basic deduction.  I'm clearly a genius at figuring out the painfully obvious.  I do not feel the need for humility on that point.

     Another thing I’ve always been excellent at is wondering what the holy hell is going on.

Pursuant to this admission, I started wondering what in the blue blazes was happening² as I looked around the room.  For a long second, I thought the place had been taken over by a particularly emphatic and passionate group availing themselves of every trick in their repertoire, including wild gestures, to get their points across.  Thanks to an impromptu drum ritual and crawfish broil I once stumbled over in a friend’s back yard while searching for an errant kitty one sultry spring afternoon, it wouldn’t be the first time my wanderings led me into the belly of the Overemphatic Beast.

     One can argue that I should have realized from the fact that pretty much everyone in the coffee house was waving fingers and hands at each other that sign language was the more obvious conclusion.  One can also argue that I’m a blithering idiot.

     Indeed, at least a couple of my girlfriends have made that exact argument, in fact.  Only one of them seemed to be joking.

     (To be fair, and to head off lengthy and likely fruitless discussion of my cognitive prowess and/or attention to significant detail, I will note that few people were conversing with any great enthusiasm at that juncture.  Most seemed to be settling in and getting tasting their food and drinks while exchanging subdued signs with their companions.)

     By the sheerest razor’s edge of luck, a single table opened up just as I was walking through the room.   I co-opted it with a grim focus that would have led to me shoving intervening people off a cliff (assuming a cliff had been present) in my haste to reach it.  After setting up my computer and paying for my order³ I decided to check the flyers on the outside doors and windows on the off-chance that they were advertising events other than prog-rock and prog-art.  Sure enough, after glancing past a half-dozen events that seemed a little befuddled in theory, if not entirely unclear in practice, regarding exactly what sort of affair they were so earnestly advertising, I found a flyer announcing a gathering for a local ASL group.⁴

     And thus was order restored to my world.  More accurately, thus was a condition of slightly less chaos restored to my world.

~***~

They -- that eternal, ubiquitous, and almost always anonymous they of modern folklore and pith – say learning a new language grows progressively more difficult as one ages.  Children and young teenagers absorb the knowledge in much the same way as they absorb every other sort of knowledge before radiating it back into the atmosphere once more, generally with added madcap hormonal hijinks.  In my early twenties, in grad school, I managed to learn one last language, Old English⁵, to add to my passing knowledge of French, Latin, and the occasional Alcoholic Gibberish.  Since then, I’ve not only learned no new ones, but I’ve all but forgotten Old English (though I could probably recollect the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet which I studied in ancillary fashion to actual Old English.)  By the time I learned it, I was past the age of truly internalizing them without occasional practice.

      Perhaps it was a matter of devotion.  Keeping up with my skills – reading the fragments of Anglo-Saxon texts still floating around, or perusing ‘Beowulf’ in the original from time to time – never seemed to be high on my priority list.  Having long since realized that the events of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” were extremely unlikely to happen to me⁶, I had little motivation to keep up with a dead language.  At least Latin, which I could translate passably well once upon a time, still has relevance to the Roman Catholic Church, Vatican II notwithstanding.

     In theory, learning sign language should be straightforward enough.  Learn the gestures, the angles and arcs and subtle crooks of finger and wrist.  Attach them to words, transform thought into action.  We do this all the time.  We master the proper turn of a steering wheel to get the desired effect.  We tap our feet to rhythm, or deftly move a full cup of hot coffee.  We walk without falling flat on our face.  Most of the time.  So, in theory, this is nothing more than an extension of who we are as human beings.  We learn the proper motion to achieve the desired result.

     Then again, in quantum theory, we should be able to walk through walls.  In physics and eschatological theory, energy cannot neither be created nor destroyed, so immortality is inevitable.  In linguistic theory, nothing really means anything except that which our listeners allow it to mean.  In theory, people should be happy and healthy and content with their lives.

     I’ve long since learned not to trust theory any further than necessary.

     In the end, theory makes liars of us all.

    If you're thinking that this is all bit of a high-falutin’ digression for a straightforward discussion of a learning experience, I absolutely agree.  Roll your eyes to your heart’s content.  In the end, excessive ponderin’ and easy access to word processing programs that allows for the quick jotting down of pointless cogitatin’ makes pompous twits of us all.

     The point is, I hadn’t learned sign language despite having a baby sister and a father who both learned it, either for fun (sister) or for his job (father.)

     So there I was in the midst of a crowd beginning to sign with increased enthusiasm as the various sources of caffeine.  My particular table of serendipity was located in a cozy little nook, my back to the wall and half my view blocked by a counter.  I settled in to work,

     Generally, I’m reasonably good at blocking out stimuli.  Being hard-of-hearing helps enormously, but the flip side is that I don’t miss much visually.  (I take great pains not to react to things I see at the edges of my vision, but I do see them better than most.)  So being able to ignore the visual stimuli as well is an accomplishment.  That night, however, I became increasingly distracted by all the signing visible.  Even when I stared closely at my screen, the periphery was filled with constant motion.  Finally, I realized something odd – it was getting entirely too loud for me to concentrate properly.

     Is this ironic?

     I want to say ‘Yes,’ but can’t really fit it into any of the classic categories of irony⁷.

     Having accepted my distraction and bedevilment as inevitable, I surreptitiously watched a few conversations at nearby tables.  Strain as I might to recognize some the signs, though, I found them incomprehensible.  They were too fast, too skilled, too completely unknown to me.  Granted, that last one pretty much sufficiently covered why I didn’t understand, but I had some hopes of at least recognizing a few gestures even if the conversation was several paragraphs past by the time I finally worked them out.

~***~

This wasn’t completely idle hope.  It wasn’t simply a case of me believing I could understand just about anything if I tried hard enough.  I’d taken a preliminary ASL class about a year prior, after encountering a group of deaf people at a sushi restaurant and inquiring (via writing) as to where I could find a good sign language class.  They helped me by naming some resources to check out.  So, after forking over $50⁸ for a couple months, I spent two hours every Tuesday evening learning the basics of sign language.

     Note, I don’t say I learned it well.  This is an important plot point in my story here.

     From memory, I can, with relative assurance, say ‘thank you,’ ‘I love you,’ and ‘good morning.’  While these are all very helpful phrases when engaged in sexual relations of various varieties, they don’t exactly cover a wide range of conversational topics, and are almost completely useless in most situations.  Certainly I could walk back up to the counter to thank the barista for making my coffee, for instance, but I’m not entirely certain how a ‘good morning’ would come across, given that it was 6:30 at night.  And I rather suspect a subsequent ‘I love you’ would make things incredibly awkward.  While it’s possible she would leap across the counter to embrace me with a mad passion and clinically insane fervor, I rather suspect her reaction would be more accurately described as what the hell? and/or I’ve called the cops and there are a dozen witnesses here if you try anything untoward.⁹

     I could also reliably sign the letters ‘J’, ‘R’, ‘U’, and ‘W’.  I can do the ‘M’ and ‘N’ if you don’t nimd ne confusing one sigm for the other.  If the fate of the world ever depends on a hero who can reliably – if not quickly – fingerspell the word ‘wruj’ or possibly ‘jurw’, I’m your man.

     The class itself was, as noted, an introductory one, filled with earnest people seeking to master the ancient and noble art of gesture-talking.  The teacher was capable and sincere.  My classmates were attentive and seemed, to a person, to have laudable intentions for learning.  Some wanted to communicate with friends and colleagues; others sought to better serve the public at whatever jobs they held.  As I recall, one had a deaf relative, while another had goals toward working with the deaf.

     Have you noticed what was missing in my description of my classmates?

     Go ahead and re-read.  Think about the many possible motivations for learning how to sign.  Note that ‘have nothing better to do with your hands’ isn’t one of them.¹⁰

     If you still haven’t worked it out, I’ll quit being coy, for coyness I have been accused of on occasion:  out of the dozen or so students, not a single one (myself excluded, of course) actually needed to learn to sign, at least not for reasons of being able to function independently in an aural world.  All seemed perfectly capable of hearing what was going on. 

Somehow, it hadn’t occurred to me that would be the case; in retrospect, though, it seems almost embarrassingly obvious.

     My situation, while certainly not unique, is along a descending slope of the bell curve.  As far as I can tell, the majority of deaf and hard-of-hearing people are either older men and women, following a known and accepted side-effect of aging, or have been deaf from a young age.  Usually birth or infancy, it seems.  Fewer start to lose their hearing in such rapid fashion I’ve been doing in their early to middle adulthood.

     Yes, that makes me special, a unique and lovely snowflake.  There couldn’t be more than a few million in the same boat, right?

     I’d order a cake to celebrate but it’s not worth the hassle trying to interact with the baker.

     Granted, my hearing was always a bit suspect.  Until a few short years ago, though, I managed just fine.  My difficulties were more annoyances than serious impediments.  Nobody was going to hire me to listen to sonar aboard a submarine, but neither were they forced to mime every conversation with me.

     Since miming conversations with me has grown increasingly necessary, I really have few options at this juncture.  So I immediately took the seat directly to the teacher’s right at the beginning of the first class and held fast to that position for the entire run of the course.  Well, almost directly.  A young lady¹¹ sat between me and the teacher, a laptop in front of her.  She would then spend the next two hours typing out what the teacher was saying so I could follow the discussion.

     It’s a bit surreal to be in a sign language class designed for people who could hear the teacher, requiring ad hoc techniques for a person who actually needed to learn.

     The teacher and the assistant and my classmates all to be lovely people who sincerely wanted to make things easier for me.  I have absolutely no complaints at all.  As I’ve discovered lately, there’s always a certain element of pity.  That’s unavoidable, and, in many ways, it speaks well of our poor, benighted species.  However, that particular topic evokes a complex reaction in me, so it will remain a discussion for another essay, one I’m sure I’ll tackle before too long.¹²

     In any case, the other people in the room gave every impression of being quite honestly interested in just being helpful.  I just found it a bit ironic, an intellectual quirked eyebrow, as it were, to discover that it was more problematic for a hard-of-hearing person to follow the class than one with full possession of their hearing.

     If I could offer a more suitable method of teaching a mixed group, I would.  But since all my ideas revolve around group texting, messaging technology, and the occasional bout of metaphysical Twister, I have to admit that they handled it as well as could be expected.  There’s a reason deafness is considered a handicap, after all – it handicaps communication.  If an elegant and simple solution existed, it wouldn’t be a handicap.¹³

     The hard truth of the matter was, I found learning sign language difficult.  For someone who has rarely experienced any particular difficulty learning whatever happened to interest me at a given time, this turn of events could be quite frustrating.  While I completely understood the necessity, and felt a certain amount of fascination with the links between gestures and the words and ideas they represented, I couldn’t muster up the intellectual energy to focus to the degree necessary to master the topic.  Despite the fact that I paid for a class that wasn’t going to affect anything like ‘grades’ and ‘graduation’, I had to focus on being nervous about failing to learn the week’s assignments before the next class.

     To avert accusations that this particular lady (of a gentlemanly ilk) doth protest too much, I’m only going to say this once:  I’m not stupid.  Not even remotely.  Nevertheless, I struggled to pick up sign language.

     Part of this, I think, was the atrophying of my study skills.  For many years now, since grad school, I’ve read and researched and studied a considerable number of topics.  My knowledge base has continued to expand over the years, often in direct linear correlation with the expansion of the Internet.  I will confidently claim to be better educated now than I was years ago, and I was pretty damned well educated years ago.  But I study topics and subjects that I find fascinating for no other reason than that they just happened to occur to me one day.   I vacillate every which way across vast regions of knowledge, every bit of datum for itself and the Devil take hindmost.

     So perhaps another part of the reason I was slow to pick it up was that I chafed under the restriction of necessity.  Learning was a task, a work of rote and goals and all that implies a lack of the freedom of exploration that I value to a ridiculous degree.  I am, at heart, an autodidact.

     The more I consider it, the more this strikes me as an even more compelling reason than mere lack of studiousness.

~***~

The complicated conversation amongst the ASL speakers in the coffee house soon grew too fast, too complex for me to separate individual words or isolate the meaningful motions that marked the exchanges.  They appeared to be talking faster than I ever do verbally¹⁴.  And yet there was an odd beauty in the control demonstrated with each movement.  A fairly stout blonde boy, no older than 17 or 18 to my eye, moved thick fingers with a delicacy that could thread needles.  Fascinated, I watched him surreptitiously until I could make out most words and the clauses they formed together.  Though the fingerspelling was still far too fast for me to follow, I could at least see their place in the flow of the conversation, where they began and ended.  I even saw a word that I could guarantee began with ‘J’ because the finger placement and motion are distinctive.  Obviously, I had no idea what it was actually about, but I could identify it as a language, as communication.

     Across the table from him was a cute girl.   I attempted to watch her instead since, given my druthers (and who doesn’t want to receive their druthers from time to time?) a cute girl wins out when I’m engaged in surreptitious voyeurism.  And I realize that term evokes some unsavory imagery, but what else can I really call it?  I was watching them at angles, between glances, careful not to let on what I was doing.  Pretty much defines surreptitious voyeurism. 

     The girl’s hands and fingers moved as quickly and frequently as the boy’s, a perfect balance in the dialogue between the two.  But I couldn’t keep from returning my observation to the boy.  The disproportionate thickness and stubbiness of his fingers accentuated the skill and elegance of sign language being used with the same fluency as I use spoken English.  Possibly a bit more fluency, given I tend to go off on pointless digressions and deliberately use words in a manner not strictly in keeping with their lexicographical underpinnings.  One doesn’t expect that sort of fluid motion with pudgy fingers and thick arms, yet there it was. 

     To call it artistic in same manner one might praise a particularly skilled and mellifluous orator wouldn’t have quite been a bridge too far.  Granted, some of the movements were abrupt and unwieldy, forcing out their meaning, but so, too, is some art.

     (Just so it’s clear, I mention this particular speaker’s weight and physiognomy not as commentary concerning, or disapprobation of, either aspects.  I’m merely trying to illustrate how language subsumes its medium to achieve a certain grace in toto.)

     My eyes scanned the rest of the group, all deeply in conversation.  Here and there, someone seemed to be making an emphatic point, the signs becoming more pronounced, more periodic.  I couldn’t tell if people were being convinced or not – discerning who was talking to whom proved difficult.  A half-dozen conversations criss-crossed the table as everyone around seemed to be looking at different people as the conversation progressed.  What fascinated me was that the very fact that I couldn’t understand what was being expressed with such skill meant they could be saying the crudest, rudest things imaginable and I’d never know.¹⁵

     Finally, I gave up.  I hadn’t intended to watch them for quite so long.  My computer had shifted to screensaver¹⁶ and my thoughts had started to return to what I was writing.  At the periphery, though, the motion still caught my eye.  A vague sense of motion reminiscent of a flock of birds rising kept my eyes darting up for a brief moment. 

     I started to shut down my computer.  As fascinating as the scene was, I wasn’t there to people watch, and the distraction pretty much prevented me from accomplishing anything meaningful.  I threaded my way out, careful not interfere with the movements around me.

The next time I was there during a meeting of this group, sitting in the exact same seat, I barely even noticed them.  Apparently, familiarity breeds concentration.

      Yes, a bad pun.  Deal with it.

~***~

This is how language works:  it savagely breaks down the vast abstract of the human condition into brittle bits and pieces and crushes them together into a brutal but lucidity.  At its core, language is imposition, forcing the vagaries of experience into concrete symbols, if only for our own benefit.  We channel instinct through idiom, thought through synthesis, self through semiosis.¹⁷

     It may only be the illusion of control, but it’s a very powerful illusion.

     We instinctively shy away from such description of how humans interact.  The implied violence of the process offends our sensibilities.  Can we call expressions of love savage?  What of inspiring speeches?  Are they mere strong-arm tactics?  The harmony of lyrical poetry would seem completely at odds with this analysis of the language paradigm.

     I don’t disagree.  And yet I maintain that this implied violence does not contraindicate any of these things.  All expression is violent to one degree or another because all desire to express ourself is an act of breaking free from our inherent isolation.  A body at rest tends to stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.  It’s not merely Newtonian; it’s philosophy, and biology.  Mere existence contraindicates interaction.  What we are is not what we express.  So when we speak, or write, or sign, or share a meaningful gaze, we force mere existence into motion, into communication.  We learn to force commonality to escape isolation.

     Language, after all, is about expressing the abstract in a manner others can understand.   Even when we can’t understand the basics, we recognize the attempt.  

     At its heart, language embraces reciprocation, acts of encoding and code-breaking, exchanging concepts in ways that allow others a brief understanding of what we’re thinking, what we’re feeling.  Every language has a pattern.  That’s part of the way we learn new ones, associating sounds with symbols, intonations with particular acts.  Identifying even the most unfamiliar language isn’t particularly difficult.  That is the heart of linguistics.  A properly educated human can single out a real language out of thousands of false ones simply through pattern recognition.¹⁸  Generally, forgeries can be disproved in this manner.  Not quickly, mind you, nor easily, but pattern recognition ultimately works because language and expression are inherently structured.

     Any human interaction beyond the tactile and instinctual requires this patterning.  We modify and rehash and contort our instruments of communication until, by some miracle of rare device, our audience grasps some cogent fraction of what we’re trying to convey.  A frisson of truth, as it were.  The infinite fluid imprecision of thought and emotion forcibly bottled up in the phylacteries off expression

     And then it’s gone as though it never intended to stay.  We expect more.  We wear the anticipation about us like a long-muted technicolor dreamcoat.  For all our attempts to set things in stone, they fade like mist under a morning sun, and all the psychometrics in the world can only measure what we have learned, not how we learned it.

     I’m not waxing philosophic without a point.  We define ourselves through language.  Our self-image is couched in adjectives and predicates and all the thousands of nouns that swirl about us, each a name for some part of who we are.  The self – anima/animus, to go Jungian rather than Freudian – remains undefined in the social context until we take measures to define it.  In order to define it, however, we need to create a continuum.  Not only do the appropriate words change, the words themselves take on nuance and subtle shifts until what we once described as beautiful or tall or pellucid changes because the ideas we encoded in the words beautiful or tall or pellucid have changed.

     Language defines the times we live in.  As such, it defines our world.  So, as my hearing goes, my ability to take control of my world fades as well.  I should learn sign language, even if it narrowly restricts the kinds of interactions I can have.  My difficulty is that I don’t think like that, don’t understand the world like that.  It’s not some simple substitution cypher.  I’m generally a very polite person, for instance, but do I say thank you in a voice that conveys that I am, in fact, thankful, or does the act of touching fingertips to chin and gesturing outwards compass my intentions, my sincerity?¹⁹

     Seems silly, right?

     It is.  I acknowledge that.  Hell, as a quasi-absurdist, I’ll even embrace it.  Mere silliness isn’t, in itself, sufficient reason to dismiss something out of hand.

     And it’s more than that.  I cling to the spoken word, to the sensation of lilting vowels and brutish consonants, the vibration in the air and the gentle lips against my ear.  In some place, deep inside me, I admit that my resistance to learning sign language isn’t mere inefficiency of study or lack of freedom.  It’s something entirely slightly more profound, and far more petty.  Every happy memory I have with others – friends and family and lovers and those I couldn’t quite categorize but definitely weren’t any of the three aforementioned – comes down to each concrete detail.  Language isn’t an idea.  It’s an enactment, and every nuance depends on how we choose to articulate our thought, make our desires as real as the things we desire.  When I told people I loved them (or, in one memorable case, the person told me I was in love with her and I concurred after a bit of thought²⁰) , the sensation, the sentiment, was carried in words and voice.  I could have just hugged them or looked adoringly into their eyes or sent them a particularly emotive stuffed bear, but the artifact of language can replace all of these.  When someone told me she loved me, the memory of her voice far outstrips the odds and ends, the items that represented the reality of our relationship.

     Every moment is sensation.  Every sensation becomes memory.  Once I commit to learning sign language, I’m finally acknowledging that the world as I used to experience will be merely memory.

     Even for someone like me, who generally rejects maudlin nostalgia as completely pointless, it’s not quite so easy to accept this as one might think.

     As I left, I took one last glance at the ASL group happily signing away, smiles crinkling their cheeks and eyes intent on each other.  In this stew of human interaction, we struggle in our divergence, in our threading path along the twisted interlocking branches of the tree of knowledge.  Trial becomes error, error becomes learning, learning becomes knowledge, and knowledge becomes self-fulfilling futility. 

     Yes, I am aware of how dark that got, and how quickly it did so.  My point is, language will always be an ongoing process, not just the learning and mastery of it, but what it comes to mean in the narrative of our lives.  Even the mistakes.

     Language doesn’t really evolve, after all.  We do, in the quotidian process that we rarely quite notice when it’s happening.

     The ASL group merely represents a necessary evolution, both for deaf people in general and for me in particular.  For them, learning sign language was born of the same necessity that learning spoken language was for me, after all.  The linguistic paradigm they created for themselves was every bit as complex and old as the one I’d created for myself.  If I must embrace this new paradigm for myself soon, and it seems increasingly certain that I must, I can at least look to these people for evidence that it will work.

     Eventually.  Because I didn’t forget that I blamed my study habits, and no realization in the world can fix chronic laziness.

~Fin~

Footnotes

1)  To save you the trouble of looking it up, SLAMBAMTHANKYOUMA’AM is absolutely a real language, I swear, but hardly one approved by either practitioners of sign language or, indeed, basic decency.  It has only a half-dozen words, all of which revolve around the need to be elsewhere with unceremonious haste the next morning.

2)  A specialized subset of the ‘wondering what the holy hell is going on’ skill.  While I’ve been known to misapply it to situations that didn’t require anything more than a ‘wondering what the hell is going on,’ I feel that sometimes a man has to shake things up by wondering what in the blue blazes is happening just to stay in practice.  Nothing worse than encountering a situation requiring one to wonder what in the blue blazes is happening and all one can muster is a feeble ‘holy hell’ sense of wonderment.

     Aren’t you glad you read this entire footnote?

3)  I suspect I have become predictable, because I didn’t accidentally leave out ‘ordering’ in my description of the tasks I undertook.  The baristas knew I would order a large Americano, two shots, in a mug rather than a disposable cup.  They had almost finished making it by the time I arrived at the counter.  They’re lovely people, it must be said

     One of these days, I’m going to order a triple mocha non-fat butterfoam latke latte with fresh-ground cinnamon and tansy, just to keep people on their toes.

     Then again, given that the order is probably complete nonsense, I suspect they’re more likely to stomp on my toes instead, just to remind me not to be a twit.

4)  Really, I can be forgiven for not noticing before.  Indie and prog-rock groups, especially local and regional ones, tend to have the most random names, so “ASL Group” could just as easily been some latter-day postmodern shoegazer pop group that stood on stage silently waving their hands at the audience for 45 minutes before traipsing off to take some hallucinogens.

     The group also apparently didn’t feel the need for the long-form acronym, and I fully support their decision, especially since there’s no point in doing a weird cross between the acronym and an abbreviation.

5)  Yes, Old English is essentially a foreign language.  So many people are surprised to learn that their nemesis in 10^th grade literature classes, Shakespeare himself, wrote entirely in Modern English.  It’s the exact same language we speak now.  Chaucer wrote in Middle English and most people need annotations to understand him.  Old English is to Modern English as, well, German is to Modern English.

6)  Nobody, or at least nobody who didn’t want to be scorned and scoffed at, would describe me as a Yankee at all, let alone a Connecticut one.  In order for the events of the story to come to pass for me, some heavy-duty dialect training and lots of faked documents would be required.  That just seems unlikely.

     Also, time travel, I guess.  But the ‘transforming me into a Yankee’ part just seems harder to believe.

7)  The classic types of irony are verbal, situational, and dramatic.  Even after years of studying and reading literature, I still don’t know why it’s important to differentiate them.  Irony is a pretty simple and straightforward concept.  The divide between expectation and reality, generally with an unexpected or incongruous element.  Though I’m not inclined to do so, I make every effort to assume Alanis was being ironic about about the flawed examples of irony in the song.  A meta-commentary, as it were.

8)  As it turned out, the $50 wasn’t actually necessary in my case.  Apparently these classes were free for those who needed them for reasons of actual deafness.  But I’d paid already, so nothing to do but forge ahead with the knowledge that I had money at stake, which should have been a great motivator.  Unfortunately, I completely overlooked the fact I care almost nothing about money. In general, $50 means nothing to me except lots of coffee and maybe a good book of Hindustani Madlibs.  This general insouciance is good for the soul – lack of greed and acquisitiveness has traditionally been a metric of morality in most religious systems – but bad for the pocketbook and the pocketbook’s usefulness in situations where coffee might be purchased.  But good for the soul all the same.  Even Christianity, the modern politically-induced fervor for rapacious capitalism endemic amongst certain substantial branches of Christian faith notwithstanding.  It’s not that I dislike capitalism – practically speaking, it’s generally the most effective economic system – but I do have to raise an eyebrow at people whose Lord and Savior preached poverty and humility being so gung-ho for such things in the political arena.

     But now I’m pontificating on politics, and that’s very much a discussion for another time and place.  Carry on, brothers and sisters.  Carry on.

9)  Just to be clear, most of the baristas at this particular coffee house give every indication of being perfectly lovely, intelligent, and charming people who would more than likely just smile politely and wait until I was out of view before exchanging baffled glances and nervous laughs with their co-workers.  I don’t want to sully their names, unknown though those names are to me, by suggesting they are prone to overreaction.

10)  Though, in a perfect world, maybe it should be.  The world would be so much more civilized if people who had nothing better to do did something better anyway.  Though, on that lengthy and frequently unsavory list of things one can do with one’s hands, I can think of several equally enticing possibilities.  But let’s not go down that particular rabbit hole just yet.  Perhaps I will soliloquize (possibly even rhapsodize) some day when I have a few drinks in me.  Since, after a wild and wooly youth drinking all manner of concoctions in all manner of places, I no longer drink much, that occasion may be quite a while in the future.

11)  I never really learned what function she performed outside of the class, or what position she held, whether an employee of the department or an assistant teacher or just some stranger who happened to wander in with a laptop, a fizzy drink, and a burning need to transcribe something.

     Actually, there were two different young ladies.  But one was there for the vast majority of the classes.

12)  Until I do discuss the pity aspect of interactions with others, however, I feel the need to make one thing clear regarding self-pity:  I absolutely do not do it in any way, shape, or form.  It’s just not in my nature, and never has been.  Even if it were, I’d absolutely refuse to engage in it.  I’ve had a pretty good time of it, and if a little suffering is a part of it, that’s just how it goes.  Life is too short, and too fun, for me to wallow.

13)  Not to be tendentious (honestly), I refer to my condition as a ‘handicap’ without reservation.  The various less-straightforward terminologies simply do not work for me.  It’s a handicap.  I’m not ‘handicapable,’ at least not in any fashion that couldn’t be easily replicated by someone who doesn’t suffer from hearing loss.

     I want to make this clear, though:  I absolutely do not begrudge anyone for embracing alternative phrasings. Everyone, handicapped and non-handicapped alike, is fighting for meaning in this world, and if a person’s self-image is abetted by calling him or herself ‘handicapable,’ they have every right to embrace it.

14)  The pedant in me requires that I clarify:  technically, ‘orally.’  “Verbal” simply relates to the creation of words, audible or not.  Sign language is as verbal as spoken language.  But ‘orally’ just seems…loaded, as millions of easily-amused middle-schoolers have demonstrated over the years.

15) It was like a friend I had who could curse a storm in French, and she would do so in the most mellifluous tone, taking pleasure in the fact that her listeners couldn’t understand her.  She even avoided merde because that one was too well-known to English speakers.  The day she first encountered me – it was a group dinner at Outback – we became good friends because I couldn’t help but laugh at the fact that she was reciting French profanities and obscenities and telling everyone it was Baudelaire.  I called her on it as we both went outside for a smoke and that was that.

     Granted, it took me several seconds to realize she wasn’t reciting a Baudelaire poem because old Chuck could be a pretty profane guy.  He didn’t name his most famous collection Les Fleurs du mal for nothing, with sections such as ‘Spleen et Idéal’, ‘Révolte’, and ‘La Morte’ (I don’t imagine you need translations for any of these.)  He was a rancid nihilistic old bastard.  And a brilliant poet, because there’s no reason why poetry can’t be rancid and nihilist.

16) "Obscurum per obscure" both because I’m a pretentious twit and because "Nemo surdior est quam is qui non audiet" was just slightly too long for the screensaver app to accept it.  The latter quote I’ve reused as an epigraph here.  I’d put a footnote, but then I’d have to go renumber all the subsequent footnotes and that’s just a headache.  In case you’re wondering, and I hope you are because what’s the point of inserting random phrases from a dead language if I can’t be properly beneficent by translating, this means “No-one is more deaf than a person who will not hear.”

     Remarkably, inserting the phrase into Google’s English-to-Latin dictionary gives the exact right result.  I’ve rarely seen these translation services manage to get more than a couple words correct at a time.

17)  I wrote out an entire section discussing modern semiotics, then realized that, despite the fact that I’m quite interested in semiotics, I was bored to death by what I wrote.  If that’s the case, I’m sure you would be too, and I don’t want to contribute to you leaving this mortal coil via fatal dullness.

18)  A properly programmed computer can do so as well, in far less time.  It’s a far simpler matter than teaching a computer chess.

     There was really no need to point this out in a footnote.  At this point, I’m just writing footnotes because I’ve become addicted. 

19)  During the ASL class, the teacher took a moment to explain that the deaf don’t really get sarcasm.  The logic was sound, if not impeccable, assuming my conclusion was what she intended to imply, i.e. that it’s hard to convey sarcasm with hand gestures, given that tone and pitch of voice are both heavily contextual with sarcasm.  I have difficulty imagining giving up both sarcasm and sincerity.

20)  Her name is *Terri and I will be writing about her at some point.  Technically, *Terri is the only person who knows me that will likely be reading this, so…hey, *Terri!  

Rococo Sylvanus: Part I

~The Bones of the American Dream~

**[Warning:  This narrative will reveal no great ideas or profound revelations.  If you're bored, don't say you weren't warned.]**

**[Disclaimer:  I am aware that this piece seems incomplete, threadbare, and clumsy.  Quite aware.  I am harping on a theme, and quite annoyingly at that.  My mind seems to be stuck in one gear and circling uselessly around some indistinct point here.  So I plan to revise it in the future, but for now I feel a need to just put it up and see where looking at it in context leads me.]**

Part I:  Rural Acrostics

The long sad shades of springs gone to furrow and seed lingered about our sweat-prickled bodies in the summer of our discontent.  The sun’s slow crawl over the horizon lingered at the edge of the slumbering world, a purple and red swathed arc of sky creased under the last heat of an endless day.  We watched with weary calm, our minds settling down, plodding along with thoughts grown as listless as flesh on the edge of sleep, as if unable to bear the weight of ideas in the sopping air.  The shadows of shrubs and fence posts and ungainly farming implements somehow seemed more distinct than the objects casting them.

This moribund descent into an Alabama dusk felt like the eve of the last of days, or like what I always assumed the eve of the last of days would feel like.  A corpulent swelteringstickydarkness gathered like dust about us in the half-evening of a quarter after 8 on a Sunday at the tail end of August. 

Night fell too slowly, yet day somehow left too quickly, slipping away in broad strokes, rolling down over the horizon.  It was the Great In-between of life – or Life – on the outskirts of a small Southern town, nestled in the far rural reaches of a nation that has not yet grown comfortable in its own landscaped skin.

I’m not sure it ever will.  Can a nation whose identity is intimately wrapped in the idea of a frontier ever escape its restive tendencies?

Darkness under rising indigo, night breathing out of tepid hours as the sunset shimmered like layered silk draped across the horizon.   We looked around at nothing in particular.  We nodded off without closing our eyes, caught in the somnolence of vast fields of faltering crops.  He murmured something crude.  To break the spell, I think, to wake himself up, and me along with him.  Though we had just driven down that morning from the University of Alabama, where we were both undergrads, it felt like we’d been there on the porch for days.

To our right, a thin paved road that hadn’t seen maintenance in decades, if ever.  It wasn’t even entirely clear to me that the road was actually paved beneath the dirt and dust and dried clay; when I pointed this out, my friend assured me it was.  Or had been, once. 

Or had been, once seemed to be a phrase that he was obligated to append to half the town he grew up in.

On the far side of this questionably-maintained road, nestling undergrowth became wide fields lined by massive trees at the very edge of our sight.  Occasionally, a flowering bush emerged from the riot of drab green and brown next to the road, but the flowers had wilted quickly under the summer heat.

Laid out about the house like the saddest and least edible buffet ever:  endless fields of hay and oats and ‘baccy, all colored a dark piss-yellow streaked with brown by time and drought and the sad-eyed neglect of farmers caught helplessly in the relentless ennui of a region descending into poverty.  The plants shriveled under the heat. They grew flaccid and weighed down by dead leaves on desiccating stalks.  Occasionally, a rare breeze caused them to sway before falling still again, as if all their remaining energy had been purged in that last desperate attempt to interact with hostile world around them.  Because the porch wrapped broadly around the entire house, we could see considerable portions of the surrounding land.

Some fields were dead, victims of neglect and bankruptcy and all the usual ways farmers can falter and fail.  As far as I could tell, the tobacco was the only crop being carefully maintained.  Even from our vantage point two hundred yards away, I could smell the dank sweetness of it, like bitter molasses. ¹

Somehow, I’d never imagined seeing so many stricken earthtones at the end of all things, nor associating vast fields of goldenrod with a slow awkward descent into death.

We looked about from our vantage point on his front porch, ensconced in quaintly archaic rocking chairs.  Quaint, or would have been had they not been painted the unsettling powder-orange of the University of Tennessee.  When I asked my friend if his parents had attended UT, he shook his head.  For reasons I couldn’t discern, however, he neglected to expand on the subject.  Perhaps he was ashamed.  Perhaps he was just trying to annoy me. 

The creak of our chairs was mostly masked by the louder creaks of the tired wooden porch floor beneath as we slowly teetered and tottered.  We rocked with deliberation, kicking at the wood beneath our feet only at occasional intervals, just enough to keep us in motion.  The sunset over the fields and trees glowed so beautiful that a better man than either of us might have wept.  It wasn’t that we weren’t good men.  Assuming one’s expectations weren’t overly high in that regard and one was feeling a particularly charitable at the moment, one could describe us as relatively decent men.  But we were young and brusque and more certain of ourselves than we had any right to be.

Even behind my Aviators (it was the mid-90s, so hush), my eyes ached from all that yellow-brown over broad spaces that had once been occupied by men and machinery working furiously to raise up a crop to sell. 

Most of the land we could see didn’t belong to his family.  Everything we could see, almost to the horizon where distant copses of stunted trees lurked, belonged to either by his neighbors or a non-local agricultural concern that seemed to have abandoned the area at some point since he actually lived here.  That was exactly what he said:  Ahgr-ih-cult’ral concern.  I’m not sure he even knew exactly what the term meant, other than big business horning in on the relative solitude of the country home where he’d grown up. 

His home sat on a respectable, but not staggering, two and a half acres of land.  Enough for a decent house, a nice yard, and an above-ground swimming pool, but hardly the latter-day trappings of munificent plantations of old.  His family was late to the game anyway, he explained.  His granddaddy built the house and tried to do some farming, but, little by little, he was forced to sell off parcels of his property until all that remained was the 2.5 acres we sat on and a small shack filled with the plumbing supplies that accompanied his granddaddy’s second attempt to make an honest rural living.

Just barely visible around the corner of the house to our left:  swampforests of low-lying regions, marshlands so entrenched that human development simply flowed around it rather than deal with trying to replace it.  My friend explained them to me.  The adjacent fields sat just above the water-table, if only just.  The forests, at least in this area, filled a regional lowland, mostly bog and scrub oaks whose branches crooked awkwardly about.  In normal times, you could walk into it and find firm footing suddenly giving way to undetected mud that sucked loosely fitted shoes right off your foot.  You had to look for the right bushes, the proper exposure of tree roots.

But we’d walked at least two miles through it the previous day without problem.  A lingering drought had evaporated even water hidden beneath dozens of broad branches.  The entire area was dying in flakes of dried mud, in stoppered wells and broken down farm machinery.  The place practically reeked of frustration in the face of the inexorable march of time.  Strangely enough, my friend noted, the drought wasn’t particularly bad or even particularly widespread.  There seemed no reason for the surrounding area to be as completely diminished as it was.  It felt like the residents of the town and surrounding farmlands had simply given up.

It felt damaged.  Cursed.  When my friend spoke of his feelings about being home again, he sounded like a man who saw a place at once both intimately familiar and utterly alien.  He had lost something grasping thorn and thresh of overgrown fields, in brutally segmented clay of dried-up irrigation channels.  Something had shattered into a thousand, thousand pieces that compassed everything he’d once known yet resembled it not at all.

Perhaps he didn’t think in precisely that way, exactly those terms, but there was no mistaking the sense of resignation in the way he carried himself, the way he spoke with mumbling lassitude of the remnants of his youth.  His parents, who had him later in life, had come to represent the aging despair that gripped the town.  And though he certainly didn’t say this, I suspected he no longer really recognized his parents very well.  I’d met them earlier, and when he spoke to them, he spoke with an enthusiasm that seemed to fall flat in their presence, as if he had not yet become accustomed to the changes that had turned them older than they should have been over the last few years.  After a couple minutes, his voice died down, his enthusiasm faltered, and the look of resignation on his face practically mirrored the perpetual looks of resignation on theirs.

~***~

Later, when we grew thirsty, we drove into town, and the few people I saw looked so remarkably like his parents that I was a bit unnerved.  Still faces, squinting eyes, careful movements, and the occasional reflexive smile that looked like the person was trying to re-enact a memory of a smile and hoping it would suffice.

These were not unfriendly people.  Just people who had seen better days and had no particular hope of seeing such days again.  If they ever had dreams, they’d made their peace with the understanding that the time to realize them had passed.

There are worse fates than making your peace, even if it’s making your peace with something unpleasant.

Even over and above the locals, our trip through town was a lonely one.  It was a one stoplight sort of place, and the stop-light was merely flashing yellow in all four directions, and even that felt like the lights were on the verge of faltering.  Yield…yield…yield…the reluctant flickers of darkened bulbs measured the full extent of life’s traffic through the center of town.  Half the buildings along the main street were bare.  Not even shuttered or dressed in the going-out-of-business posters that mark failed business everywhere.  Just empty windows, cracked doors, old names fading slowly across the glass.  Some of them weren’t even shut.  The doors hung open a crack, or a pane from the main window was missing.  A former hardware store.  A former store whose name had once begun with ‘LUC…”.  Between them, a former café that couldn’t have been more than two meters wide as it filled the gap between the hardware store and the LUC... store.

An aura of desuetude clung tightly to the town, like a particularly voracious but languid parasite.  The sensation of the lifeblood being sucked dry was inescapable.

What strikes me now, after all these years, was that I saw virtually no white.  Some beige, if one chooses to account those as variations of white, but few colors I would call white without qualifiers.  Lots of browns and greys and peeling blues and splotchy vinyl siding, but very little white.  Several buildings might have been white at one time, but the endless dirt and dust of rural farms under a drought made it difficult to tell for certain. 

I didn’t notice then, mind you.  I just knew something felt off, and I only realize what it was in writing this.

What I did notice back then was the prevalence of empty lots.  I couldn’t help but wonder how those came about in the midst of a small town.  There seemed to be no reason for a space between two storefronts to be empty, but there also seemed no indication that buildings that once resided in them had been demolished.

That’s the interesting thing about failure – sometimes you lack the resources to even tear down the remains.  Sometimes even the catharsis of complete destruction is out of reach.

What few people walked about did so with shuffling gaits and slightly bowed heads.  Had it not been so sad, I would have laughed at the cliché of it all.  But they contrasted with the occasional person sitting in a chair under the shade of some shop’s awning.  These would look at us and wave.  Calling their waves cheery might have been a stretch, but they were at least friendly.

If ever I’d been to a purgatory on Earth, this was it.

Ch'or sì or no s'intendon le parole.²

We stopped at a convenience store that, like everything else in town, had seen far better days.  Half the coolers were dark and bare.  The other half were filled almost entirely with beer, with a single narrow cooler on wheels devoted to soft drinks and off-brand dairy.  The distinct odor of cigar smoke mixed with the dusty breeze of a window-mounted air-conditioner was overpowering.  A layer of dust that covered a shelf of tchotchkes – ornaments and rough figurines and blank baseball caps – was visible from several feet away.  

The less said about the hot-dog rollers, the better.  Judging from the consistency of the hot dog skins, they had started cooking during the Carter administration.  Judging from the smell, they were literally skin filled entirely with grease.  Judging from the grease on the rollers, this was not the sort of grease that would have been permitted under the Hague Convention on Chemical Weapons.

I would have reported the guy to the U.N., but looking up the phone number would have been a hassle.

(This is also why I didn’t report a friend of mine who made the absolute worst mixed drinks in existence.  Not in the world.  Not in the U.S.  Not even in our town.  In.  Existence.  Eventually I came to understand that some evils must be tolerated for the Greater Good.  The Greater Good in this case was the fact that he provided us poor college students with free booze.  I like to think that the existentialists would have approved of my perspective here.)

The man behind the counter barely looked at us as we purchased a case of Coors and the last four-pack of wine coolers in the store for my friend’s mother.  I wanted to ask my friend if he knew the man, if some happy parts of his childhood still lingered.  Since the man barely acknowledged us, though, I suspected that would lead no place worth going.

By the time we arrived back at the house, the sun had disappeared, though its luminal remnants lingered over the tops of the trees in the distance.  The creep of night seemed interminable as we sat out on his porch drinking increasingly-lukewarm beer.  Nothing happened.  Nothing would happen.  Nothing had happened.  The sense of unbeing, unknowing, unloving, and always undreaming weighed us down.  It was an odd sensation, undreaming within a dreaming, like drowsing whilst fighting against drowning.  The more we woke, the more we slept.  Bugs bit us.  We felt them and did not believe.  We dreamed anxiously of the dark long before the last ragged fragments of the day faded, and when it finally did, we sat in the glow of the light from the window behind us and told what jokes we could remember, dirty and clean, offensive and mild, anything to keep the ennui away.

I say ennui, and the name fits perfectly, a sighing insubstantial murmur that can fill days with its afternotes and linger in the ozone that coats our tastebuds.  It was the Ennui, that haggard crow flapping aimlessly this way and that through a landscape fit for little else, its dull black eyes surveying the undreaming landscape.  In its wake, the vulture Entropy scattered the intrinsic bones across the dust.

(If I try real hard, I can almost pretend that I wasn’t the sort of pretentious twit that would idly create an elaborate avian motif to describe being somewhat bored.  Almost.  But I was young and filled with the vigorous intellectual nattiness of an undergrad in college.  So, while I cringe nowadays just thinking about that tendency, I can forgive myself on the grounds that no college student majoring in one of the liberal arts can be considered truly collegiate until he or she has embrace pomposity.  I know I did, after all, and self-awareness is the first step on the path toward forgiveness.  Just so long as I can laugh at myself – and I certainly can, to a slightly unsettling degree – I can be redeemed.)

Though I wanted to draw him into doing so, I refrained from asking my friend what the town had been like, growing up.

That night, we slept in hot rooms.  That was the nature of Alabama summers, so we were used to it.  But one never learns to be comfortable in the drenching restless prickly-sweat of trying to sleep in steamy environments.  I managed perhaps three to four hours of sleep.  No two of those hours were consecutive.  When I took a shower the next morning, the water was tepid, and smelled like well-water.  Which it was, so that was unsurprising.  And I was used to tepid well-water.  I’d drunk it plenty of times in my life.  Tepid well-water, however, doesn’t leave on feeling truly clean no matter how long one showers under it..

~***~

The next morning, we went walking.  If you had asked us why we chose to do this, I suspect my answer would have been, Might as well, right? and my friend’s answer would have been a mumbling incoherency of purpose.  Walking was his suggestion, and when I shrugged, he grabbed his cigarettes and headed out the door before I could ask the all-important Why?  I don’t think he knew why we were circling around to the few identifiable residential properties nearby, smoking and talking about pointless stuff.

(Mostly parties, bars, and all the lovely women we knew, as I recall.  I’m not sure we ever talked at length about many other topics in all the time we knew each other.  At its heart, our friendship was based on two constants – beer and heterosexuality – and we were damned if we weren’t going to get as much mileage out of those topics as we could while we were still young, shallow, and occasionally sober.)

The houses were uniformly old, uniformly wooden, and uniformly marked with indelible dirt stains on peeling paint.  Only one of them could be seen from my friend’s house, rising in the distance above a tobacco field adjacent the back yard.  Though it had stood empty since before my friend left for college, he took me there first.  The owners had died, and their heirs had come by to visit only once before abandoning it for good.

I didn’t ask why my friend took me there, but I suspected that some sort of symbolism was involved.

Maybe.  My friend wasn’t really the most metaphorically-inclined person I knew, to be honest.

But he was familiar with all of the remaining neighbors, an aging group of countryfolk that would not – or, more likely, could not – move away from this place of aching joints and muttered conversations.  They remained in the only place they could imagine living out the remainder of their slowdreaming drifting days in a world gone grey.

The men and women we met were thin and gnarled, or fat and gnarled, or sometimes just fleshy and blotched, and they seemed lost in their own thoughts even when they were giving you their full attention.  They looked you in the eyes as they spoke, yet somehow managed to be looking anywhere but directly at you.

At least when speaking with me.  I was a stranger, someone to treat with the utmost civility, yet their voices sounded hollow, perfunctory.  They spoke in intransigent monosyllables, asking how I was and whether I was enjoying myself, almost as if puzzled at the idea that I had come here willingly, that I was accompanying my friend to meet the neighbors of my own volition.

They had no particular use for outsiders come to gawp at the end of their days.  I couldn’t blame them one bit.  If they had to fade away, they should at least have been allowed the dignity of solitude.

They favored my friend with half-smiles and sincere Welcome backs, but when he introduced me, they slumped back into their endless ennui.  Politely, of course, ever so politely, but it seemed as though they’d expended all their energy just welcoming my friend.

They moved slow, talked even slower, and whatever purpose their actions and words once had, it had become rote.  I knew what they were going to say before they said it – polite words of greeting, mumbled observations about the weather, the heat, the crops and football.  One couple was obsessed with the times. The times had left them behind.  The times weren’t bringin’ the right sort of rain.  The times had messed up the way things oughta be, and maybe people in Washington, D.C. should stop screwing around with the times. 

Their confusion was inarticulate but very palpable.  And even though none of the other neighbors spoke about the times as such, they all shared the same vague sense of dread and consternation.

The houses all had open windows.  Their ages suggested they probably didn’t have central air, though I did notice a window AC in a kitchen.  But I wondered if they’d run the AC even if they had it.  Power, especially the electricity needed to cool an entire two-story house, cost money, and money seemed to have deserted these places a while back.  Inside, the furniture looked uniformly aged, well-used, with cracks in the leather recliners, permanent creases in couch cushions, and scuff marks on the wooden furniture.  Perhaps some would call my term unkind.  Well-used?  Why not well-loved?  And I’d agree.  But the overall sense of desiccation left me feeling that the unkind description seemed more apt.  I felt like these items remained as mementos to a time when they would have seemed new and luxurious, reminders of a days when the parlors and living rooms would be filled with happy people, flush with the incomes of steady work and optimistic about all the plans they could make for the future.

I felt like I was standing over their bones.

I felt like I was being given a guided tour to the death of the American Dream.

The neighbor I remember best was the last one we visited, a stooped black woman with thin hair and fat breasts that hung over a well-rounded stomach.  Despite her appearance, her skin was far smoother than I thought possible for someone her age.  As we walked up to the door, she was already there, opening it to meet us on a porch enclosed with heavy canvas and layers of mosquito netting.  That is, the porch of anyone in the wetter parts of the South, at least anyone with experience and common sense. 

She moved about with the help of a four-footed aluminum cane that had buckled slightly about a third of the way down its length.  She welcomed us quite sincerely – and treated me far more kindly than the others we’d met – and invited us to sit for a spell.  Her word, because you can’t grow up in the South without learning that a ‘spell’ is the exact right measure of time for any decent interaction.

We chatted.  She was a marvelous old lady, sort of a rural Grand Dame of the best Southern tradition.  She nodded a lot, tapped the tip of her cane down when she was making a joke, and liked to use the phrase  Dontcha believe it?³ as a punctuation to all manner of sentences.

When we left after 20 minutes and a glass of ice tea (actually a bit too sweet for my tastes, but perfectly brewed with the perfect amount of lemon) and were actually sad to do so.  As we walked down the dirt driveway, toward the road that may or may not have also been dirt, she stayed on the front porch until we were out of sight, an elegant leftover of old-style Southern etiquette that demanded she wait until her guests were well and truly gone before abandoning her job as hostess.

On the walk back, I called her Grandmother when speaking of our time there, as a reflexive mark of respect⁴.  As in (as best as I can recall) Grandmother *Washington was very sweet, wasn’t she?

My friend nodded, but corrected me.  “Oh, she’s actually just a couple years older than my parents.”  He raised his hand to stop me before I even considered speaking.  “Yeah, I know what you mean.  She’s had a tough life, though, from what she’s told me and my parents.  Husband died in an accident not long after I born.  Lost two kids before they were 5, and I think she had multiple miscarriages.  That’s the impression I got, though, of course, she never actually came out and said it.  Only family I ever knew of was a nephew who lives in Atlanta and stops by, or used to when I was living here, once or twice a year.”

“Tough living out here,” I said.

He nodded, and shrugged.  I waited for him to say something, but the walk continued in silence.  So I just finished my original comment.  “Dying small towns and farm communities can really grind a person down.”

My friend nodded again, this time with a slight grimace.

~***~

And these are the thoughts I had as we worked our way back to his house:  All the slow calcification of lifetimes spent out where survival depended on the sun and soil, the rain and the endless slogs of churning mud, everything out here trudged on and on until muted voices finally called each person, each aged repository of sadness, home again at last.  The tragedy of the death of rural Americana in the burgeoning shadow of the computer age, the failure of manual transmission amidst the endless digital networks.

But I kept thinking about Grandmother *Washington, who was younger than she looked and older than she should have been.  The specifics of her life were unique to her, of course.  The general tragedy of scrabbling out the last few decades of their lives in a world dying of a mouldering malaise, however, could be seen on the faces of everyone I met there.  She just gave them a memorable face.

And, perhaps, a meaningful narrative.  Though probably not.  We want to find meaning in damned near everything.  Sometimes, things just don’t have meaning.  They simply happen because that’s how life goes.  It takes most people a lifetime to understand that, if they ever manage to understand it at all.

But I still remember Grandmother *Washington walking out onto the porch, her eyes sharp but her movement slow.  Stooped before her time, Grandmother hobbled onwards with no particular destination in mind.  Just the blank horizon in this life, and whatever rewards she might find in the next.  If that didn’t provide a perfect metaphor for the region, I can’t imagine what would.

Metaphors aren’t meaning, though.  Just descriptions.  Clarifications or obfuscations, ways of giving substance to the bare bones of ideas.

And the town itself, with all its deserted buildings, flaking signs and broken windows, remained a reminder of the life that was.  It was more depressing than any ghost town in the same way that watching someone suffering as they die is worse than the memorial service after.  (And on this point, I can speak with vivid authority.  When you lose the two people you love most in the world to cancer, when you sit by their bedsides day after day until you are a razor’s edge away from breaking, you learn such things.  It's been...a rough few years,)  This was a place that once had schools.  I saw a single sign boasting of some sort of state-wide educational award at the elementary school, though I never saw the school building itself.  And, with schools, children and dances and ice cream parlors.  It had parents and homey restaurants and the steady chatter of friends meeting for a bit between the chores and occupations of their lives.  It had two churches that I saw, one Baptist, one Methodist, though I never asked my friend whether either still held services.

The Baptist church, clearly the older of the two, had a large cemetery filled with the mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers of the town’s remaining inhabitants.  It encapsulated the history of the town far better than any spoken narrative could possible manage.

I think, perhaps, that I understood what a lifetime out there meant, even if I couldn’t quite articulate it then.  It wasn’t life lived, or the vasty deep of time, or even the memories of years long gone.  It was the accumulation of sensations, of celebration and mourning, of square dances at the abandoned Masonic Lodge and delectable foods that one loved as a child and would never taste again.  This wasn’t a grand tragedy, some Euripidesian narrative of divine curses and petty betrayal.  This was loss on the scale of bits and pieces, of cherished memories reduced to useless sentiment.  The sadness of these people was unmistakable.  It wasn’t ineluctable, however, or even necessary.  It was simply a condition, the layers of sediment accreting on the dying corpse of a small town.  Whatever grandiloquent philosophies might have once been offered, the aftermath was merely the silent trudge down a diminishing country lane.

If I had to assign a name to how I felt in that place, though, it wouldn’t be ‘sadness.’  It would be ‘loneliness.’  There was something terribly isolated about this place, this bent and spindled memory of a community.  The people were just biding their time,

I honestly don’t mean to wax philosophic, and I say this with the full knowledge that I’m writing this down and can go back and delete or modify or even simply redirect what has come before.  But there needs to be some honesty.  My friend’s real name is not important.  Nor is the town’s real name.  My own real name is absolutely worthless.  With the exception of Grandmother *Washington, I’m not even certain I’m remembering most of the faces rightly any more.  Their natures, though?  The faltering vigilance, the realization that routines had long since lost any meaning?  Those I remember.  The grim lethargy, the expressionless brows, the abortive but sincere attempts to smile. Was the home I stayed in a shade of light green or lavender?  Shingle-board or vinyl siding?  It was the only one-story house in that particular area, so at least I remember that much.  I’m pretty sure the driveway was gravel, but it might have been sand, or old asphalt, or a dirt lane split into two tire ruts along its entire length.  I’m absolutely certain that it doesn’t matter, and hadn’t mattered for many years before I ever set foot in that place.

But sometimes things get broken, you see.  Life comes apart at the seams and all good intentions and hard work come to nothing, shattered and splintered into a million cracks that can no longer hold together.  Abuse and carelessness and the dust-storms of change chipped unrelentingly away.  Later that day, we drove into town to meet someone my friend wanted me to meet, and we stopped at the A&P for a smoke since my friend stopped smoking in his car while visiting to avoid his parents smelling it, either in the car or on his clothes after smoking in a confined space.  Oddly, the A&P was perhaps one of the few buildings I’d seen in this place that looked like it was open for business – clean, well-maintained, windows filled with ads for sales and the painted lines in the parking lot still looked relatively unworn by the elements.

                It was closed, of course.  My friend told me it shut down the previous year, having outlasted most of the local non-chain businesses.  When it first opened, it supplanted a local grocery store that managed to survive only a year after.  As much as people wanted to support the local store, it couldn’t match the prices or variety of the A&P.  (An old, old story, of course.  Nowadays it’s mostly told about Walmart.)  Even as they shopped at the A&P, however, the locals vocally despised it.  They would talk in harsh whispers over coffee and breakfast at a local diner, and go to considerable effort to pretend friends and family who worked there worked somewhere else. 

And when it failed, people who once hated the outsiders coming in, and would have cheered its demise 15 years ago, now saw its failure as one last twist of the knife in their guts, a sign that even the outside world no longer cared about or supported them. 

And that, too, seemed significant to me.

~***~

Footnotes:

1) Having lived a considerable amount of time in North Carolina (indeed, I am currently living in Greensboro, just to the right of  primo tobacco country) I’ve become quite familiar with the sight and scent of growing tobacco fields.  There’s nothing quite like it, and I could tell at a glance, and sniff, that this field was doing just fine.

2) Dante’s Purgatorio final sentence of Canto 9.  Approximate translation, as best I can manage:  “Now the words are clear, and now [they?] are lost.”

3) This was not actually the phrase she used, though it’s reasonably similar and similarly inapplicable to most sentences.  She used it anyway.   And, just for the record, while I doubt she’s still alive, I should make clear that I’ve changed a few other aspects to the story to avoid pinpointing her.  Essentially, her appearance and race are the closest details to reality.  Her slightly-crumpled cane actually existed, but she wasn’t the one who used that particular item.  She used a cane, just not that one.

4) It’s a Southern thing, but not necessarily a universal Southern thing.  It’s not even a consistent one – there are plenty of people very much like Grandmother *Washington that I never once spoke of with such an affectionate term – so there’s really no obligation to take up that habit.

~To Be Continued in Part II -- in which we learn the real reason my friend asked me along, to come, who we were going to meet, and why I’m thinking about broken things -- to be posted when I damn well feel  like writing it.  Having spent approximately 5 hours on this one, I can't say when that might be except that it won't be tonight and probably not January 17, 2094.  There's no story behind that particular date, but there is ominous music in the background.  Feel free to play the ominous music of your choice.~