Walked around my hood Memorial Day lonely as a cloud. Nowhere to go nothing to do. For many years past I would be going out to Rolla in the middle of Missouri where we would sit around a little round table on the back porch and drink home brew and eat good food and gab on and on all day. Did that about thirty years and as we all got older the logistics became more difficult and we haven't done it for a couple three years. And now he died early this spring and she is not getting around very well.
Just me walking around, getting exercise looking at stuff. Kept an eye out for chonkosaurus as I went by the river, but no dice. In the parks were knots of people grilling and drinking and hanging out. The kids running around like banshees, the adults messing around with the grilling and the table setting and mundane chores and the oldsters not budging from their folding chairs ready to bore anybody who wandered close to them and patting their tummies and saying, "Sure is a nice day. Yesiree".
Should have been me, sitting in the sun watching my brood buzz around me. Grampa Ken. "I declare chile, can't do nothing with you buzzing around me, why doncha go bother Grampa, he's got plenty to tell about days past."
Should have married, should have been good, should have had a brood. I always assumed when I was growing up that I would have a brood. Seemed like it would just happen. I would meet a nice girl, and the next thing you know I would be handing out cigars, getting a promotion, getting a mortgage, the whole shebang.
Never happened, lived to loose I suppose, working low paying jobs, quitting for spells, never thinking much beyond tomorrow, and all the while getting older. My mother warned me in my younger days to settle down before I got set in my ways. And now I was set in my ways. I wanted to come home to an empty house where I would have to talk to somebody about their day, where somebody would stop me halfway to the kitchen and ask did I really need another beer.
(Didn't expect such a long url. But I checked it out it works.)
Anyway so it goes. Could have been worse. I could have had a harridan wife, ungrateful kids, been stuck in some hellish job that I couldn't quit because I had all these dependents. Still I was feeling some pity for myself when my feed got tired and I turned homeward. The whole wide sunny holiday and everybody had somewhere to go, something to do, but not me.
But winding my way home it occurred to me that I hadn't had a bleu cheese burger with fat fries at Elephant and Castle on Wabash under where the train takes the turn to State Street in some time. Washed it down with a couple Scottish ales, had a good article to read in my New Yorker, and it was fine. Just fine.
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