Holiday Depression

I've replaced the concept of being married with a bamboo backscratcher. I don't have to be sensitive to anyone else's needs and I can scratch exactly where it itches. The learning curve was long and laborious, and the imagined need for companionship was a constant attraction, but the fact is, I like being alone. I can get up, at three in the morning, add some white wine to the crock-pot of bean soup, give it a stir, listen to a couple of blues numbers on late-night radio (Buddy Guy, Clapton), roll a smoke, get a drink, and not have to explain myself. Almost an illicit feeling. I'm sure there's a law in Alabama that says I can't do this. A pack of dogs woke me, I'd kill them all, but I'd have to deal with the bodies, so I just run them off with a few well-thrown rocks. I need to replenish my supply of rocks because I've been throwing them frequently recently. Maybe it's the time of year. The shortest days are the most difficult, when you get up in the dark and get home in the dark, and in the interim there's only the barking laugh of a co-worker. Sure, I could be depressed, though I choose not to be, focus my attention, instead, on something that caught my eye. I know it has a name, that refraction of light. I'd gone outside to pee, and turned on the porch light, prismatic ice crystals were falling from the sky, not snow, exactly, but some form of water turned solid. It was so beautiful I peed on my left foot. The bean soup is taking forever to cook, the dried Navy Beans are several years old and even after twelve hours in the crock pot they aren't done. It's not really a problem, the soup will be better for it, I just turn the pot up to High for an hour, then back to Low to simmer for another few hours. I'm somewhat of a connoisseur when it comes to dried beans. Dove Creek, Colorado, is the Pinto Bean capital of the world, and in the first years after my separation and divorce, before moving to Ohio, it was on one of the three routes I'd take to get my daughters every other weekend. There was a Bean Co-op there and I'd always stop, to get a ten-pound burlap bag of one bean or another. The people that worked there had a knowledge of legumes that exceeded my wildest imagining. I'd spent ten years, before Colorado, in Mississippi, growing between 40 and 50 different varieties of beans and peas, including several heirloom Crowder Peas, African in origin, that are incredibly delicious. I gave some seed to Carlos, at the Co-op, and I never paid for beans again. When I came back east, he sent me off with fifty pounds of assorted dried beans. I lived on them, and corn bread, the nine months I worked on Peter Jefferson's house (Tom's dad), outside Winchester, Virginia. A brutal time, during which I wore a hair shirt and carried my feelings on my sleeve. I still cultivate, through a surrogate, a Black Crowder, that is all-time favorite bean. I got the seed from a friend of Roy's in Babylon, the black section of Duck Hill, Mississippi. Going on about nothing. Beans, for god's sake. I get the house comfortable, but I'm still shuffling around in my bathrobe, because I like the way the collar keeps my neck warm. It's beautiful outside, so I suit-up for a walk, insulated Red Wing boots and insulated Carhartt overalls over sweats over long underwear. Like that character from the tire commercials, or the Dough Boy. The outfits I affect. Choose your vowels carefully. At one point I retreat to the sofa and look at Sargent portraits for several hours. They continue to amaze. Open the Old Vines Zinfandel so it can breathe until the soup is done, but I need something to sustain me. A sardine sandwich, a snack I learned at the bar at the end of the loading dock at the theater's back entrance in Boston. The Combat Zone. Where they just dumped a can of sardines on a piece of bread, with mayonnaise and a slice of onion; bar food, for those that choose to never kiss another human being. It's as good as I remember. Memory being a poor test of anything, but goddamn, it is a very good sandwich. Oh, am I alone again? it must be a holiday. Everyone else has someone to be with, but you can lean on, because we all need someone to lean on, even me.