Big Mike: The Half Of Life I Love

I turned 54 big ones this week. March 4th. The only date that’s a command.

March forth.

As in the years, which are now flipping by like calendar pages in an old movie. Eek.

The Days Seem Like Minutes

I can’t stop my paunch from growing, my lower legs from turning more mottled, the area just below what used to be my finely chiseled jaw from turning wobbly, and other signs that I’m nearer the soil than the womb.

Scary? You bet. Then again when my sis, Good Old Franny, died in January 2007 I sat in her bedroom alone with her. It was our goodbye. Cancer had torn through her bowels, her liver, and then pretty much all the rest of her internal organs until she was almost a skeleton. She only had a few days left on this mad Earth, maybe only a few hours. Everyone knew it. We’d all taken vacation and sick days to gather around her and usher her out. Each of us — her sibs, her kids, her grandkids, her old pals — took ten or fifteen minutes to commune with her, alone. I almost envied her. That’s the way to go, I thought, with people waiting in line to tell you how much they love you.

Ma, of course, was part of the bon voyage party. She took an hour or so with Franny, naturally. And, just as naturally, they fought. They’d been fighting all their lives. Why should they stop just because one of them was on her deathbed?

Anyway, it came to my turn. I’m not a sugar-coater and Franny wasn’t either. It would have been an insult to her to pretend I was there for anything other than to bid her adieu. So I said, “Well, this is it. Tell me, did you love this life?

Franny nodded, then after a pause during which I suppose she was gathering her strength to speak, she said, “Yes I did.” She paused again, eying me in a way that made me squirm, as if she was on the verge of knowing something that the rest of us couldn’t even begin to imagine. That coming knowledge liberated her from niceties and any possible hesitancy — no matter how slight it might have been in her case — to tell a painful truth. She said, “You don’t, do you?”

How could I lie to my dying sister?

“Not so much,” I said. “I’d say about fifty percent of the time I love life. The other fifty percent you can have.”

She nodded again as if she knew precisely what my answer was going to be. She’d only wanted me to tell her the truth.

So let me tell you about a part of that fifty percent I love. The Loved One asked me a couple of weeks what I wanted to do for my birthday. The first thing I said was, “Don’t get me anything; I got enough crap.”

“Okay, what do you want to do?”

“I dunno.”

You know, at fifty-four you really don’t want to get a James Bond 007 attache case. I got one when I was eight. Good god, that thing was so cool — I would have had an orgasm upon unwrapping it had I been capable of having one at that tender age. That’s one of the drawbacks of my age — there’s no longer any gift that can excite me that much.

An Eight-Year-Old’s Dream

And at fifty-four you really don’t want to go to the circus, which I was dying to do when I was seven. I pestered Ma and Dad to take me to the circus for my birthday that year. Both of them looked at me as if I were daft. As if they’d rehearsed beforehand, each said, in turn, “Whaddya wanna do that for?”

I had no answer. I was trying to buy into their outlook on life so I pretended that I knew the circus was nothing more than a bunch of lions and tigers and clowns and acrobats. A silly expense. How would going to the circus help pay the mortgage, tuitions, doctor bills, and keep the family’s credit rating pristine? So I shrugged. Of course, one of the advantages of the passage of time is the ability to think of a good riposte. Now I know that when they asked why I wanted to go to the circus, I should have said, “Uh, because I’m seven?”

A Seven-Year-Old’s Priority

So what did I want to do on my 54th birthday? It hit me. Tell Me A Story, Part Three at the Muddy Boots Cafe in Nashville, about fifteen miles east on us on State Road 46.

That’s what we did last night. It was, as the name suggests, the third installment of an open mike storytelling event sponsored by radio station WFHB (for which I’m a newswriter, by the way). Just plain old folk get up and tell some true tale.

Best thing we could have ever done. The Loved One had a chai and a slice of cornbread. I had a blueberry smoothie. And we listened to the most motley collection of storytellers rural Indiana could produce.

The Muddy Boots Cafe

There was a young woman who told of a car trip she’d taken with her family when she was a girl to the mountains of Virginia. All the way, squished into the backseat with her sibs, she listened to her older brother tell her spooky tales about vampires and Jesus. She recalled laying up all night long in her sleeping bag when they finally reached their campsite, her eyes wide, listening for the tell-tale sounds of vampires or a bloody Jesus come to scare the poo out of her. To this day, she admitted, she still can’t really distinguish between vampires and Jesus.

Another guy told a story he swore was true of his high school reunion where the most athletic, noblest and most popular guy in class finally decked the biggest bully and everyone cheered. But his telling of the old chestnut was so heartfelt and entertaining that none of us cared that everyone who’s ever attended a high school reunion tells the same damned story.

There was a grandma who began by mentioning that her completely gray hair was caused by her daughter Heather. It seems the family once had a pet ferret that constantly humped everything in sight. One day when she was about four, Heather stuffed the ferret into a pillowcase and swung it wildly over her head just to see how it would feel. She stopped only when she inadvertently clunked the ferret-bag on the dining room chair. “Mama,” she called out, “the ferret’s not moving!” It turned she’d paralyzed the ferret from the waist down. The incident, the grandma said, had instilled in Heather a lifelong desire to care for animals. As for the ferret, she said, it went on to live longer than most of its species-mates, only the family never again had to witness it humping anything.

A farm woman told a story about her ex-husband. He had a horse whom she loathed. The husband, she claimed, only kept the horse around to torture her. One day he was out putting fenceposts in the ground. He came in midway through his chore and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. He went back out and resumed his work. A few minutes later, he dashed back in and demanded of the woman, “Why did you drink my beer?”

“I never touched your beer,” she said. And, like many married couples, they went back and forth for long minutes. Finally, he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

A few minutes later, he burst back in the house and yelled, “You did it again! You drank my beer!”

“I did not,” she huffed and another back and forth ensued. Again he ordered her to bring him out another beer.

This time, the woman decided to hang around, hoping to see what was going on. A moment after her husband laid his beer and the ground and began to concentrate on his fence posts, the horse peeked around the barn, extended his neck, picked up the can with his lips, raised his head and drained it.

“Look, look,” the woman shouted. “Look what your damned horse is doing!”

The next day, the woman concluded, her soon-to-be ex-husband nailed a sign up on one of his new fenceposts reading, “Horse for sale. Cheap.”

The last storyteller of the night was a big, round guy with a long, thick, gray beard and equally gray hair hanging down to his shoulders. He was about 65 or so and looked like a cross between an overgrown gnome and a department-store Santa Claus. He wore suspenders and baggy jeans and carried a six-foot walking stick. His was less a tale than a prose-poem about how telling stories makes us human.

The Loved One and I drove back home on hilly, curvy State Road 46 in utter darkness. “I’ll bet we could see a million stars,” she said. Upon hearing that, I pulled off on a gravel road leading into a secluded forest. We came to an opening and I put the Prius in park. When I turned the lights off we couldn’t even see each other for the first few moments.

“It’s too cold,” The Loved One said.

“Let’s just look for a minute,” I said.

We got out of the car and turned our heads skyward. There were so many stars it was hard to make out the constellations. We saw the Winter Triangle easily, though, with brilliant Sirius, the brightest star in the sky other than the Sun forming its bottom point, the red supergiant Betelgeuse forming its top point and white Procyon the triangle’s third point. We saw the blue Pleiades, the Seven Sisters, riding on Taurus the Bull’s massive shoulder. The Loved One broke the silence when she exclaimed, “Look at that! A shooting star!”

She then kissed me as if I were no longer a 54-year-old goat but a someone who had a finely chiseled jaw and no paunch. Those calendar pages suddenly stopped flipping, if only for a moment, in the dark under a million stars.

It was better than the all the circuses and all the James Bond 007 attache cases in the world.

Procyon (upper left), Betelgeuse (upper right) and Sirius (bottom)