First Day of Spring

Today marks the first day of spring.  Last year, on the first day of spring, I stood beside my wife as she lay in a hospital bed.  She had been having great difficulty walking.  In fact, she was no longer able to lift her feet to climb a single step.

Two solid days of blood tests, x-rays, MRI images, and prodding delivered us to this point—me, Uyen, and a diminutive woman doctor whose given name was then, and is yet, unknown to me.

“You have cancer,” the doctor told Uyen.  “The cancer is terminal.  There is nothing we can do for you.”

“But nobody in my family has ever had cancer,” Uyen said plainly, gazing up at the doctor.  Soon, she turned to look at me.  My eyes failed to register properly.  Tears had already streaked down my cheeks and dropped away to the floor and bedding.

Welcome, the first day of spring.

My wife did not cry then and she did not cry in my presence at any time after that.  I was always the weaker of us.  Was me who scuttled off to unlit rooms and sobbed into my hands.  Was me who pulled off to the side of the road and rested my head against the steering wheel.  Was me swimming in uncertainty.

This morning, here on this first day of spring, I see me holding Uyen’s hand again…holding my wife’s hand in mine as she slowly dwindles away and becomes part of the sunlight and part of the night.

--Mitchell Hegman

Wicked

The wicked make leisure of all things.

--Mitchell Hegman

Shoplifting

My friend X engaged in shoplifting only once.  He did this at the age of twelve.  His venture into this unscrupulous practice did not turn out particularly well. 

A few of our mutual friends, including two black-haired brothers (I shall call them “the two black-haired brothers” for the purpose of relating this story), were accomplished shoplifters.  If “accomplished” strikes you as too positive a word, I assure you that I do not intend this as a complement.  To make all of us feel better about this, I will add that the two black-haired brothers eventually stopped shoplifting and became fine adult citizens.  They voted on occasion and one of them even went so far as to sacrifice his own life to save the life of a third, younger brother, on a sinking ship in the Bering Sea.

You cannot become more upstanding than that.   

These mutual friends, the two black-haired brothers, took up smoking cigarettes at the age of about ten and eleven, respectively.  They were crass, loud, and could spit better than anybody we knew.  They practiced spitting constantly.  “Watch this,” one or the other of them would say, and then they would…

Okay, no need for lurid details.

For a while, the brothers supported their smoking habit by snitching an occasional cigarette from open packs left lying around by their parents or any other smoker within their territory.  As their smoking habit gradually took root and the number of cigarettes required to sate them grew to a sizable figure, the black-haired brothers came to realize that a new system for procuring smokes might be required.  They struck upon the idea of a newspaper route as a way to finance their smoking habit as well as pinball games and candy.   

Two things dawned on the black-haired brothers as they started into their paper-carrier occupation.  First, delivering papers seemed curiously like work.  Secondly, spending money on cigarettes when they could now buy candy or fishing gear seemed, well, goofy.

Out of these distressing elements arose what might be described as a shoplifting spree.  Using their paper route and paper bags as cover, they would drop into one of the local stores and give the owner a “free” newspaper.  While one brother engaged the owner in pleasantry and presented the paper, the other got busy raking goodies into his paper bag: cigarettes, candy, that kind of thing.

This probably went on for far longer than is should have.

One day, the black-haired brothers decided to have X help them pilfer goods in the grocery.  They outfitted my friend X with a paper bag and took him into the store.  X had never stolen anything in his life.  Naturally, he quaked and shivered from fear the whole time he wandered around the store.  He felt certain somebody was watching from just beyond the displays of bread and canned goods.  He kept slipping back and forth between groceries and hardware.  While the younger of the two black-haired brothers distracted the store owner, the older brother carefully raked items into his paper bag.

X watched.

Finally, shaking horribly, X swept something into his bag.  He quickly whisked down the aisles, and then burst out the door onto the sidewalk and into the glare of full sunlight.

All three boys soon gathered again in an alley a block away.

“I got some good stuff!” enthused the older of the black-haired brothers.  He quickly brought forth packs of cigarettes and a few candy bars from his bag.  They all touched the booty.

Satisfied with that, the two brothers started poking at the newspaper bag hanging from X’s shoulder.  “What about you, mother-humper?” asked the little black-haired brother.  “Show us what you, grabbed.”

X slowly opened his bag and lifted the items he had brushed into his bag.

The black-haired brothers stared in disbelief.

“Light bulbs!” screeched the older brother.  “You took light bulbs?  Why did you take those?  What are we going to do with light bulbs?”

A shoulder-punching and spitting frenzy quickly developed in the alley.

So began and so ended one life of crime.

--Mitchell Hegman 

Memorial

Friends, family, six bikers in black leather, seventeen cowboys, old men, old women in perfumed mist, and one crying baby, we gather today to sit in a forced silence that feels like sacks of wheat flour stacked on our chest.  We gather to remember how to forget.

Please be silent, except the baby gasping between siren calls.

Now let is bow our heads and pray:

Artificial light.  American flag.  Antique trike.

Give us a stained-glass lamb in oaken relief.

Give us a long green valley from which we never return.

Ink drawing.  Old hat.  Eagle feather.

Give us a dove frozen in crooked flight.

Give us a man in flowing white robes strolling low hills.

A life.   A loss.  All locked.

The end.

--Mitchell Hegman

First Bluebird

3-16-2012

I saw my first bluebird of the year, returned from the south and electric blue.  I wanted to steal a bluebird photo from someplace and post it, but I could not find anything quite as blue.

--Mitchell Hegman

Ghost Town

This is a photograph I snapped with my cheapo pocket camera after a day of skiing at the Great Divide.  The picture was taken near Marysville, Montana.  My ancestors, when they first settled in Montana during the gold rush of the 1860’s, settled in this very mountain valley.

--Mitchell Hegman

Stars Drink Gravity and Wobble Around

If a given star has a planet orbiting around it, the star will wobble due to the gravitational forces of the planet pulling on the star.  Having discovered this, astronomers now seek out the stars wobbling amid the firmament in their quest to locate distant planets.  Once they locate a star swaying about, astronomers look in the space surrounding to locate the planet promoting this motion.

A question.

What might we seek to find near a man wobbling similarly through our night?

--Mitchell Hegman