CLOUD DRIVE: H_MOSS>NEIGHBOR_FILES
JANUARY 11, 2090
Disappointment is everywhere, but you can’t build a life on it. Disappointment is a collapsing soufflé: tight and dense where it should be light and airy.
The ingredients are all there, you’ve followed the recipe, and yet here you are, at the mercy of mysterious deflating forces. I’ve never once made a soufflé, in case that wasn’t obvious.
Yearning, on the other hand, that you can build a life on. It’s disappointment with a twist! It’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa, unable to do the one thing buildings are supposed to do: stand up straight. And yet the tower is nearly a thousand years old. The same soil that made it lean has protected it from the earthquakes that have toppled much sturdier buildings.
Did Galileo drop balls off the Sistine Chapel? No, he did not. At least, I don’t think so. I guess I never thought to look it up. The point is, he did drop balls off the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Just to show that gravity doesn’t care how big or small you are; it’ll send you hurtling to earth at the same speed every time.
No one will ever be able to describe the experience of death. This is disappointing. This feels like it could be something of real value to humanity. But by the time I experience it, I will be unable to talk about it. A real missed opportunity.
I guess I should talk about my background? Like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, I grew up crooked in soft soil. My mother never hid the fact that I wasn’t supposed to exist, I think because she was ashamed and disappointed in herself, but obviously made me feel about two inches tall. She was very young, and even in those days, in her family, you either dragged a husband into the mess with you or you were in real deep shit. Can I say shit in an obituary? Probably cocky of me to expect this to be published in Voices of the 21st Century, so I’ll just go ahead and say shit and leave it to the living to decide what to do with it.
My mother, before the mistake of me, had big plans. Easier to consider them thwarted in an instant than watch them unravel in slow motion over the course of a whole life. As for me, I thought my accidental existence was a miracle. I was not supposed to be here, but here I was.
I have always loved baseball. I spent every summer afternoon I possibly could at the park playing ball. One summer my mother sent me to wilderness camp and I’m still devastated about it, not because we were cooped up inside the whole time, wearing wet masks and hiding from wildfires, but because it was a summer of no baseball.
The neighborhood boys, a handful of Italian climate refugees, called me Miracolo, short for “Mani Miracolose”—miracle hands—because I could catch anything, hit anything, and when I threw the ball, it always did exactly what I wanted. They started me in right field, to prove myself, but I ended up pitching. (Funny, isn’t it, how that famous sculpture is called Miracolo? What are the odds? Probably high odds, probably only strange to me and very normal to Italians, for example.)
I was lucky to have a love like baseball. A love I could play or coach or watch and still be a part of, no matter what direction my life took.
Well, if I had become a famous ballplayer, I wouldn’t be alone in a one-bedroom apartment in Albany writing my own obituary, would I?
There are so many of us out here almost making it, almost remembered, feeling the sweet breath of success on our cheeks and then slipping, stumbling, getting lost, or just plain losing the scent for no discernible reason. I’m proud of my almost. Almosts have kept me alive, and I don’t mean just breathing. They may have kept me from being remembered, but it’s this life that matters, not whatever is in the next.
Getting what you want is very overrated; there’s another bit of advice for the kids.
I was not so lucky in human love. I have no children, but that’s all right. My wives are all ex—they live somewhere and would prefer I not name them. I did have an uncle I absolutely adored. His name was Sam, what a character. Cigar-smoking jokester who sat me on his knee while he and my dad shot the shit (there I go again) on the porch. He had quite the collection of sweaters, and they all smelled like whiskey and lipstick and smoke. I’m not “survived by” him, as the obits say; I just like remembering him.
My one survivor is hard to talk about without getting choked up. Poppy, just the sweetest mutt you ever saw. Skinny legs too long, scared of her own tail, little white mustache and goatee like Sigmund Freud. Even now she’s got her muzzle on my belly and just heaved one of those heavy dog sighs, watching me from under her fuzzed eyebrows. She’s barely older than a puppy, but she’s lethargic, just like her old man.
I remember the day I got her, the little neighbor girl toddled over here like she always did. She was so tiny I don’t know how she even reached my doorknob. Kid had just started to talk. So when she patted my dog and kept saying, “Poppy! Poppy!” over and over again, that’s what I named the dog. Didn’t find out till later that she was just saying her own name.
I miss that kid, despite everything. Always assumed she was my neighbor Hester’s daughter, but now I know better. Too little too late, as they say, but I tried to make it right, I really did. Who knew an old man’s photo could make such a splash. But you can’t make this world right, not anymore.
Hester and her roommate were otherwise good neighbors, very quiet. Hester’s got this one cloudy eye with a reddish pupil that sort of looks like Jupiter. I do my best not to stare, seems rude, though how do you not stare at someone’s face when you’re looking at them?
What a mind-bending activity, lying on your deathbed which just last week was a regular bed. Trying to sum up your entire life without it sounding like you want to end it. I always thought death would come for me slow, not like a line drive to the skull, but then it’s been a strange year for all of us. The latest in a long string of strange years. Can you keep calling each year strange if they’re all strange?
One last story: A scout for the Yankees came to one of my high school games, and I knew he was there, and all the other guys were shitting their pants (apologies, again), but somehow, I managed to throw a perfect game. Helped that the other team was terrible. Scout walked toward me, and it felt completely normal and right, like destiny itself. He congratulated me on my game and gave me his card, invited me to spring training. But I was only sixteen, and my dad said no. His dad was an immigrant, and the family didn’t come here so that his only son would grow up to play games like a child.
I thought my life was over. I thought I had found my chance and lost it, and this was the peak, the rest was downhill until death. Well, this is the philosophy of a young man who doesn’t think much of old age even on a good day. The truth was, I would have many chances of all different kinds. Life is full of chances, most of which you won’t even notice until much later, if ever. But life also had a way of intervening and interrupting my chances: a pregnant wife, a stillborn child, an old injury reinjured, wrong place, wrong time, wrong guy. From a certain angle, you could see the tragedy of it. But I’ve always known life to arrive tilted and stay that way. This has its own advantages, maybe not the obvious ones.
Now I’ve gone and done it, I’ve mentioned dinner and Poppy is suddenly full of energy, whining and slobbering all over my keyboard. The promise of a tasty treat will do that to any of us. Most of all, I think, I will miss life’s demands.