©2010 Tom Weathers
Call him Ishmael.
Two Blind Cat posts about outings with Ishmael in the first weeks after Brenda died. Ishmael and I have known each other since the Cardinal days in the early 1970’s. We worked together again at Schwab from 2002 to 2005 where we took long lunch walks and discussed most everything there is to discuss.
In the first of these December 09 outings we ate breakfast at the Pancake House then walked around Freedom park in the drizzle talking about metaphors of belonging and loss (and maybe politics and any nice-looking women who might have been out that morning).
In the second outing we went to a shooting range to test an heirloom pistol that belonged to Ishmael's mother-in-law. This post concludes with an aside about IKEA.
Metaphors In The Drizzle
Ishmael and I went out for a brunch-like meal Sunday morning then walked in the drizzle at Freedom Park. Getting to the Pancake House was comedic. Nothing was the same, all the familiar landmarks consumed in one of Charlotte's recent paroxysms of gentrification. The old Charlottetown Mall is gone. The little houses in the Cherry neighborhood that once furnished servants for Myers Park have been replaced by cheap looking apartments.
But the Pancake House was nice and the conversation was good.
Either there or later walking in the drizzle at Freedom Park we talked about Ishmael's notion of how Brenda, the cats and I formed a system. It was/is like a gravitational system where each member contributes his or her attraction to the whole. Remove one body and the rest fly around in confusion as the new arrangement tries to sort itself out. This is especially bad when the sun, the center is removed. This doesn't have anything to do with love. It is much deeper than that.
(Yancie travels a complex orbit between the old system consisting of the cats and me and the new system of her own family - sensitive to disruptions and perturbations in both.)
My metaphor is more biological. Brenda and I were together so long we became connected at the level of emotional DNA. At the end, our spiritual genetics were intertwined. I could finish her sentences, she mine. So when the connection between us was severed I naturally began to hemorrhage psychic stuff. For a while I thought I would bleed out. (Note one year later - the wound still leaks and suppurates.)
Julia Willis, another friend, also a writer and a poet, offered these words...
"Now we are of that age when those who watched us grow are all gone and those we chose to love and move through time with are falling away, one by one, like leaves reluctant to seek unfamiliar ground."
Guns and IKEA
(4:00 AM - woke up early again)
Yesterday Ishmael came over and we took his heirloom Colt .32 revolver to a shooting range to try it out. Grammy was the last one to shoot it when she let go a round in the pantry to see if the little pistol still worked. He said that she hit a can of green beans.
I got there early and waited in the gun store/shooting range parking lot. Ishmael drove up a few minutes later in his Prius. It was probably the first time that such a vehicle had ever visited this place.
Ishmael had never fired a pistol and I had not fired in 45 years, having lost my taste for it in the Army.
The kid in charge grinned but did not seem to think we were crazier than anybody else. He cursorily examined Ishmael's pistol and after checking with his manager declared that it was probably safe to shoot. However it turned out that they had no .32 short ammo. Saying what the hell I rented one of the store's 9mm Baretta pistols bought a paper target and box of the cheapest bullets and went to lane six. The kid must have thought I knew what I was doing because he offered no directions or warnings, didn't even verify that I knew how to eject the clip and stuff it with the short ugly rounds. He just gave us some forms to sign indicating that we declined instructions.
As it turns out some skills persist. My only problem was with the noise. I had never fired before in an indoor range and after being nearly deafened went back out to get the ear and eye protection that the kid had originally offered.
Ishmael fired a few times then went to the waiting area. The noise was too much. Looking back once at the sound proof safety glass partition I saw him gesturing toward me with a huge stainless steel revolver. He seemed excited. I burned through the remaining rounds, shooting some with two hands, some with one, moving the target in and out, most of the time hitting what I was aiming at.
When I went out to return the pistol and pay, the waiting area was thronged with holiday shooters - men, women, children - serious and excited. The sign said that children under eight had to be accompanied on the range by an adult. Every hand seemed to hold a weapon. It would have driven an Army range officer crazy.
After that Ishmael and I grabbed some lunch and then went for a walk, talking about poetry and books.
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Last night I went out to eat with my daughter and her brood. After that we went to the new IKEA. Brenda had always wanted to go but never made it. The idea of being rolled around in a wheelchair was just too undignified. Under my breath I told her that she wasn't missing anything. The pots and pans and angular furniture were like absurd sculptures - monuments to nothing I could connect with.
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