Standpipe

By late January 2014 the city of Flint, Michigan, an hour’s drive north of my home, was in the news, another financially strapped municipality under emergency state control.  I sat stranded, recovering from surgery to repair chronic Achilles tendonitis, a condition inherited from my father.  By late February, foot immobilized in a boot, I traveled with my brother to our mother’s Tennessee hometown, the place she had chosen to live after our father’s death seventeen years earlier.  She was content living in her small condo across the river from the old county court house, happy, it seemed to me, as she had ever been, perhaps even happier.  Mother had fallen several times in the past two months, every tumble requiring EMS rescue.  None fortunately, resulting in serious injury.  She had grown frail overnight or so it seemed, helpless to care for herself, no longer able to drive.  She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis and a dog’s breakfast of lesser ailments.  A friend had been staying with her off and on.  The woman hinted she could provide around the clock care in her own home several miles away.  It was time for a short, impromptu trip south.  Time to assess mother’s condition, persuade her to leave her condominium, negotiate financial details, make all the necessary arrangements.  Two days.  Time enough to sort things out, tidy up, then return home to our respective lives.  I was eager to play the role of the dutiful son, but something else roiled unseen just below the surface.  Looking back, my obliviousness stark in hindsight, I had another reason for being there.  I yearned to bear witness to the tragic opening scene of my mother’s slow decline and eventual death.  Everything else was busy work.  Jokes buoyed us through Ohio; glib self-deprecation, cynical takes on world events.  Kentucky granted us license to crack wise about family, irreverent and profane.  Crossing the state line triggered a bout of sober pragmatism, rehearsing euphemisms for loss that would roll off our tongues with greater ease the more we said them.  Dusk blanketed the Appalachian foothills.  We exited the freeway, drew closer whistling past the graveyard of the inevitable.  Our mother, all her possessions, a condominium and its contents, a car that embodied the revered essence of her late husband, our father, awaited our arrival, poised for final disposition over the coming months.  

Standpipe

February 26, 2016.  First day ride-along but I’m driving, behind the wheel of a Penske box truck.  The woman training me, this is her seventy-second consecutive day of Red Cross disaster deployment in Flint.  Winter long and cold, she tells of slippery stairs, sopping feet, ice covered sidewalks.  It’s snowing now, spring still weeks away.  In back, three layers of bottled water ride upended like old seabed thrust up by plate tectonics, cases heaped atop the wheel well.  I dumped the pallet on the first turn leaving the warehouse.  Look at that place I say, nodding toward a ramshackle mobile home park.  A shifting landscape of colorless trailers hunkered among black skeletal trees, branches utterly convincing as the dead fingers of a lost race of giants.  The woman doesn’t suffer fools.  Says her aunt used to live there.  Not a bad park compared to some.  Hours later, water gone, list checked off, we’re heading back to the warehouse.  It’s snowing big wet flakes, sunset bullied into submission by shouldering clouds.  Now, this park is really bad, the woman says, looking out her window.  A low place, scrub woods, dark forms dissolving into twilight.  The trailers nearest the road look like gaping skulls, black rectangles once fitted with windows and doors.  Aluminum long since stripped, insulation exposed, they appear in twilight as box car size bales of filthy cotton.  No lights are visible.  Oncoming darkness, damp, encroaching woods have rubbed away what’s left of this place, left holes in the newsprint, obliterating what amounts to the drawing of an amoral two year old.  The woman says there are squatters.  I peer into the gloom for cooking fires.  Oncoming headlights on the road ahead, torches of the Kings men bearing news of plague, braving a shortcut, black woods closing in from all sides.  My collar is soaked, shoes turned to sponges, shuddering from the cold, the cold and nothing more I tell myself.    

Standpipe

June 8, 2016.  No doubt about it, this is the real thing.   A place where things do not necessarily go better with a sugary soft drink.  A neighborhood hostile to even the most sincere effort to teach it to sing in perfect harmony.  All morning long we weave a haphazard web in this forgotten corner of the city.  Check house numbers, veer to curbs, jump from the cab.  This is not a block that invites the soul to linger.  This house, though consumptive in appearance like its neighbors, is distinguished by neat red and white trim.  Coke signs hang in the window, a Coke plaque on the door next to a handwritten note, Please Go To Back Door.  I walk around back, my sight line to the ERV blocked.  No sign of a dog, but another Coke sign in a back window.  Knock repeatedly, no answer.  Satisfied no one is home, I beat back to the truck.  Coming even with the corner of the house, a late modal sedan sweeps into view, wheels into the driveway.  The windows are tinted opaque, bass thumps from inside, reverberates in my chest.  Suddenly, my reflective Red Cross Disaster Relief vest feels gossamer thin like a last minute Halloween costume, one of the lessor super heroes.   Three young men exit the vehicle.  Red Cross, water, I say, consider saying again like a protective mantra.  One of them enters the house through the front, steps back out.  His mother, she’s not home.  Eight cases of water and Britta replacement cartridges.  Inside its dim, curtains drawn, the air still and close, silence a disinterested third party.   Coca-Cola memorabilia hangs everywhere.  Walls painted red and white.  There’s a big illuminated Coke clock on the wall in the tiny kitchen.  Classic Coke rug.  When I ask, the young man grins and shakes his head.  His mother is crazy for the stuff.  Grew up in Atlanta, worked at corporate H.Q.  I don’t ask in what capacity.  We stand together for a moment longer taking it all in, me for the first time, her son, perhaps, nursing a familiar ambivalence.  How to appease a conflicted southern heritage, an old woman’s pride, deep abiding love.