Grave Lumas And Wishbags Monologue
Grave Lumps & Wishbones
Like all stories told late in a man’s life, this one begins with his prostate. A calamitous long distance phone call to a Father’s daughter will end it. Double stuffed between these two crisp cookie shell perspectives is a rich, hokey-pokey, cream filling. So, cheek to cheek and with happy feet, follow the pied piper’s lead and march locked in step with the carnival’s Conga line to the rhythmic, stylized soft shoe three step shuffle (and kick), of this picnic choreographed three-legged marathon narrative. Shake your booty and pegged leg, then trip to the life fantastic for this rebooted, Father-Daughter’s last tango’d waltz. Vicariously, all together now, let’s: dip, dunk, twirl, and turn yourself around, because …show more content…
that’s what it’s all about!
Ironically, first he couldn’t pee; now he can’t stop. With the Swiss precision of an Omega stopwatch, at the twenty-minute mark, he starts squirming like pricked bait on a hook. At forty minutes, in raindrop dappled shoes, he’s Fred Astaire. And Old Faithful on the hour, every hour, with neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night staying the copious geyser of his fire hydrant red pee-mail: an accidental double Big Dog dare salute, aimed towards the local canine hierarchy for low man on the telephone pole.
From his prostate, it metastasized to his lungs, colon, kidney, and pancreas, or perhaps it was always there, silent, biding its time like a watched tea pot; a bubbling, boiling cauldron of a percolating time bomb; a pressure packed crock pot, with a slow burning fuse, relentlessly counting down: drip…drip…drip. His brief candle sputters, gutters, nearly going out, dimming under the tempest’s deluge, with an inexorably and inevitable erosion of his heart’s fire and caffeine fueled vigor.
Good news, bad news — bad news first: diabetic complications, stroke, and heart failure will surely kill him before the cancer. There is no good news, not in the hospital gown stark, naked fluorescent lighting of the examination’s day room. Sounds of silence — cancer’s low blow. Its unspoken, unlearned name is adenocarcinoma. I am a Hawaiian Island; I am igneous rock.
His cough barks, like seals fighting over a fish, with duck quacking echoes.
It is an affliction upon the ears, like a swarming plague of busy, buzzing mosquitos, tasking me on the chase around perdition’s flames. Why don’t you just die already? Post-prostate, the first tumor they remove is from his lung. So much more than just a damned spot on the MRI and X-ray films — Out I say! He doesn’t cough anymore, hardly; but, when he does, the cacophony stabs at me, like Vincent’s dull palette knife. My cochineal tin ear is not yet Quasimodo deaf to the ringing, digitized bell of the hospital’s chapel — for whom will it toll …show more content…
today?
Figaro, FiGarO, Figaro. Am I the despicable operatic diva: me, me, me? Or the metaphoric, titanium yellow, fat coal mine canary, singing a singularly cautionary song to a departing audience of cotton packed, blocked ears? Alone on the world’s stage, something wicked, a darkly walking shadow, this way comes strutting and fretting like an idiot, full of soundless fury and mad tweets. Except for the encore and curtain calls, the play has ended. Time now to die a brave player’s death, like a homecoming hero; a last Tecumseh battle cry, then exit stage left!
He still looks reasonably well, tolerable as a tall, heavily sweating glass of cold, iced tea on a feverishly warm, tropical summer’s afternoon; but, follicles challenged, puffy faced, and with a pasty, milk-white pale complexion, he is instead a forgotten carton left well past its expiration date, hidden in the back of the refrigerator next to the pickles. Sniff, sniff. Note to self: check the freshness stamp on the soul of his diabetic, fetid foot.
His entire life he’s kept everything (including medical waste) neatly packaged, sorted, and preserved in jars of formaldehyde. It’s his OCD and Zoölogy degree on full display. Goggled Coke bottle lens specimen jars ogle him, through the looking glass. We are mirror images, the enantiomorphic odd couple: Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum; Felix and Oscar; Left and Right thumbed. I am his chiral opposite: messy to the max — double toil and double trouble!
Doctors remove a dozen tumors from his colon. Fore! He calls me over to see the bloody, toilet bowl golf balls he’s dropped into the water hazard and asks me for an official ruling. Situational etiquette demands the correct response: comedy; tragedy; drama; admiration? I gouge out my eyeballs. My empty face is an actor’s mask. Who will love my mother, when the king is dead? Will she find solace in her Facebook pages, or on her iPhone?
I flush the bloody entrails, prognostic harbingers of unrelenting, imminent extinction. They swirl round and round the bowl, streaking crimson antediluvian comets in search of doomed dinosaurs; flying through an inverted porcelain firmament, caught in the inescapable gravitational tidal pull of a black hole; now disappearing down the rabbit hole — a hole in one! He is sad to see them go. In the days ahead, he will have precious few opportunities to chase little birdies around the greens again.
His fearless roar is silenced by the kidney operations and he refuses to discuss their particulars, other than: All the nurses were good-looking…for guys. He does opine, far too fondly, on the post-operation morphine drips: commercial air conditioners set on high, blowing fevers and pain out the top of his head with arctic chilled breezes and powerful porpoise breaths. Puffy dragon clouds of medicinal marijuana smoke inch out of his ears, on tiny caterpillar feet. He grins appropriately Cheshire-like, frolicking in the autumn mist, before sadly slipping back into his chrysalid cave.
The pancreas is problematic.
Fling the cancerous stone enough times and the giant falls. He refuses the required surgery, despite the handsome nurses and new wonder drugs. His body has betrayed him. Once as big as a moose and loose as a goose, he looks confused and shrunken, as if he’s drunk…straight from a poisoned bottle — which in fact, on doctor’s orders, he has — or swallowed whole one of Alice’s reducing elixirs.
With needles embedded vein deep and protruding from an anemic forearm, he pretends all is well and sleeps away the bustling hospital’s eighteen hour day, like immortal heroin addicts nodding off in a small corner of the park, vainly searching the compass for anything other than the needle tracked arms of Morpheus to hold their abridged attention spans, while examining empty time cards on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Sweat soaked palms and swarthy terrors saturate his night. In raven black wingtip brogues, the mailman’s gloom delivers inclement dreams and stormy nightmares, resurrecting his waking anxiety. The Sandman is most unkind and in the Land of Nod he finds no weary respite from sleep gasping apnea, or the monsters under his bed. The tell-tale ribcage rapping of his heart wakes him, pounding wildly as if he’s just lost a death match foot race to a Nike shod, Frankenstein’s closet monster; but, in due course, he makes his peace with the gamboling ghosts upon the floor, by watching the lambent shadows of Late Show reruns and infomercials. So little time
left; so much television left to view…nevermore!
Still, cancer’s boogeymen seek out and devour him from within, like alien predators, or porcine parasites — wallowing in his sweetness. Sugar running low, he only just manages to wake from something less than a coma, but more than a brief winter’s hibernation; he shuffles, zombie-bear-like, outside to the lanai and into the vampire’s night lit by a lupine moon, in hopes of a quick, sanitary demise, resulting in minimal bedroom feculence.
He calls often; I rarely answer: ring, ring, ring — it's chiming signifies nothing, I am an idiot. Time zone differences…broken phone…classes…homework, the long distance connection goes straight to Purgatory’s voice-mail limbo. He doesn’t complain. He is the broken one, but not the only one in pain who needs saving. For me it is too much. For my younger sister — who loves him unconditionally and with every other sentence literally tells him exactly that — there is no doubt that she has honorably and deservedly earned his ashes and our inheritance’s remains, unaware the entirety of it has already been spent on my Kenyon College tuition!
He loves my mother and my mother loves Him, believing through Jesus’ stripes that he will be healed. Perhaps, maybe…or, maybe not — he’s an Agnostic; a Doubting Thomas; and a little Dutch Boy interceding always on my behalf by poking a finger into weeping, leaking holes, attempting to stem the flow of violence; electing to stand between mom and me; resignedly welcoming the frequent whippings, where he is wounded for my transgressions and bruised for my iniquities. She was often (Nag not a tongaN) justifiably angry in my youth and rarely spared the rod; but, spoiled as I was back then, I did so revel in poking the she-bear. Once I told him: If only he had let her beat me, it may have turned out for the best. By his stripes I was saved!
The poet Kahlil Gibran asks: For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? Winds kindly cool and harshly buffet; the sun gently warms and unmercifully blinds; but, Death is more the poet’s muse and survivor’s province than the dead man’s affair. As tearful mourners puddle and pond graveside, stoically discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast, the grateful, constant dead remain forever immune to the changing seasons and other meteorological concerns.
I stand steadfast, rock solid, feet securely and (at least one) firmly planted in hard gravediggers’ scrabble. My soul is buried alive as my OCD hoards and clings to the leftover flotsam and jetsam of his sinking life’s vessel: surplus odds and ends, remnant scraps, and trash debris piled suffocatingly high — a veritable post-Thanksgiving cornucopia of gravy lumps, turkey skin, and splintered wishbones. Surfing the swells and breakers of my unsettled, frothy brainwave backwash, he’s the big kahuna precariously hanging ten much too soon after eating a meal, of sickening sea rations. The ponderous, dead as a door-nail anchoring weight of an under-cooked great goose, floating like a cemented, soggy shoed mob hit, or the chain ladened ghost of Jacob Marley, moaning miserably in the pit of my stomach on a molten pond of greasy gravy, mustard blots, potato slivers, and cheesy crumbs — a Dickensian scourge; but, try as I might to navigate around the frozen tears of my mind’s titanically obsessed cogitations, the throttle is fixed on full ahead, at wipe-out ramming speed.
Pull…Tug…Snap! Broken, clavicle stretched heart strings pulse, and tuning forked breast bones accordion. I close my eyes and hold my nose as the ship’s Captain and I go down together for the last time to the orchestra’s discordant, jangling tune. Ring…ring…ring…Aloha! Is anyone there? Aloha? The long distance connection is forever lost to the ocean’s deep, with the static silence of a dead line; but, to my great surprise, I am more than ever, still very much my father’s daughter.
Like all stories told late in a man’s life, this one begins with his prostate. A calamitous long distance phone call to a Father’s daughter will end it. Double stuffed between these two crisp cookie shell perspectives is a rich, hokey-pokey, cream filling. So, cheek to cheek and with happy feet, follow the pied piper’s lead and march locked in step with the carnival’s Conga line to the rhythmic, stylized soft shoe three step shuffle (and kick), of this picnic choreographed three-legged marathon narrative. Shake your booty and pegged leg, then trip to the life fantastic for this rebooted, Father-Daughter’s last tango’d waltz. Vicariously, all together now, let’s: dip, dunk, twirl, and turn yourself around, because …show more content…
that’s what it’s all about!
Ironically, first he couldn’t pee; now he can’t stop. With the Swiss precision of an Omega stopwatch, at the twenty-minute mark, he starts squirming like pricked bait on a hook. At forty minutes, in raindrop dappled shoes, he’s Fred Astaire. And Old Faithful on the hour, every hour, with neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night staying the copious geyser of his fire hydrant red pee-mail: an accidental double Big Dog dare salute, aimed towards the local canine hierarchy for low man on the telephone pole.
From his prostate, it metastasized to his lungs, colon, kidney, and pancreas, or perhaps it was always there, silent, biding its time like a watched tea pot; a bubbling, boiling cauldron of a percolating time bomb; a pressure packed crock pot, with a slow burning fuse, relentlessly counting down: drip…drip…drip. His brief candle sputters, gutters, nearly going out, dimming under the tempest’s deluge, with an inexorably and inevitable erosion of his heart’s fire and caffeine fueled vigor.
Good news, bad news — bad news first: diabetic complications, stroke, and heart failure will surely kill him before the cancer. There is no good news, not in the hospital gown stark, naked fluorescent lighting of the examination’s day room. Sounds of silence — cancer’s low blow. Its unspoken, unlearned name is adenocarcinoma. I am a Hawaiian Island; I am igneous rock.
His cough barks, like seals fighting over a fish, with duck quacking echoes.
It is an affliction upon the ears, like a swarming plague of busy, buzzing mosquitos, tasking me on the chase around perdition’s flames. Why don’t you just die already? Post-prostate, the first tumor they remove is from his lung. So much more than just a damned spot on the MRI and X-ray films — Out I say! He doesn’t cough anymore, hardly; but, when he does, the cacophony stabs at me, like Vincent’s dull palette knife. My cochineal tin ear is not yet Quasimodo deaf to the ringing, digitized bell of the hospital’s chapel — for whom will it toll …show more content…
today?
Figaro, FiGarO, Figaro. Am I the despicable operatic diva: me, me, me? Or the metaphoric, titanium yellow, fat coal mine canary, singing a singularly cautionary song to a departing audience of cotton packed, blocked ears? Alone on the world’s stage, something wicked, a darkly walking shadow, this way comes strutting and fretting like an idiot, full of soundless fury and mad tweets. Except for the encore and curtain calls, the play has ended. Time now to die a brave player’s death, like a homecoming hero; a last Tecumseh battle cry, then exit stage left!
He still looks reasonably well, tolerable as a tall, heavily sweating glass of cold, iced tea on a feverishly warm, tropical summer’s afternoon; but, follicles challenged, puffy faced, and with a pasty, milk-white pale complexion, he is instead a forgotten carton left well past its expiration date, hidden in the back of the refrigerator next to the pickles. Sniff, sniff. Note to self: check the freshness stamp on the soul of his diabetic, fetid foot.
His entire life he’s kept everything (including medical waste) neatly packaged, sorted, and preserved in jars of formaldehyde. It’s his OCD and Zoölogy degree on full display. Goggled Coke bottle lens specimen jars ogle him, through the looking glass. We are mirror images, the enantiomorphic odd couple: Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum; Felix and Oscar; Left and Right thumbed. I am his chiral opposite: messy to the max — double toil and double trouble!
Doctors remove a dozen tumors from his colon. Fore! He calls me over to see the bloody, toilet bowl golf balls he’s dropped into the water hazard and asks me for an official ruling. Situational etiquette demands the correct response: comedy; tragedy; drama; admiration? I gouge out my eyeballs. My empty face is an actor’s mask. Who will love my mother, when the king is dead? Will she find solace in her Facebook pages, or on her iPhone?
I flush the bloody entrails, prognostic harbingers of unrelenting, imminent extinction. They swirl round and round the bowl, streaking crimson antediluvian comets in search of doomed dinosaurs; flying through an inverted porcelain firmament, caught in the inescapable gravitational tidal pull of a black hole; now disappearing down the rabbit hole — a hole in one! He is sad to see them go. In the days ahead, he will have precious few opportunities to chase little birdies around the greens again.
His fearless roar is silenced by the kidney operations and he refuses to discuss their particulars, other than: All the nurses were good-looking…for guys. He does opine, far too fondly, on the post-operation morphine drips: commercial air conditioners set on high, blowing fevers and pain out the top of his head with arctic chilled breezes and powerful porpoise breaths. Puffy dragon clouds of medicinal marijuana smoke inch out of his ears, on tiny caterpillar feet. He grins appropriately Cheshire-like, frolicking in the autumn mist, before sadly slipping back into his chrysalid cave.
The pancreas is problematic.
Fling the cancerous stone enough times and the giant falls. He refuses the required surgery, despite the handsome nurses and new wonder drugs. His body has betrayed him. Once as big as a moose and loose as a goose, he looks confused and shrunken, as if he’s drunk…straight from a poisoned bottle — which in fact, on doctor’s orders, he has — or swallowed whole one of Alice’s reducing elixirs.
With needles embedded vein deep and protruding from an anemic forearm, he pretends all is well and sleeps away the bustling hospital’s eighteen hour day, like immortal heroin addicts nodding off in a small corner of the park, vainly searching the compass for anything other than the needle tracked arms of Morpheus to hold their abridged attention spans, while examining empty time cards on a rainy Sunday afternoon.
Sweat soaked palms and swarthy terrors saturate his night. In raven black wingtip brogues, the mailman’s gloom delivers inclement dreams and stormy nightmares, resurrecting his waking anxiety. The Sandman is most unkind and in the Land of Nod he finds no weary respite from sleep gasping apnea, or the monsters under his bed. The tell-tale ribcage rapping of his heart wakes him, pounding wildly as if he’s just lost a death match foot race to a Nike shod, Frankenstein’s closet monster; but, in due course, he makes his peace with the gamboling ghosts upon the floor, by watching the lambent shadows of Late Show reruns and infomercials. So little time
left; so much television left to view…nevermore!
Still, cancer’s boogeymen seek out and devour him from within, like alien predators, or porcine parasites — wallowing in his sweetness. Sugar running low, he only just manages to wake from something less than a coma, but more than a brief winter’s hibernation; he shuffles, zombie-bear-like, outside to the lanai and into the vampire’s night lit by a lupine moon, in hopes of a quick, sanitary demise, resulting in minimal bedroom feculence.
He calls often; I rarely answer: ring, ring, ring — it's chiming signifies nothing, I am an idiot. Time zone differences…broken phone…classes…homework, the long distance connection goes straight to Purgatory’s voice-mail limbo. He doesn’t complain. He is the broken one, but not the only one in pain who needs saving. For me it is too much. For my younger sister — who loves him unconditionally and with every other sentence literally tells him exactly that — there is no doubt that she has honorably and deservedly earned his ashes and our inheritance’s remains, unaware the entirety of it has already been spent on my Kenyon College tuition!
He loves my mother and my mother loves Him, believing through Jesus’ stripes that he will be healed. Perhaps, maybe…or, maybe not — he’s an Agnostic; a Doubting Thomas; and a little Dutch Boy interceding always on my behalf by poking a finger into weeping, leaking holes, attempting to stem the flow of violence; electing to stand between mom and me; resignedly welcoming the frequent whippings, where he is wounded for my transgressions and bruised for my iniquities. She was often (Nag not a tongaN) justifiably angry in my youth and rarely spared the rod; but, spoiled as I was back then, I did so revel in poking the she-bear. Once I told him: If only he had let her beat me, it may have turned out for the best. By his stripes I was saved!
The poet Kahlil Gibran asks: For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun? Winds kindly cool and harshly buffet; the sun gently warms and unmercifully blinds; but, Death is more the poet’s muse and survivor’s province than the dead man’s affair. As tearful mourners puddle and pond graveside, stoically discussing tomorrow’s weather forecast, the grateful, constant dead remain forever immune to the changing seasons and other meteorological concerns.
I stand steadfast, rock solid, feet securely and (at least one) firmly planted in hard gravediggers’ scrabble. My soul is buried alive as my OCD hoards and clings to the leftover flotsam and jetsam of his sinking life’s vessel: surplus odds and ends, remnant scraps, and trash debris piled suffocatingly high — a veritable post-Thanksgiving cornucopia of gravy lumps, turkey skin, and splintered wishbones. Surfing the swells and breakers of my unsettled, frothy brainwave backwash, he’s the big kahuna precariously hanging ten much too soon after eating a meal, of sickening sea rations. The ponderous, dead as a door-nail anchoring weight of an under-cooked great goose, floating like a cemented, soggy shoed mob hit, or the chain ladened ghost of Jacob Marley, moaning miserably in the pit of my stomach on a molten pond of greasy gravy, mustard blots, potato slivers, and cheesy crumbs — a Dickensian scourge; but, try as I might to navigate around the frozen tears of my mind’s titanically obsessed cogitations, the throttle is fixed on full ahead, at wipe-out ramming speed.
Pull…Tug…Snap! Broken, clavicle stretched heart strings pulse, and tuning forked breast bones accordion. I close my eyes and hold my nose as the ship’s Captain and I go down together for the last time to the orchestra’s discordant, jangling tune. Ring…ring…ring…Aloha! Is anyone there? Aloha? The long distance connection is forever lost to the ocean’s deep, with the static silence of a dead line; but, to my great surprise, I am more than ever, still very much my father’s daughter.