2002-10-09 - 12:04 a.m.
I always wonder what is left behind when people abandon a place. There are always some sort of shadows, some energy that lingers. I have watched the houses on the next block being torn down over the last few weeks. There was much grinding and crashing as the machinery wrecked and pulverized the sturdy old buildings. They sat empty for months prior to the demolition and already seemed to have slumped and sagged. Today there was just a smooth, graded lot where the houses stood, and a view that wasn't there before. No trace of the two small bungalows and a four-plex apartment building. Not a tree or bush or sidewalk left. I wonder for the first time what became of the guy who lived in the first floor apartment and grew lots of beautiful plants, and the older couple who sat out in their screen porch on summer nights. They probably can't afford to live in this neighborhood anymore, now that it is a "gold mine."
When I lived in the country I heard about a man that everyone called the "Hermit." He had spent his entire life living in a tiny cabin way back off the road, and he never talked to anyone and only came in to town for supplies a few times a year. Or had. He had died a few years earlier.
My (then)husband and I decided to see if we could find the cabin. We drove down narrow dirt roads with weeds growing up between the tracks, and finally stopped to crawl through a fence and walk. We finally found it, sitting up on a hill, amid the ruins of split rail fences and old farm implements. The door was loose on its hinges and we gingerly opened it and looked in. It was dark inside, and the tiny two-room cabin had been ransacked by hunters and invaded by wild animals. But everything was still there. The wood stove. The rocking chair. The bed, minus a mattress, where he probably died. There was something eerily still about the place. Later, neither of us could recall hearing a bird or a squirrel or even a rustling leaf. Outside there was a weathered wooden chair placed beside the stone that served as a doorstep, and wood shavings on the ground, as though he must have sat there whittling. I imagine him connected to this place in a symbiotic sort of way, knowing every variation of leaf and cloud and wing. I always wonder what he did there by himself, year after year. How did he perceived his world, populated only by himself? And might it not be easier to make sense of than the one in which I live....?
I still think about the hermit sometimes on days like this. Days when I have had too much of people, and I am struggling to keep my equilibrium. Today at work I made a big mistake, although I could not have acted differently based on the information I had. I approved a student's petition for a refund that my boss had previously denied. I had no idea that the student had petitioned before, it wasn't documented, and I honestly believed (and still do) that he deserved the refund. But my boss was upset and told me to reverse it. And then I found out that a check for over two thousand dollars had already been mailed to the student. So we had to approve it again, since there was no way to recall a check. Just the kind of thing I was afraid of. What makes me feel the worst is that the poor student feels all jerked around, and I didn't want to have to do that to him.
So that was my day: spreading myself too thin, trying to deal with so many people's problems. I think I could be very good at dealing with problems if I had time to integrate them into my thinking, live with them, write about them. The thing that makes modern life so tricky is that we are forced to do things quickly. I don't think my brain is designed for that. My brain intended for me to be the leaf, cloud and wing sort of person. Making observations. Forgetting I am not invisible.
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