The Lonesome Death of William McClure

Jul 22, 2022

Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory.

― James Joyce, The Dead

One summer he appeared on the sidewalk, out of some kind of past that refuses me unless I demand it let me in. With force. Or clenching my eyes so tight that time shatters, reality melds with imagination, and I conjure up a history in the old ways. Using connections unproven by science or religion. Like witches do. Or liars. Or writers.

We were hanging the right onto Fayette Street the way we always did. My mom in the driver’s seat of her car, driving us somewhere. Me in the passenger seat, my little brother, Dave, in the back. It was sticky out. August days in the early 1980’s were congealed in the thick emberish-ness of a world I seldom understood. Boredom was miasmic, like some heavy gauze of air that lay over my town, and so the sight of my Uncle Bill on his bicycle was something to behold in the moment that I spotted him.

“There’s Uncle Bill,” I stated flatly, my words floating out into the world of my rolled-down window. Warm stale thick. Dense beautiful soup of my youth. Lost city of paradise as we rolled down the block, slowly, past Tommy Kow’s tap room/ past Bolereo’s Pizza/ past Al’s bar with the solid steel door that shone like chrome/ reflecting the sparks off the bolts the sun heaved directly at it from far off in space/ the dark air-conditioned longness of the room beyond… a place few kids had seen.

But I had.

Many times.

My mom smiled as we rolled past him. He was old then, at least to me. He was my grandfather’s older brother, which alone made him seem impossibly aged. But beyond that, he was mysterious and odd. He was seen by our people, I could tell, as eccentric. Maybe not all there. But why?

I didn’t know. I didn’t ask. He wasn’t a main character in my weird life at that point. We lived with my grandparents, my mom and me and my brother did. And my dad lived around the corner in the house we had once all been together in. But now he was drunk mostly and there was another woman there living with him and he would wave from his pick-up at me out in the street, throwing a baseball up in the air and catching it by myself.

Uncle Bill just appeared one day, sitting on the tattered couch of my Mom-Mom and Pop-Pop’s place, moving his jaws like someone without teeth. Or with fake teeth. Shifting his face around, I remember. Not really smiling or saying much. But not really sad or angry or anything, I guess. He just was. I didn’t know anything else.

In the dappled shadows of the big elms and sycamores on Fayette, I watched him that day. He never saw us. He only watched the path, the sidewalk. He had a small motor on his bike, installed underneath his seat, and I can recall how fascinating it was for me to see a person on an old simple bike never pedal even once.

“He built that motor himself,” someone had told me at some point. My Pop-Pop or my Mom. I don’t know. But the thought occurred to me that afternoon that there was something very unique about this uncle of mine.

As we passed him, I watched his slight frame bouncing time-to-time as the bike popped up over then back down again upon the raised cliffs of the old slabs of cement that had been pushed around by massive roots for so long now. In and out of spackled daylight, I knew so well each and every bump he encountered, for I had ridden them all myself countless times, millions of times, in the summer morning and in the autumn evening and on my birthday and the day they shot Reagan and sent us home from school early and when the Phillies won the pennant and when the 4th of July was just being born, the whole town still quiet, but with a fevered excitement steaming up out of these sidewalk cracks like strong angels pushing up out of Hell.

At the red light down by the 7-11, after we had passed him by and moved down the street, I sensed him coming again. I didn’t need to check the mirror or turn my head back. I just knew in the way that we know certain things before they happen.

And then he was there again.

Swishing by us, across 6th Avenue, heading south. Towards the slow frightening river that reeked of dead suckers. Towards the on ramps to the city, or the on ramps to the unknown west. Jostled by his uneven trail, I remember thinking to myself that I could call his name and that he would surely hear me, but that he would probably not even look.

I don’t know why.

I just knew he wouldn’t.

I just knew that he would have not looked at us at all.

So we passed him again and I watched him in that moment, my young eyes locked onto his vessel. In a fleeting instant, I wondered why.

Why he smelled like loneliness.

Why his old face laying atop his old body ripping down the summer street on his old bike that he never peddled seemed to move from his realm and into mine.

Why he lived in a tent on a hill in West Conshy.

Why anything ended up the way it did.

And why everything seemed so fragile and bound to die.

Then the light went green and my mom eased us forward.

Then we lost him in acceleration, just like we always do.

_____

So much of what makes America America to me is the hard-to-describe dirty cigarette butts and hammered twigs that live in those cracks in the sidewalks of the places with names. I tend, I guess, to wash up on the banks of daydreams and imagination more than most. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. I don’t even think it matters at this point. It is what it is, you know? Part of me surviving this long has been these hand-bent junkyard filters of poetry I started accumulating long ago.

I look at most days through fantasy eyes, as if I’m picking up on things that no one else is picking up on. Truth is, what I’m picking up on is probably not even there at all. I mean, not in the sense that would make it definable to anyone in their so-called right minds. Pragmatic living in the 21st century USA almost forces you off the imagination highway. You want to dream: dream about money. And how to make it. Because otherwise: you are probably fucked, little man. Little lady. Little dumbass hiney-hole.

So it goes. I cash in my Uncle Bill chips at the Substack bank this afternoon. I remember him because I ran into him on Ancestry.com. I remember him strongly then. Vividly, more vividly than I could have ever expected, but in uncertain ways. I have no voice for him. I recall nothing of his timbre or his tones.

His laugh is lost to me, if I ever even knew it once.

I recall his harmonica playing. Sitting there on that blown-out couch, maybe thanking my Pop-Pop for the couple of bucks he’d just given him for food or toilet paper or booze or I don’t know what, he would play the harmonica and it was the first person I had ever seen do that in person.

I remember thinking to myself that he must have fallen off of a train. Some old boxcar passing down by Spring Mills where the Revolution ghosts stared at the road from old graveyards and side creeks with eels and I can feel them still even from far away. His harmonica sounds were overwhelming to me; lonesome and rough and cut from old bones laying the woods; raw meat chiseled from the rocks in the wide crayfish pipes that ran underneath the park; from these dark places where we found ourselves as kids/ hiding from druggies/ throwing fat glass soda bottles just to hear their sharp echoes snap against the corrugated throat of the Earth itself.

The silhouette of someone standing at the far end in the light.

A stranger curious about racket.

A fellow traveler on a ridiculous summer afternoon.

Bob Dylan captured it all better than anyone else, I think. His voice and words have always seemed to me to be something other than what so many have picked up on. No one is wrong, of course. It is all in the ear of the beholder. Yet, to me: Dylan: especially around ‘Time Out of Mind’: he tapped into something no one else has ever been able to do. He gave resonance and shifty tangibility to the American wanderer in a way I never knew possible. And by possible, I mean, I never even knew there was such a thing.

But it seems that there is. And now, all these years later, I can listen to some of his songs and I can move them with my hands as they play, over towards this bucket of digital bone dust I’ve been carrying around lately and when I do, I can look down in at what I have of Uncle Bill and I can recognize his existence with deeper meaning. With soul, maybe. Or with some kind of hardcore imaginary literature raining down on him from the present and finding magic in his unknown past.

Using strange random facts and my memories of him passing in and out of bicycled sun splash, I find myself resurrecting a man lost to time. To oblivion.

Or not.

It seems arrogant of me to think that it’s me.

It’s probably not. It’s probably Dylan. He alone found them out in this American wilderness, these dirty old towns and these creepy woodlots and underneath the overpasses and back in the shadows behind the mini-markets and the strip malls and the tattoo places run by belly-ringed boogeymen on the edge of town.

Cormac McCarthy tried, but I don’t think he got as close as Dylan.

So why I am trying with this dead Uncle of mine? Who even knows what the ever-loving fuck I’m talking about?

I don’t know.

I do, I guess.

I still feel it in my bones, man.

_____

Every day is the same thing out the door
Feel further away then ever before
Some things in life, it gets too late to learn
Well, I'm lost somewhere
I must have made a few bad turns

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of 'em
In a minute, if I could

I'm crossing the street to get away from a mangy dog
Talking to myself in a monologue
I think what I need might be a full length leather coat
Somebody just asked me
If I'm registered to vote

The sun is beginning to shine on me
But it's not like the sun that used to be
The party's over and there's less and less to say
I got new eyes
Everything looks far away.

-Bob Dylan, ‘Highlands’

_____

In this census I just found from 1940 on Ancestry (no paid endorsement/ just sharing my deep fascination with that site with you), William McClure, my Uncle Bill, was 24 years old and renting a room from an older couple. His occupation is listed as “gardener” and according to the data collected he was working 70 hours a week on a private estate. Part of me wonders if he was actually living with the couple he worked for because he is also listed as a “servant”. I think it’s possible. He worked for this older well-to-do couple as a full-time gardener and lived in a room in their house.

I close my eyes and I see it now. The story goes that way and I’m not sure if I don’t want it to even if I can’t prove it one way or another. That is, I suppose, why I can never be a real historian. I want to add my own visions to the mix.

Like Dylan.

He lived on Rose Tree Road in Media in Delaware County, my uncle did. It all checks out because that’s where my grandfather was raised as well, although by 1940 he was about a year from entering World War II as a radarman on a battleship in the Pacific. Uncle Bill never went to the war. I’m not exactly sure why.

But I do know some things.

Next door to the house where he lived, there was a couple of sisters named Elizabeth and Elsie Newcomer. Until this morning, I knew certain things but never that these two lived next door. Because as this story weaves in and out of whatever light I can manage to shine it up with, I also have to warn you that more will meet the eye tomorrow, probably. And then more maybe next week, if I’m lucky. But by then you will have walked away from the man. I will have introduced you to the guy and he will die and there will be a lot of sadness and unanswered questions because I only teased you with the scent of the ghost and never the real thing in your hands, like melted marshmallow or liquid soap.

It must have been here though, somewhere in the fenced-in yards of these Rose Tree Lane houses in prewar America, that William McClure first laid eyes on Elizabeth Newcomer. She was 15 at the time, living with her sister, who was 16, an 81-year-old man named William Quimby, who was their grandfather, and his servant, a 51-yer-old black woman originally from Virginia named Bertha Robinson.

As this novel of life unfolds, I pause. Obviously. I mean, I can’t help it. Who was Ms. Robinson? I wonder about her/ don’t you? If she was 51 in 1940 then that means she was born in the south in 1889. Which means that it is entirely possible that her parents or grandparents had been enslaved, huh?

That distinct possibility means something in a kind of raw, eerie way, too.

Because the moment my Uncle Bill laid eyes on this Elizabeth, this young girl that he would marry before too long, he was also laying eyes on a person born into a family touched by the greater hands of American history. And that is something I wonder about a lot now that I know it.

Was he enchanted by what I’m about to tell you? And also, ahem. Did he fall for a child… a girl of 15? Or did he wait for her to grow older? I can’t tell you. I can’t quite gather it all, plug in every fact I am hungry to plug in. But this much I know.

Elizabeth was the great granddaughter of a man named David Wills. Wills was a prominent attorney in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania when the Civil War brought the country’s raging boil to his home. The battle of Gettysburg in July of 1863 found Wills and his family hiding in his basement as Rebel forces pushed United States soldiers back through the town/ literally running and firing in the streets just outside their home on the town square.

After the armies moved on and the town was left with rampant scenes of death and destruction, David Wills became arguably THE leading force in developing the National Soldier’s Cemetery that exists there today.

And perhaps most notably, it was Wills and his family who, in November of 1863, hosted President Abraham Lincoln overnight in their house. After dinner, Lincoln finished up a speech in a bedroom in the home, a speech he would deliver at the dedication of that same cemetery the next afternoon.

A speech that came to be known as the Gettysburg Address.

Now.

I don’t imagine for even a moment that this young gardener knew any of that when he must have noticed the schoolgirl living with her grandfather in the house next door on some nice day in 1940, or maybe even 1939 or whatever. Unless he had been told such things by the people he lived with, it’s unlikely as hell that he could have known.

But the fact is: Elizabeth Newcomer was the great-granddaughter of this historical Pennsylvanian, this famed character in the Gettysburg Civil War pageant that still moves people to this day. Me included. Here was a strange/ almost direct connection to some kind of American comet. To the battle. To the cemetery. To men and women who were there and made things happen. To Abe fucking Lincoln, man. You know what I’m saying?

I almost passed out when I discovered this last week.

I almost passed out with joy unearthing these moments and realities from the very rivers of my family blood.

But, like so many things in this world, there was more to consider. More to process. And more to stare at, like finding some dead Civil War soldier/ his skull blown wide open/ his blood all over the dog’s feet/ out in the backyard/ tomorrow morning.

What is happening?

Why is this all so surreal?

_____

_____

The past challenges me and makes me want it more when it dares me to find it in the filthy flood sludge left behind by time simply rolling through and then simply rolling out. I want so badly to know everything there is to know about me and about Arle and about who we descend from. What did they do? Did they live interesting lives?

And of course, did they fight in the Civil War?

That one alone has cost me a lot of time. It’s time I won’t ever get back, but I don’t want it back either. I’m drawn by the never-ending possibilities of who I came from. The uglier, the sadder, the more difficult to comprehend or imagine: the more I want in. Not to mourn what amount to unknown strangers in some condescending sympathetic way or whatever. But rather: I need these people. I need them so I can put them on these stages in my head/ write them scenarios to act out upon the very instants of the facts I gather about them. Random droppings that offer almost nothing still give me hope and inspire me to wonder.

Was this person hard to love?

Were they sad all their days?

Did they like walking in the grass? By a river? With a pistol in their pants?

I know I will hardly ever know, but I don’t care. The tree is not enough. The genealogy is only the beginning, you see.

The bonds of certain familial connections are largely irrefutable if you follow them deep enough, but even that level of proof is kind of indifferent to me, I have to admit. The very science of the blood is vital and I know it well enough. But it is just the start.

Because once I know that I am somehow connected… or that YOU are somehow connected… to someone/ almost anyone/ who has died and is gone/ then the game begins. And I want to close my eyes/ armed with basic truths/ so that I can submerge myself in layers of deep imagination where I conjure them back.

Bring them back. To life. In my head. Spitting. Chewing and talking at the same time. Hitting their children. Stealing their neighbor’s apples. Laying on a bench, drunk, angry. Praying for the return of a dead daughter. Praying for the resurrection of a freshly dead infant.

Hunting rabbits in the rain.

Feeling a rush of blood to the head as the hoe falls from your hands and you stare at the girl next door, her hair shooting light into your eyes, and you understand that you are doomed.

You are doomed, gardener boy.

You are bound for living hell.

_____

They married. I think you know. Maybe I told you? I’m too lazy to go back and see. They married and by the mid-1940’s when Elizabeth Wills McClure- as she came to be known- was in her early 20’s, they apparently moved from Rose Tree Road. Together, I suppose.

I don’t know what year they married in. I cannot find the official license or even any sign or mention of it in any newspapers. Which makes me think it wasn’t a big wedding, and that it wasn’t a popular one with the families. Or hers at least. My uncle Bill wasn’t from money. My people have always been poor or just getting by in the blue collar way of it all. Hard working blah, blah, blah. No luck is more like it. Luckless. Not everyone, mind you, but enough.

Still, we carry on. Ride our bikes down the sidewalks and dare the world to kill us.

The young Mrs McClure, on the other hand, may have had some money. I don’t know for certain, but she came from a family that was certainly better off than where my Uncle was coming. So it is entirely plausible- and distinctly possible- that this was a situation in which a younger wealthier woman rebelled against the direst wishes of her family and married a man beneath her station.

A simple gardner. A worker. A laborer. Like me.

However it all played out: I dug in and found out that at some point in the mid to late 1940’s, the McClure’s somehow bought a small 23 acre farm.

In Gettysburg.

The local newspaper, The Gettysburg Sentinel, ran a small top-of-the-front-page article announcing that the great granddaughter of David Wills himself had recently been married and was about to set up a home in the town of her family’s prominence.

Later investigations lead to children.

A daughter, Elizabeth, named after her Mom.

And another daughter, Billie, named for her Dad.

I sit in my car and I stare at the red light down by the Sheetz and I remember Uncle Bill’s aura, the sadness that no one spoke of, his vagabond existence. I remember hearing that people around our town didn’t like him. He was too weird, too alone and aloof. He must have scared them because he was different.

That’s so American.

Every small town needs weirdos that people can hate and blame and frown at in order to feel better about their own sorry selves.

People swore they’d seen my Uncle Bill stealing tomatoes off their vines out in their early morning gardens. Like a hobo or a rabbit or a soldier hungry on the march. Stealing someone else’s fruit in order to curb your real hunger. Hell, what’s more American than that, I ask you?

What’s more American than stealing a tomato when you need one?

Ask Bob Dylan.

I swear to fucking God/ we should ask him.

He probably would have followed my Uncle Bill into the long dark night.

I’m almost sure he would have.

_____

At the red light still.

I toss his whole marriage around in my head, knowing what I know, knowing what is coming.

And I wonder if there were moments when it seemed to each of them, to all of them, that this was everything. The babies out on the summer grass. The sunshine coming down. Up north of the battlefield, the essence of all that history breezing across the pale cheek of the girl who stole his heart. Him sitting there in the evening, drinking a cold can of beer, missed the war, got a farm, holding his crawling little girl in his hands and thinking to himself that all of this is magic.

Magic.

Remembering the nights alone, back on Rose Tree. When he wondered if it was possible.

If it could happen.

Then it did.

_____

Each of us owes those who came before us nothing whatsoever. Platitudes about honoring the dead, whether they died in battle or died of bursting tumors or whatever, they all seem a bit overstretched to me. The dead are exploited by the living for gain and value. Our true feelings about them are all mixed up into nothingness by the fact that our words and actions regarding them are almost always predictable.

We cash them in like poker chips. Little flecks of bone pushed at cashiers, our eyebrows raised just a tiny bit, as if to say:

Is this okay? Is this alright?

I wish to honor the dead.

Again.

Ho-hum.

What on Earth can you give me for them today?

But really, we ought to try and imagine what their breath smelled like.

Whiskey?

Eggs?

Sex in the dark?

Cigarettes?

Blood?

Metal?

Lung disease?

We ought to just be thinking about what their breath smelled like.

Because that’s all that really matters, honestly.

_____

A Gettysburg newspaper I found on Newspaper.com tells a story that had to be the beginning of the end, I figure. There may be more to it. There has to be, really. But this is where I lose so much because newspapers don’t report on the little things. The minutiae of our gloriously mean existences. Our tiniest moments go unreported, and yet they define so much more than maybe all of these bigger stories do.

I can’t say for sure.

Nobody can. Not Bob Dylan, not anyone.

As the wandering soul finds hope and love, we can almost bet that he might find pain on the road soon after. It is the balance of things, it seems. No year shall go unmarred. No man shall reap too much without putting back something he wishes to hold onto. People chase fortunes, but really they are just running- as fast as they can- from death.

The article, from January of 1949, appeared on the front page again. But this time the story was sad, not happy. On the farm there’d been a fire. One afternoon as my Uncle Bill was at work in a furniture shop somewhere around Gettysburg, the heating stove caught fire. The little girls, Billie and Elizabeth, were about 2 and 4 at the time, and they were upstairs in bed because, according to the report, they’d both had colds and so their Mom, Elizabeth, had them stay in bed all day.

Luckily, their lives were spared. With wild flames climbing the walls and smoke filling the house rapidly, their mom got them out of the house and onto the lawn. Then the firetrucks arrived and they all watched as the roof collapsed onto the house and the house collapsed into the basement.

The whole thing disappeared in a furious blaze of swift unforgiving pain. By the time word had reached my uncle and he rushed to the scene, it was done. All was lost, the article said. Only a few clothing items had been saved by the woman of the house. And it was to her family’s home back in Media that these people were going, the article stated.

To pick up the pieces, I would think.

To reconcile with the heat-melted image of a banged-up dream.

____

There is a notice, a few years later, of the plan to auction off the property. It’s around 1953, I think. A few years after the fire. It seems like they’d rebuilt, put a little cinder block house where the old farm house had been, but it never took somehow. Their return to the farm, this attempt- or so it seems- at carrying on together, it must have fallen apart after not so long.

Each of their names, William McClure and Elizabeth Wills McClure, appears separately in the notice, each with a different lawyer listed as representation. By then, it was over. A divorce, I’m guessing, had been introduced by someone. I don’t know who. I guessed it was her, but I have no idea why. Maybe that’s my bias. Maybe I just insist on creating blistering raw history where there is none to officially declare.

I don’t care.

I do what I want.

From family tales, I gather that my Uncle Bill was never the same after this. They say he lost his mind. Or that he walked away from the person he was and was never the same again. I don’t think that’s provable in any historic sense of the researched word, but still. It isn’t hard to buy, is it?

He lost his little girls. He lost his wife. He lost his farm and he lost his belongings and he lost the feeling he had probably had that it might all be okay. That it might all be okay in the end. Which is the only thing that keeps any of us going when you break it all down.

Hell, he even lost Abraham Lincoln in that fire if you think about it.

No wonder he ended up like he did.

_____

I’ll let you go. I’ll hit you with a few more things and then I’ll cut you loose, but I hope you walk away thinking about stuff. About life and the past and where we come from and the trillions of intricate unsung songs of cigarette and scallion breath that are available to you if you want it.

Our past is liquid. It’s shapeshifting despite the rigor confines of the very names that define it. Each person lived and died, true. But each of them remains to be discovered, if only in your wild sweet head, for an hour or a day or forever maybe too. Touching the past doesn’t have to be pedantic and factual. You can start with simple apparent truths, trust me. But from there you can imagine so much more than you can imagine if you trust in what I’m saying.

Ha. I’m not trying to tell to take magic mushrooms and go on Ancestry or anything. I’m just trying to inspire you to wonder about who your ancestors really were. It’s okay to imagine things about them. It’s okay to play scenes out from their lives in your head the way you want. Even if it’s all lies, they might teach you something. Or guide you forward. Or scare your ass away from some hot coals lying directly in your road.

As for my Uncle Bill, he barely saw his daughters again. My mom tells me that at one point when they were older teenagers and my mom was in 9th grade, Billie and Elizabeth contacted their dad. They wanted to know if they could come live with him.

He was overjoyed, of course.

My mom recalls the family’s excitement, how they went furniture shopping to fill up the new apartment he rented for them to live in on west 5th Avenue in my hometown of Conshohocken. But when they came, they didn’t stay for long. Again, the answers why are not so readily available. My mom was young. She only remembers the aftermath/ how Uncle Bill fell deeper into blues after they went away a second time.

But what reality was all of that based in? I mean, he had had no experience whatsoever being their dad in a long long time. It was a long shot to start with and it was probably a shit show in the end. Teenage girls and a possibly traumatized man. I don’t know. Not good odds.

After that, I don’t think he ever saw them much again. Maybe he did. There are no articles in the paper about it though. There never is for stuff like that. So I resort to imagining. I take massive gaps in the timeline and I roll them around in my hands like clay. Like pizza dough or something.

He never married again, but his ex Elizabeth did. I believe she had a good life, from what I can gather, as did their daughters, but what do I know? I read what I find and then I daydream the rest. They are all gone now.

My Uncle Bill died in the winter of 1986 in a small cheap tent that he lived in. He froze to death, the cops said. The tent had been pitched on a hill in a lady’s yard overlooking the Schuykill Expressway in West Conshohocken for years by that point.

The woman would offer him shelter in her home, she said.

But he always refused, she said.

He just wouldn’t come in.

I was 15 years old at the time. I was in high school and into rock-n-roll and bass fishing and baseball. Girls ignored me. I was chunky and tender and probably kind of an asshole because I had no father figure and I think I was sad about that but had no idea. My Pop-Pop loved me a lot. He was a hard drinker and a tricky man in a lot of ways, but he loved me and I know that. He loved his brother, Bill, too. I remember him crying snotty tears in his recliner across the days after he died.

I don’t know why, but I return again and again to Uncle Bill’s last day, his last night. I try to imagine things. How his fingers felt. What he smelled. If he wondered in his deep cold sleep why the warmth in his blood was growing. I wonder about if he heard their voices in the midnight closeness of his humble joint. The daughters, their light young laughter frozen in time, like morning stars shooting out over the astral-ness of his wandering mind. The woman, gone so long now, the one he had met as a girl: a last bolting dash of laughter moving out of her and into him from across the miles and across the years.

There were newspapers hung up on the walls of the tent for warmth, my mom says. She had seen it all with my Mom-Mom when they visited it the day after he passed. She tells me how it was done up so fine, his poor man’s insulation job. How it was hanging from those temporary walls so tight and true: like real insulation in a real home.

The bike with the motor was on the kickstand just outside.

I barely knew the guy, but I knew him. He saw me. I watched him. We were alive together once upon a time, whatever that may mean. And I remember my mom’s big car speeding up down Fayette Street, us losing him to the lazy day we left behind us. The lean old man disappearing in our exhaust, in the shadows of the high tree branches dancing with the summer sun splashed on the ground.

Bouncing down the sidewalk/ teetering/ balanced/ maybe a bruised tomato in his pocket/ he never knew that we were there, that I had watched him. Now he is mostly forgotten in this world.

But not entirely.

Not just yet.

Not for today, or what’s left of it, at least.

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He longed to be master of her strange mood. - James Joyce, The Dead

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