LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

The writer spent two hours sorting out materials he had stashed in boxes. First, he sent poems off to a Quarterly that proposed new ideas and was written with a combination of hope and cynicism. As he slipped his poems into the manila folder he thought to himself, 'An American must live as though he is ten years younger than he really is.' He found it odd that at his current age of 33 he felt younger than when he felt at 23.

It is an odd place that denies intellect and imagination but justifies everything through experience. Think of two men. One of them writes the greatest story in the history of the world and the other is able to pedal his bicycle backward down the street. The latter man will win all the rewards. He will reach a vast audience. He will be viewed as real by his fellows while the novelist is hardly recognized at achieving anything. He looked over the boxes of material. He thought to himself, 'I understand why Poe adhered so fastidiously to his aristocratic sensibility and why Whitman didn't develop his democratic consciousness until he was in his early 30's. Ah, America is not Europe.'

The question that began to present him was, 'what exists between 23 and 33? He understood it as a fine, exciting question. Perhaps it was the values he had to respect by rubbing up against something obdurate and awful in the environment.

Later he went to wait for the bus to take him to the train. He stood there for a few minutes when a huge, classic car came next to the curb. An elderly man in his mid-60's rolled the window down. "Can I give you a lift?" He got into the car. "I don't trust the bus system," the old man said. He had a poodle in his lap that he kept stroking with one hand as he kept the other on the wheel. He commented on the weather. It was a beautiful, balmy day, not a cloud. The car approached the town. The man said, "what do you think about our San Quentin half-way house?" The writer was startled a moment and then realized the man was passing judgement on a bank under construction. It was brick and mausoleum. He laughed. "Yes, I see what you mean." The old man started telling the writer that on days such as this he would rather be out on the Bay. "Did you own a boat?" "I had a cabin cruiser that I sold," he replied. "I couldn't use it."

Later, on the train, the writer thought about the elderly man. He comes from old money, he thought. He reminded the writer of a roommate he had in college, Hosking. He was not rich but was going to inherit a vast fortune when his mother died. His mother use to come up and visit him in college and Hosking couldn't stand it. He never said anything but would cuss her out when she left. He could be very generous and nice but was a petty thief in ways that startled the writer. Toward the end of their association the roommate was committing felonious fraud and the writer never kept ties with him.

Frankly, the wealthy had been around him like ghosts. They were always there but would vanish for long stretches of time. It wasn't as though they were pulling the strings but that they knew, even after long intervals, what the writer was up to. His own family were nose-grinders and hadn't emerged on the other side of the middle-class. He admired the nose-grinders but felt he was useless among them.