With so much depression haunting so many, the afflicted have to find a means of comfort. (Image by Philip McKay)
Old Baggage
After walkin’ the streets of anywhere-everywhere,
I pause at a street vendor and who nudges me in the ribs?
My friend, Conscience, Mr. C for short,
reminding me of some unresolved troubles.
“How you doing, my straight-jacket pal?”
So, of course I was momentarily trapped waiting for my knish.
He loved that straight-jacket phrase to remind me of a friend,
who ending up in Bellevue, blamed me for what sent her there.
Damn… And my Houston Street knish
was just getting started with a mustard lather.
Mr. C persisted. “How’d those goofy faces you made
for the doctors and nurses work out for ya, huh?
He knew I’d played crazy to get into her ward at Bellevue.
“It worked,” I answered, remembering the look on that doctor’s face,
the shape of his three-piece suit wrinkled,
his body exhausted maybe from an all-nighter with patients,
or a sojourn on the couch of the doctor’s lounge,
hard to tell which.
That memory was but a recurring image rearing up as I walked
Manhattan watching the Wily Coyote footwork of pedestrians
trying to escape, I know not what,
that seemed like a populace of lost… children.
Maybe I was one of them?
Thinking back on my favorite haunt, the 5th Ave Library,
I recalled many a walk-up and pausing to reflect on Golberger’s Lions at the entrance.
Lord Astor and Lady Lenox, as they were renamed
from their 30s identity of Patience and Fortitude,
LaGuardia’s symbolic designation during the economic depression.
That other kind of depression.
So here I was, letting Mr. C catch me again in the tug-a-war between my own time
and that of yesteryear. But…
My knish was ready and Mr. C
was becoming a nuisance.
I paid,
smiled,
and took a big bite.
“So?” I said between smacking my lips.
“So?” Mr Conscience answered.
“Wanna a bite?” I asked.
“I don’t eat,” he replied.
“Yeah. Of course not. Gotta keep you edge, right?
“Got that right,” he retorted.
“Why is it every time you come out to bug me, I’m always eating,
and you always have the same things to sayr. Why’s that?”
He grinned and put his arm around my shoulders.
“I’m that part of you no amount of comfort food can
pacify. That’s why. When are you going to realize that?”
We walked.
I ate.
He kept smiling.
“Damn guilt shit,” I spouted,
stuffing the last morsel of my comfort-pacifier
into my mouth.
Mr. C tipped his hat and wandered off across the street
as I came up on a homeless old man slumped against a building wall
mumbling with a twinkle in his eye, “Conscience should mind his own business, you know?
Heftin’ old baggage forever is a bitch.”
“Yeah. It is, isn’t it.” Be both nodded. I slipped him a five. “Grab yourself a knish, old buddy.
Somethin’ ‘bout them makes the past weigh less.”
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Love ya!
Jane
In a way, this appears to be a memoir rather than fiction. Maybe not your memory, but many others. Good write.
Ron
Sandie
Rx