By Garret Miller
Years ago, I occupied a warehouse for most hours of light. Me and a gaggle of burnouts huddled in the hulls of trailers, dolleying off packaged furniture for assembly and distribution— and I’m unsure that I’ve worked an honest day since the summer eve I marked my last. I moved on from the warehouse, taut and frayed, and dressed deer until I couldn’t stand the smell any longer. It took one day. Then it was maintenance work in a nursing home, and on the easiest days, I’d change a lightbulb. The old blinked between life and death. I thought I may as well have been butchering.
Yes, the scent of processed deer, like stale blood, is intolerable. Worse perhaps, but human and essential and thus endurable, are the wings of a nursing home wherein lie the dying. Many times I’ve walked the halls, heard each knell that marked life, the wet coughs and vague moans, and found in their lapsed silence the simple truth that is suffering. I’ve a good friend who tells me that truth is an illusion—and perhaps it is, but at least this is honest.
I teach now, but I do not work… still I grow tired of the speechmaking, the prescriptive, the arrogant hopefulness and laze of it all. On the topic of THE WRITER’S JOURNEY, here goes: there is never much worth saying. There’s even less to write down. The world has sent me where it pleased, pocked me as it has you, and surely, this will never change. There are some fragments of experience that affect me in profound ways, as there are for you, and in the selfish pursuit that is writing, we dwell. This is fine. The sooner you come to terms with feeling the better. I’ve learned that poetry is prayer… only it still works when faith runs dry. Futile, perhaps, but we all must pass the time somehow. Enough speechmaking. Thoreau loved walks, “journeys”, and his mother loved doing his laundry. That’s a truth that is also an illusion. One resident I was passingly fond of, Ernest, loved Thoreau (false, but he may as well have) and never believed I could fix his sink. He shared a room alongside his wife in Payne, Ohio. You have to be able to rely on yourself, he told me, self-reliance. And I nodded. The leak was as simple as a loose pipe nut. He died a few weeks after his wife.