"Breathe All Seasons"
Coming up from South Georgia like slowly awakening from a long sleep and beginning to remember the good and the bad moments about Greensboro while driving back to that first city where I had lived and had worked after finishing at State College when there suddenly was money for beef steak and late night parties with lots of Scotch whiskey instead of only beer for our gay company, when free time and awareness were treasures to lavish in simply because they were not had in such quantity before and with restrictions finally removed completely they became things to squander as a child squanders the too many toys received at Christmas and as a dreamer squanders emotions that are too plentiful.During my absence it did not snow in the cities where I lived and worked, so trusting birds could not chirp sing and prance in billowing cold and retrieve tossed bread crumbs from powdery blanketings. And still nights did not become brilliant in the glow from ice forming on harsh shapes that gradually surrendered definition. There were no days when snowballs could be playfully thrown at blush cheeked girls trudging heavily bundled in clothes passing our apartments on their way to the next street over grocery. There was not the powerful I-am-the-only-person-alive-in-the-world-to-enjoy this sound of crunching steps into hardening drifts on long walks at night.
But there was time to realize that only in memory can we assign an end or a beginning to what we experience. We do no know that at a particular moment we are happy, just as we do not know that at a particular moment we are sad. Going from happiness to sadness then back to happiness without knowing when one experience ends or when the other experience begins. Moments escape as we are continuously moving, continuously thinking, loving, planning, changing, scheming, hating, wishing, failing, and trying again. We do not release one experience before we take up the next experience, so a moment is influenced by the mixture of a million moments. And even at the moment of death we can not assign it as happy or sad, an end or a beginning until it too is a memory.
Then a spring rain fell at another time with huge splattering drops in the afternoon and settled the dry blowing soil and eased the heat pressed close air, and life’s sounds were clean and cheerful once more. This rain brought the delicious smell of planted fields and pine forests, and afterwards I knew how very welcome it was and how much I would have missed the rain if it had never come.
Greensboro could not have been changed enough so I would not know the streets to take and the proper turns to make long before reaching them. Even if they have changed the two way streets into one way and the one way streets into two way, that would not slow me. If I went to the Irving Park Delicatessen with Cellar Anton’s in the basement, it would be the same. The waiter Fritz would still be using his shiny blackness and his gleaming smile and his backslapping forgiveness to get generous tips from white customers so they could wallow in the brief ecstasy of paternal glory. And Inger from Germany would still be walking among the red checker clothed tables mechanically playing an accordion that mashes her hefty breasts flat. She would have the same superior expression, as though the armies of the world had marched across her soul but even that could not destroy her. Anyone asking her to play ‘Dixie’ would get that sullen eye stare, and as she turned to walk away in disgust they would be mighty tempted to swift kick her broad ass for involving herself in something she could not possibly understand. Because Fritz is the only person who understands, and it is okay as hell by him.
When I first lived and worked in Greensboro, Sunday evenings were or suffering fearful depression from mountainous hangovers in solitude. Then our gay company started using these evenings for dating the most beautifully perfect girls available, to sooth the fatigue from the terrible pace we were setting. There was something purposeful and good in the way we came together at one apartment or at another apartment and enjoyed the slow music that was low as we played cards and sipped fortified fruit punch, or just sat quietly holding our date’s hand and speaking in muffled tones. But our gay company had become too notorious by this time to be left alone even for one evening, so the taunting crowd that tagged along behind us the rest of the week appeared and at some time our quiet evenings became tainted with the dirty sameness that came to everything we did back then.