Leftover People
You have managed to collect all sorts of leftovers in your own life. Sweet, really. No family of your own, the parent figures dropping away one by one. And now, you have the pets that nobody wants, stray cats and kids to feed. An ideal family really, excpet when you have to bring them back. When they are claimed. And they begin to cry because they are aware that nobody will be as honest with them as you have been.
You’ve spent your teenagehood and young adult life of the party nights waiting on streetcorners for people, kids, animals to get dropped off. You take in the elderly, the forgotten, the poor, the injured, the infirm. The ugly dogs that smell bad and are losing their fur. The only ones you have ever turned away are the ones with substance problems. You need creatures of substance, not ones with problems with it. No alcoholics or druggies, even ones that just smoke for fun.
You want to be able to predict everyone’s behaviors. You can’t ever predict death, or illness or injury. You can predict hunger and cold. You try to predict everything else, just to be prepared. Everything is well stocked, you could run a hospital or an emergency shelter. Or a weekly neighborhood party.
You could be more friendly. But you find that you are plenty friendly, and you wake up to days which are full of coming to other people’s rescues. No time for yourself. No time to enjoy the fruits of your labors. Even your own house is overcrowded with strangers, who luckily seem to be taking care of each other.
Which is why is it so much fun, so delicious, to drive to an unknown body of water and swim it. Sometimes with a full wetsuit, sometimes with nothing. Sometimes it is too beautiful. To get away from shore. From people who demand every last shred of kindness that you have, because it is in your nature. And that leads to people walking all over you.
You are losing the little girl. Her father has come for her, or is coming. He’s reappeared in her life, demanding her back. You have no ground; she isn’t even yours. But at 9, she has spent most of her waking hours with you, more than her mom (your friend) more than him. And he wants to take her just to prove a point. Just to put her into a school. A sleep-away school, to board her. To make her bored. She puts on a show for him every time he comes, acting very sweet, and sometimes having conversations like people. But you hear when his false voice comes in. Even when he is telling the truth, it has an air of manipulation to it. If he were explaining gravity, she would not believe him.
He has her today. Going back to your house, there would only be silence now. You miss all those crazy wonderful noises of all the rooms being used.
Everything is haunted.
You long for new views, for a place to fully escape. For a way not to be recorded, or downloaded or reached by Blackberry. (black berries can be poisonous, inkberries, pokeberries, elderberries. Stay away says Mother Nature, how can you not obey that?)
And so you leave everything behind. All the devices with batteries or electronics or recording devices. Give up the idea of anything waterproof. Nothing is. And you don’t want them to trace you. Although you have the feeling fo always being followed.
==
What if a woman lost her horizon? Her job, her family, her sense of home. All she had left was a strong love of swimming, and the movies and stories around her.
Her long lost brother returns to her life. Suddenly, but slowly. Encapsulated in a Center for many years, he brings her back to the present, of being immediate in the moment. (mentally ill, sick or dead, or a computer)
She decides to swim from her former office to Walden. Kendall to Walden, going by his Center (McLean, Mill Pond, Duck Pond)
Broad Canal Walk
Under Longfellow Bridge (Salt & Pepper) R watched the fireworks
Harvard Bridge/MIT Bridge Units of a student
Kendall-Charles River-Kayak
To Head of the Charles
Halcyon Lake
Fresh Pond
Alewife- Jerry’s Pond
16 miles, 5 ½ hours walking
could be walked in a day, easily
Swum? Not so easily.
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