thing was the reality and everything else was just illusion.â
Time makes you cocky. Sitting in the mall
now
, Gerry recants a bit on what he said
then
. The mortality of then seems less real or maybe mortality is getting less real generally. Maybe the line is blurring. Gerry thinks of the sweaty preacher, shouting in his geometrically pressed suit, verbally trying to re-draw, indelibly, Gerryâs line.
Gerry doesnât deal with the line, or Oreo cookies or long falls the next time he writes something for his group, but he does have a go at bringing his George into the more recent past.
Fragment: Mortality at the Mall
There was a piece of the AIDS quilt on display at the mall, under the floating banners of the optimistic puffins. The puffins looked bullet-proof, smug that they donât get AIDS. They just get their heads stuck in the plastic rings off six-packs and strangle or get oiled and freeze. Those are the occupational hazards of the heroic life of a small bird in a big ocean
.
George looked at the quilt, which was made up of squares dedicated to the dead. He found he knew two of the squares, both mourned by families who had embroidered clouds and mushrooms and a smiling pinkand orange cat. Brothers and sisters and a mother did those squares for two men who were a poet and a teacher, respectively. The loves of their lives donât seem to be mentioned, unless theyâre squares themselves, names that George doesnât recognize
.
A pretty, youngish woman was passing out literature at a folding table. She worked at something or other at the university and George had known her for several years. Still, he did not know what her relationship to the quilt and the people on it might be
.
âItâs so sad,â she said. âThere are so many.â
Undeniably there was a quilt-full there on display. George thought he recalled having heard that the national quilt was football-field size. He had a First World War vision of emerald soccer pitches full of Flanders Field crosses. Still, he felt vaguely that the dozen or so friends or acquaintances of his who had died, or were dying, of AIDS, didnât nearly match the numbers heâd lost to other life-style martyrdoms, heart attack, gunshots, pills or crossing the street three-parts pissed
.
With a twinge, George realized that, flying in the face of reason, fewer people he knew were dying anymore. There was a time in the early â80s when he seemed to go to a wake every week. He had been drinking then and he hung out with older men with stories to tell. He brought his wife Paula along for them to be courtly to. They told their stories and he sponged them up with the beer, although sometimes the sagas were cut off in mid-cycle. Paula, whose father died when she was fifteen, wept at a number of funerals for men who would have been about his age
.
Somewhere along the line, though, all the older men had gone
.
âYouâre like the medicine man of a lost tribe,â she told George as he kept scouring empty tables for myths in the beer puddles. Eventually he was starting to act out the sagas himself. At thirty-five or six George was acting very middle-aged. He drank too much too often and steadily in-between
.
âYouâre the scribe for a civilization that only has a past,â she said, variations on a theme. By that time, she may have been quoting the man she eventually left him for
.
In the Saturday mall, the pretty girl from the university handed out her literature and mourned or quasi-mourned on the shopping centre frontier of mortality. George wondered if, perhaps, she was going through herwake-a-week period now, as his had slowed. He wondered if that was reason to rejoice. If you hang out with people who do not die, does immortality threaten? George remembered the silly twist of logic they had played with in high school when they talked about deductive reasoning. If you havenât died on any day so far, on the basis
Time makes you cocky. Sitting in the mall
now
, Gerry recants a bit on what he said
then
. The mortality of then seems less real or maybe mortality is getting less real generally. Maybe the line is blurring. Gerry thinks of the sweaty preacher, shouting in his geometrically pressed suit, verbally trying to re-draw, indelibly, Gerryâs line.
Gerry doesnât deal with the line, or Oreo cookies or long falls the next time he writes something for his group, but he does have a go at bringing his George into the more recent past.
Fragment: Mortality at the Mall
There was a piece of the AIDS quilt on display at the mall, under the floating banners of the optimistic puffins. The puffins looked bullet-proof, smug that they donât get AIDS. They just get their heads stuck in the plastic rings off six-packs and strangle or get oiled and freeze. Those are the occupational hazards of the heroic life of a small bird in a big ocean
.
George looked at the quilt, which was made up of squares dedicated to the dead. He found he knew two of the squares, both mourned by families who had embroidered clouds and mushrooms and a smiling pinkand orange cat. Brothers and sisters and a mother did those squares for two men who were a poet and a teacher, respectively. The loves of their lives donât seem to be mentioned, unless theyâre squares themselves, names that George doesnât recognize
.
A pretty, youngish woman was passing out literature at a folding table. She worked at something or other at the university and George had known her for several years. Still, he did not know what her relationship to the quilt and the people on it might be
.
âItâs so sad,â she said. âThere are so many.â
Undeniably there was a quilt-full there on display. George thought he recalled having heard that the national quilt was football-field size. He had a First World War vision of emerald soccer pitches full of Flanders Field crosses. Still, he felt vaguely that the dozen or so friends or acquaintances of his who had died, or were dying, of AIDS, didnât nearly match the numbers heâd lost to other life-style martyrdoms, heart attack, gunshots, pills or crossing the street three-parts pissed
.
With a twinge, George realized that, flying in the face of reason, fewer people he knew were dying anymore. There was a time in the early â80s when he seemed to go to a wake every week. He had been drinking then and he hung out with older men with stories to tell. He brought his wife Paula along for them to be courtly to. They told their stories and he sponged them up with the beer, although sometimes the sagas were cut off in mid-cycle. Paula, whose father died when she was fifteen, wept at a number of funerals for men who would have been about his age
.
Somewhere along the line, though, all the older men had gone
.
âYouâre like the medicine man of a lost tribe,â she told George as he kept scouring empty tables for myths in the beer puddles. Eventually he was starting to act out the sagas himself. At thirty-five or six George was acting very middle-aged. He drank too much too often and steadily in-between
.
âYouâre the scribe for a civilization that only has a past,â she said, variations on a theme. By that time, she may have been quoting the man she eventually left him for
.
In the Saturday mall, the pretty girl from the university handed out her literature and mourned or quasi-mourned on the shopping centre frontier of mortality. George wondered if, perhaps, she was going through herwake-a-week period now, as his had slowed. He wondered if that was reason to rejoice. If you hang out with people who do not die, does immortality threaten? George remembered the silly twist of logic they had played with in high school when they talked about deductive reasoning. If you havenât died on any day so far, on the basis
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