The little grains of sand that fill our hourglass each have universes of their own.

Quiet sadness ambling with Grocery bags in hand. A mother’s kindnesses doing what Little good they can.

When his anger flared Young eyes could not resist The rooms of meticulous smut, And the circus of an exhibitionist.

Thier stomachs knew before The cats could understand, In the days before They found the feline's man.

None were as honest affection as they, If they stirred, it was surely brief. For need is their only loyalty, Hunger, the only grief.

The wind only Understood That the shouting Had stopped.

The drippings of the Mortal remains forevermore Are still entombed Beneath that new vinyl floor.

And nobody Told The new Tenants.

Everyone has weird neighbors. Some weirder than others.

I grew up in a strange place. The city, yes, odd, but oddity within oddity was my neighborhood. It was a cluster of about 12 houses in the middle of an industrial district. My across-the-street neighbors were the city's largest power transfer/transmission station. Massive towers, humming lines, rusted empire of pylons feeding every dwelling in town.

All of our neighbors were like us: weirdos. Who picks a house in place like this? Just people trying to exist. Who don't fear breaking the social norms.

And our next door neighbor, Mister Denton, fit right in.

To me, he was just always a very old man. He was quite fat, the shape of a bloated pear. Shoes to big and athletic socks always slouching and pants that were one slip away from dropping off altogether. His shirts in my memory were always greasy and mis-buttoned. Hair a wild swirl of salt and pepper and he wore coke-bottle glasses to be able to see.

Whenever Mister Denton stood, he always placed on hand on his hip, thumb down, like he was really pushing to put pressure on the hip, not just rest a hand. I would frequently see him walking down our dirt road headed to the grocery store with empty bags to carry everything home in. I lost count how many times my mom would give him a ride to or from the grocery store. In later years, she would just take him groceries.

The few times I can recall hearing him speak, he had a sort of high pitched voice for a man. Not squeaky, but just soft and high. This would have probably been when mom took him in the car. That's also where I got the lingering smell of body oder attached to his memory.

Most certainly mentally ill.

His house was an old World War Two era home. A tan stucco box with old rotting wood frame windows. The wall finish was cracked and falling off in several spots and the back of the house was asbestos armor.

A four-foot chain-link fence separated his house from ours, overgrown with trumpet vine—a flimsy attempt at privacy. To a pack of curious kids, that fence was not a boundary but an invitation. His windows had no curtains, no blinds, just greasy glass and rusty screens. It was practically daring us to look.

This invited snooping children to pop their heads up to see what they could discover. Especially when he started yelling at his cats. I never knew how many, but based on smell, way too many.

When Mister Denton raged, he screamed at the top of his lungs: a shrill, high-pitched fury that sliced through the neighborhood. Usually it was something food-related. The ritual became a game—one kid sneaking up to the window to report on the scene inside.

Which was frequently Mister Denton parading around in nothing more than his slouching athletic socks, grimy flip flops and a sagging, dingy pair of briefs. Only his coke-bottle glasses complimented his shocking lounge-wear.

Usually.

Sometimes he forewent the briefs.

Of the three windows we could safely peek into, the living room, the kitchen and a room that had become his library of paper back books, the kitchen provided the most 'entertainment'. It was on those cabinets and tables that he would open and sit cans of cat food. In my memory they are covered with open cans.

The library always attracted me, even though we rarely saw him there. A longtime fantasy of mine has been to have a room filled floor to ceiling with books. And though it was a small room, Mister Denton had that. It felt like a very wealthy feature for a poor broken man.

In my mind they were volumes of sci-fi and fantasy, worlds anew and adventures to be hand on this one. I was SORELY disappointed when, as an older teen, I was part of a crew that roofed his house and went sent inside to the library to clean up some debris that had fallen through the ceiling, I perused Mister Denton's titles and found what I guessed were smutty titles.

Of course, being the prudish teen I was, I'd never seen books of this sort. From the titles, one could estimate their contents. I could not. Curiosity being what it is to cats (and wolves), I plucked one book off and flipped through it and read a page, where i was disgusted to read of a man licking the anus of a woman on an airplane. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever heard of. Uhg! I had no idea people got up to these sorts of things, much less WROTE about them!

Immediately embarrassed, I nervously thrust the book back into his empty slot and noticed hundreds and hundreds of books with titles like; Trailer Park Temptresses; Nurses in Heat: ER After Dark; The Peach Orchard Diaries; Naughty Nights on Flight 69. It went on and on. My conflict between the man I saw and heard and his owning a large library of books suddenly was no conflict at all. Mister Denton was a pervert, pure and simple.

Now it all made sense.

To my knowledge, his interest in lurid books never translated to attention to little boys and little girls. Which in hind sight is a huge relief. We ran through our little kingdom day and night, nary an adult in sight riding herd over us.

I always felt sorry for my neighbor. He led a solitary life and while he no doubt had family, I never saw anyone visit him. Except my mother. As he got older she would take him food and meals. She was very kind that way.

It was this kindness that moved her to find Mister Denton after he had died. I am vague on the timing. Sometimes, I think I was still a teen living at home, others, married and out of my parent's home. I do have clear image of his bloated black and blue corpse through the rusted screen door and an overwhelming smell of decay.

Thankfully, I have no recollection of how the cats handled his death and decaying body once their canned food was no longer available.

That was many years ago, more than thirty, and yet I still think of him whenever I see that house next to mom and dad's place. I can no longer recall his first name or any other details about him. But, that small piece still lives in memory. As we all do. Even after we are gone from this mortal life, small vignettes exist for a time.

I do wish I had brighter, happier memories of the man who was my families neighbor for two decades, but reclusive personalities rarely shine their light on the outside world.

Mister Denton, should we one day meet again, I look forward to getting to know you and I'd love to hear how you remember your little strange neighbors on that dirt road in Dust Meridian.

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A magnificently honest rendering of low self esteem.

Thinking we are unloved and unlovable is endemic. What a state to be in. It breeds a constant need to give away parts of ourselves so that we feel loved and valued. When in truth, if someone truly loves and values us, they do not need what small treasures we have. We are enough all by being who we are. By existing. 

When we give of ourselves to get affection or acceptance or love, we enter a transaction. There's nothing inherently wrong with this, but if becomes how we identify ourselves, it can break us. It treads in to parasitic territory. How can love support a parasite? Love requires exchange. Perhaps in the short, it may not be balanced, but on a long enough timeline, it should be an even give and take. 

I care for you, you care for me. Our needs are met.

But in long-term relationships, patterns can form that are not healthy. They may form because one partner or the other just doesn't have what is needed to fill all our missing parts. It isn't their fault. They may even wish to be the parity to our broken. But a one legged man will not win a marathon against bipeds. 

So if we are in a committed imbalance, or not, we must learn to accept ourselves. If you and I can approve of who we are and find validation and acceptance, and not count on our second parties to fulfill us, then we can find peace. 

Or perhaps, you and I will find each other. Because—not because we wish harm, but because we vibrate at a frequency that feels incredibly lonely. And suddenly, there is a signal in the dark that we recognize. And we align with it. And we are made greater. Where other signals diminish us, we are suddenly enhanced. 

And made beautiful. 

And you may be made to feel bad as if this is evil or wrong. But how can love be wrong? If you are cold and you find a fire, is that wrong? 

This is not something I say lightly. It is dangerous territory to admit. 

The world is a cold place. Is not the true injustice to ask someone to stand in the cold because it is the right thing to do?

The Boy, the Mole, The Fox and the Horse is the kind of story that begs introspection.  You, I hope, will see yourself in one of the characters. The wise, the broken, the hurt, the lost and the sage. You will probably realize you are some mixture of these.  And I think that's beautiful. 

Let me go on this journey with you. If you can' support Charlie at Charliemackesy.com

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Some memories never fade, only get lost in the well of time.

A father's story while watching forest Gump 6/11/22

I stopped by my dad’s place to say hi. He was watching TV.
He’d been doing that a lot the last few months—a big shift for a man who spent his life doing something.

Anything, really. Making things.
Metal things. Wood things. Rebuilding car engines, rebuilding whole cars, building fences, even building buildings. The list goes on and on.

At seventy-five he’d had neck surgery for spinal stenosis—when the spinal column ossifies and starts pressing against the spinal nerve. Too much pressure causes pain; too much pain and you risk paralysis.

Right after the surgery, he told me he was having vivid dreams of panthers attacking him from behind, biting his neck. “Worst pain I ever felt,” he said.

It made me think of that old joke—God invented the pain of childbirth so a woman would know what it’s like for a man to catch a cold.

Ha.

He said if he could do it over, he wouldn’t. He’d rather roll the paralysis dice.

When I walked in, Forrest Gump was on. As we talked, the scene came up where Forrest is slogging through the jungle in chest-deep water, saying:

“One day it started raining, and it didn’t quit for four months. We been through every kind of rain there is. Little bitty stingin’ rain... and big ol’ fat rain. Rain that flew in sideways. And sometimes rain even seemed to come straight up from underneath. Shoot, it even rained at night.”

We sat in silence watching it play out.
While Tom Hanks talked about the rain from below, Dad started telling me about the time he burned down the mess hall.

“It never rained much when I was in Vietnam,” he said. “Not like they show in Forrest Gump. I mean, it was green—but not that green. It did rain, though. I bogged down a five-ton truck in the mud once. It could turn into a mess pretty quick.

“We’d taken this hill—Hill 972—so we could launch artillery from our six guns. Had ’em set up on the flat top. We were using the anti-rock platforms I designed, and they worked great. Kept the cannons from rocking back and digging big holes. I should’ve patented those when I got back; I’d be a millionaire. Not that there’s much call for that sort of thing stateside. Still, it saved us a lot of digging when we finally pulled out.

“A little further down the hill we set up base—just carved it right out of the jungle. Lived in the middle of nowhere. A little pop-up town.

“We were watching a movie one night when somebody shouted that the mess hall was on fire. Fires are all-hands affairs—you grab whatever’s got water in it and you’re a firefighter.

“Setting up camp was always hectic. The sooner we were dug in, the sooner we could keep our heads down and get on with living in Vietnam.

“Which is why some genius filled up the water cans with gasoline.

“The fire was going pretty good when the call went out. We scrambled everywhere looking for water. Like I said—it was green, but not wet like they show in Gump. Finally someone found a stash of what we all thought was water. We grabbed every single one of those jerry cans and started dumping.

“WHOOSH!

“Gasoline doesn’t burn—the vapors do. Explosively.

“The flames shot up into the night sky. And somewhere in that sudden glow was the dummy who’d put fuel in the cans meant for water.

“Needless to say, the mess was a goner. Those tents weren’t much, but they were the difference between civilization and not.

“Even now, fifty years later, I can still see those flames like it was yesterday.”

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