Signals

The time is early last summer -- or was it late spring? -- and the Complete and Total Loser's mother, dead for seventeen days now, has summoned a tree service worker to talk about tree removals in the back yard. She has always been a high-maintenance control freak, a label she ignored rather than disputed, and having needless work done in and around the house is a way for her to get attention as her powers diminish.

She wants three perfectly healthy trees removed but her timing in having the tree man come is bad; the Loser, the family nature lover, is there. After the man examines the trees, the Loser asks the pertinent question: Is there any benefit to removing them? Are they diseased? Do they present any danger to anything? The answer is no on all counts and the Loser gets the man out after some minutes of heated discussion between he and his mother.

He ends the discussion after the tree worker has left with this:

"Mom, how much longer do you think you're going to live in this house?" Her health is failing precipitously and she's talked of moving to an assisted living facility.

"Five years," she says, though she doesn't say it like that. What she says is more like, "Five years?" Her eyes widen.

The Loser sees in her face at that moment a mix of helplessness and denial that pangs him but he suppresses at the time.

"OK," the Loser says. "Five years. So why not let those perfectly healthy trees stay there and let whoever moves in after you and Dad move decide what to do with them?"

She doesn't mention the trees again for what turns out to be the rest of her life.

The Loser is beginning to see that exchange and other things as signals of her impending demise. Some are subtle and just entering his consciousness. Others seemed obvious then but the Loser preferred to perceive them differently at the time. (What good does dwelling on gloom do?)

On one of his weekly visits the Loser's mother says, "I found something of yours the other day." It was a tiny wooden chest, a souvenir she'd gotten in Florida in the mid 1960s and given to the Loser. It's the size of a stack of four decks of playing cards and the Loser used to store his boyhood coin collection. It had been missing for decades and he'd thought of it sometimes but assumed that it was just one of those things that gets lost as the years pass. Where had she had it? Why did she find it now? Was she going through old things? If so, why?

The Loser's Parents Return from Florida

They are back from Florida, where they stayed on the coast and watched the sun set over the Gulf of Mexico. The Complete and Total Loser went to a Midwestern college for four years yet in that time has never set foot in the Sunshine State like so many of his peers.
His parents used to go to St. Barts, but they're too old now to cope with the lack of banisters and cobblestone streets there. The Loser imagined all month they were better off in Florida, where he's pretty sure ambulances patrol streets like ice cream trucks and geriatric hospitals are minutes away.
"We didn't see one black face the whole month," the Loser's mother said. This is just reporting; she is no bigot. (If anyone's that it's the Loser, who lives in the city where a large percentage of blacks pose at least a degree of threat and where he has indeed been robbed at gunpoint in broad daylight by two of them.) They said also there were no Jews where they were.
The Loser's father found it extremely relaxing to watch the shore birds. Pelicans, gulls and smaller birds -- sandpipers? -- shared the same sea and shore. "How," he asks, "do they survive?"
This sounds like a dumb question, but it's not.
Twenty-first century Americans are so far from nature that when we observe animals close up, it is astonishing that they can live. No clothes, no shelter, no technology of any kind. No health insurance! Naked creatures with little beaks and webbed feet, surrounded by predators, chased by cars, filth and toxins they can't possibly adapt to quickly enough, their habitat torn down and replaced by inedible structures with confusing reflective surfaces.
Yet some of them survive. And even thrive.

Kids These Days

In February, the Complete and Total Loser will live in the suburbs, tending his elderly parents' house while they bake like turtles in the Florida sun. Therefore now, at noon on a Friday (he works a later shift Fridays) he's bicycling to a train station to buy a monthly pass. The savings and convenience will be considerable.

He's waiting at a light to cross a busy intersection that has several cars waiting to head east, but none waiting to head south. There are teenagers in Catholic school uniforms milling around a food cart on the corner, talking, waiting to get a plate a greasy food, a bag of potato chips, a soda. The Loser sees that there are several pigeons in the middle of the intersection. They will be in jeopardy if the light changes. They are feasting on a mostly intact, large soft pretzel someone has dropped or tossed into the middle of the intersection.

The light changes. A minivan, the first in line, floors it into the half dozen pigeons, who are distracted by their competition for the bounty. The van's driver knows exactly what's happening.

One pigeon doesn't make it. It sits on the road, it's lower half crushed, wings splayed, blood seeping out from beneath it. Its head is erect, alert, as its avian brain tries to comprehend why it is not flying through the air, free and safe.

This amuses the teenagers, who laugh and shout at the injured animal.

The Loser waits for two other cars to pass, then dismounts his bike and limps over to the remaining pretzel, which he picks up and throws away from the street, onto a strip of cold grass. The children laugh at this, too. He knows there's nothing to be done for the bird. Best to leave it to another car to crush it and end its agony.

Years of being mocked and derided have taught the Loser to ignore the jeering of the kids and say nothing. Teenagers will learn nothing from a deformed middle-aged man in the street, his face red and pinched by the freezing wind.

The Loser does eat meat, though very seldom beef, which he hates himself for eating when he does. He knows pigeons are not well liked in cities. Yet he has just seen the act of cowards and bullies, and it stirs a tenderness in him toward the victim and feelings that will intrude on his sleep this night. He wishes it weren't so. He wishes his heart were as hard as the one he presents to the world (he hasn't cried since the age of 12). He wishes people were kinder. He wishes cars and cities and crowds didn't grant people anonymity. He wishes he had chosen a different route to run this errand.