El piso bajo*

When I was a young teenager, before my first real job, I was a paperboy. I rode my bike around our neighborhood, enduring the hazards of vicious dogs (one bit me in the butt), workers driving their pickups home drunk a couple hours after the afternoon shift ended (one ended up in the ditch), not to mention the much more relevant distractions of any cute girl walking by in shorts, lonely housewives who wanted to talk, or my main obsession -- getting back out to the massive corn field behind our subdivision.

After all, I had an entire world in formation out there, with the documentation to prove it. It was a world based on running. After I had smashed down a narrow swath of corn stalks for 50 yards or so, I would intersect with other paths I had created. At each of these intersections, I added a circle, much like those that confound visitors to Washington, D.C., or Paris.

This was my private world, and only I knew what transpired there. I can only guess what the poor farmer who discovered this maze thought when he directed his harvester through my world, but being as I was young and irresponsible at the time, I didn't really care. I ran through my world, rebuilding a skinny young body from the ravages of rheumatic fever. I pushed myself relentlessly, as I raced around this cornfield, repeating my mantra, "I am not lazy, I am not lazy, I am not lazy."

Unfortunately my various maps and stories about that era are lost due to my decision a few years later to vaporize any evidence I had ever been so immature to do this in the first place. Tonight is the first time I've ever written about this.

I suppose that farmer is long since dead, and if any crimes were inadvertently committed by ruining a small portion of his crop, certainly the statute of limitations has expired by now...

***

One day, when collecting payments from my customers of the Bay City Times, one elderly (to me) lady asked me to come inside. Reluctantly, I did. She offered me tea and started talking about how she had recently lost her mother. This horrified me, especially when she started crying. "I'm so lonely!"

At this point, I knew I had to go. I climbed back on my bicycle and rode away from there, and tried my best to never talk to her again. I found it appalling that a woman of her age was so lonely for her dead mother; it was not like she was a child like me.

Why would an old woman ever act so forlorn?

***

If you have not guessed this, tonight's post is an ode to a special friend, though not the one I usually mention. This is someone different, the one who took the time to teach me basic html, and not to condescend to me in the process. Luckily, I took a digital photo of this lesson, so I have preserved it for a future that we will no longer be able to have together.

There is another reason I am loyal to this friend. At the depths of my loneliness last winter, when my dearest J was away, the weather was cruel, and I did not have any desire to reach out to other potential female companions, this person sensed my pain, and invited me to a very nice, home-cooked dinner. The warmth of their home, plus the sight of a couple very much in love, helped sustain me through that period.

***

For all of my posts, there is an optimal soundtrack. Tonight's would be "Thank you, Jack White." The CD is Flight Test, the artists Flaming Lips.

Virtually everything I write about here concerns a sense of loss. Yet, I hope it is clear I am not mournful. Each loss we suffer creates a new opportunity in this life. No matter how painful, or how shockingly we experience it, a new feeling will arise to address our pain. Sometimes, that is a sense of relief -- that a source of great consternation, ambivalence, or guilt (to cite a fraction of the spectrum of emotions actually involved) now has decisively been removed from our daily reality. In the wake of this removal, we may be free to seek a truer future for ourselves, i.e., a partner more ready to traverse life's challenges with us, an employer more appreciative of our vision, a community that sustains, rather than depletes us.

As the title of this post suggests, (*)the ground floor is a place I am familiar with, as I've often retreated there when life's shocks have brought me more than I (temporarily) thought I could bear. But, as I've mentioned before, it's not how you fall but how you bounce.

I'm confident my friend will bounce just fine, and I look forward to meeting again, once we are both on the upper floors of life.



Caption: Just another lovely photo of a whiteboard somewhere in Silicon Valley. (Author unknown).