There are certain women, some with shopping carts, or paper bags, who pick through rubbish and arrange their goods around them on the pavement where they sleep. I am the last one who could glorify their position. I love my bed, and soft light, and being warm. Discomfort, I avoid. It makes me nasty. But I understand these aging libertarians, a little, and admire them, sneakily. If the price for my choosing silence were two sheets of newspaper in the dark behind a supermarket for my bed, why, I’d sing and chirrup and admire the roses fifteen hours each day. And if, to escape the burdens of early rising and dutiful arrivals, I had to dine on the scrapings from the ravioli tins and carrot stumps in the neighbors’ garbage cans, you’d see me dressed in slick white nylon and sensible shoes at six in the morning, waiting for the bus in smug contentment. If the only restrictions on my capacity for mayhem were the offensive strength of my body odor and the obvious lack of hygiene marking my beloved person, then I would chew gum and spit out insults with every plate of hash slung, slightingly remark on every weakness or individuality that came inside my ken, and pinch babies in my spare time.

Of course, I’d feel terrible about it all. My dreams would haunt me into the day and the repercussions would cause my blood pressure to rise. So it is lucky that I can hide here with my generic malice in a comfortable “disability.” But those women who disarm themselves by an act of will have always my surreptitious admiration.

Whether it has been ten years now or thirty-five since that important night, I cannot be positive. A calendar and small subtraction could give me a clean and tidy number, but there is no corresponding knowledge in my peeling brain to refer to. The time has gone soft, blurred, taken on crimps and creases that prevent conforming to the standards of measurement. There are whole days when I am twenty once more and Sam and Carlotta may appear in the doorway at any moment.

II

A family of pastoral delinquents

It was days later when I went out to their place. I got a lift as far as their turnoff from the highway. Walked past the old folks’ housing park. Two bedrooms each, with a garage and a two-hole golf course in everybody’s backyard. There was a big strawberry field beside an old house. Turbot used to live there. I went to high school with his two sons. I heard they sold the place when he died.