Carrying In: 6th musing

   

    
          Later in the evening, after dusk has fallen and night is here, I search for a small sketchbook I had scanned earlier in the day. The one with drawings of Dad in the hospital in 2007. In that small space I captured it all, him in his hospital gown, weary and cantakerous. Him reciting poetry, the angels of mercy hovering about him and my mother as we waited...as I was used to waiting back in those days...and a fiery outburst of his that I recorded when he yelled and was not a good patient at all. He hated to be confined.
It's all there, but the sketchbook was not in the bag of books of his that I had also scanned earlier in the day.

    So I leaned into the back seat of the car and carried in that rumpled brown paper bag of books, well thumbed through, notated, some covers falling off or held on with a bit of tape....stuffed with papers.
I crossed the snowy yard and felt his presence long ago coming in the back door from a stint at the
Q yard railroad where he worked....carrying in a brown paper bag full of books, his thermos of coffee or something stronger and carbon copies of things he had typed. Tired, he would lurch into the room about 10:30 at night. I still remember the smell of the rail yard about him. I recall how tired, very tired he was as he got up early the next day to teach English classes at MCAD...tired, he poured himself a drink.
    My mother waited up for him. Sometimes they visited, sometimes they shouted and quarreled right away. Sometimes she was asleep, sometimes she was depressed. Other times their friend Viv would be over..the smell of her cigarettes permeating the house and Dad would revive and carry on a conversation long into the night.....with her and my mother.

    And so it went for years...Dad coming in with his trove of books in a bag..carrying in his thoughts, his quips, his overflowing ideas....
    And then it all ended, he retired from the railroad with a good pension and his contract at the Art School was not renewed.....He had time and he typed and typed....papers filling the room, thoughts going here and there and books..more time to read and books filling up every square inch of the house
    Now those very books fill the basement, the back room and parts of my garage. With little effort I've managed to recreate the chaos and wonder of my parents house.
    Persephone looks around in that basement underworld of literary knowledge, art and papers...She takes a deep breath and starts making order all over again.