After some years of freedom at school, then college, then the army I spent thirty or thirty-five years trapped behind the counter of a drug store on Graham Avenue in Brooklyn. I left pieces of my soul, or the shavings of decades of soul whittling, and most of my energy on the littered streets around my store.
It was after I escaped the chains of ownership that I became free again for a few years working for an organization which had some vague stated purpose but which actually was no more than a place to hang a hat and tell a few stories. I felt human there for a time surrounded by people who understood me, and whose aims exceeded that of piling up money.
What happened to me since then has been merely a matter of surviving trivialities and a weakening body. I own a piece of the beach; I have recently purchased an almost infinite sea view, which ends at the horizon. I see the ocean as flat, and I see Florida as even flatter. There is little variation in the seasons discernible to a native Northerner and I miss the weather, the atmosphere of the north. New York and New England are natural to me. The landscape, the foliage, is in my blood. The cold invigorates me, I never hide from it, and I go out to meet it.
But now, in Florida, at the end of my working life, I feel defeated, ambition depleted, exhausted by my pallid life on Graham Avenue which was paradoxically brightened only by a few crimes attempted on me, which I deflected. Those few moments were the only moments I really lived. All the rest was marking time.
I revel too much in sentiment. Tears come to my eyes easily. Thoughts of my dead father, lost friends dead too, form lumps in my throat. The pain of other people, their losses also make me cry. Once open the floodgates of memories fail to hold back my tears.
I look in the mirror and now, instead of my father I see a new man, no longer handsome, fleshy, face no longer symmetrical or proportional, unearned lines misplaced on my cheeks and forehead, jaw weakened, eyes puffy and flat, seeing much less than they once did.
My main pleasure has been a few friends.
