Every month a question will be posed that may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. Remember, the question is optional. You can write about anything that relates to your writing journey.
Let's give a warm welcome to our co-hosts: Rebecca Douglass, Beth Camp, Liza @ Middle Passages, and Natalie @ Literary Rambles!
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| My grandmother (left) and Charlotte |
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| Charlotte (left with dove) and my mother. |
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| Gus and Charlotte |
What follows is story about
Mr. Davis and Tom
Mr. Davis lived in a 10 X 15
foot shed behind
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For me, at eight years old, Mr.
Davis was a scary and mysterious person.
When I visited Charlotte it was
understood, when it came time to feed
him breakfast, lunch or dinner, I wasn’t to show my face.
Off her kitchen, a wide covered porch ran the length of her house. By the kitchen door was a small round table and a single chair.
“Yoo-hoo! Wilber! Dinner!” She alone
called him by his first name.
A minute or so later Mr. Davis
would appear out of the depths of his self-imposed exile. A large, imposing
figure, he always wore the same thing, no matter the time of year or weather or that fact that he lived in the tropics:
dark trousers, dark long-sleeved shirt, and often an ancient and filthy
knee-length over-coat. Sometimes a battered fedora was perched on his head.
He’d stump the 30 or so feet to the back porch, eat in sullen silence, get up,
and return to his dark den.
When
“Yoo-hoo! Tom. Yoo-hoo! Dinner,
Tom!”
Out of the tangle of thorn
bushes that grew behind the house would come slinking a great battle-scarred,
orange tomcat. Part of one ear was chewed off, and his fur was scraggly and
lumpy with cuts and scabs and scars. He’d come slinking in, wary of anything
different or any movement that was not part of his frame of reference, eat his
bowl of food, then slink back into the bush.
Old man and old cat ate their
meals together in hostile, untrusting silence.
Mr. Davis ate without looking around
as if he might see something which would then necessitate an acknowledgement.
Tom crouched in tense
expectation that he might have to bolt at any moment. After each gulp of food
his head swiveled from side to side, taking in his surrounding, making sure
nothing had changed.
They were the same kind of
creature. Life had dealt them blows which had caused them to retreat into
isolation. Mr. Davis had chosen his while Tom had been born to it.
Yet between them they had
Was it because the wounds they’d
suffered and the scars they bore were momentarily soothed by her ministrations? Those moments were not enough to civilize the misanthropic old man or tame the
wild old tomcat, but they were enough to keep them coming back.
Daily they came to that
borderland of civilization, the neutral zone that was the back porch. They
could have come inside the house any time and been welcomed, but the porch was
as close to the smell of humanity as either of them cared to get.
I caught occasional glimpses of
the old wild man and old wild cat as they made their journeys to the edge of
that reality where they couldn’t endure to live. I dared to take peeks at them,
hoping they would notice me and see me as harmless and thus allow me to
befriend them. But I was also terrified, if they did see me, they would run
away and never come back or yell and hiss at me for scaring them.
I walked a thin brittle line.
Common sense, instinct, or some part of my unconscious knew not to intrude and
cause a break in the fragile connection Charlotte had with them.
Perhaps in that time with
***
Has my opinion of Charlotte changed now that I am older than she was when I was 8? Not one little bit. I love her as much now as I did then.
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| Me on Charlotte's lap. L to R clockwise: Friend, Ed, my sister Erva Denham, friend Milaine, and Ed's brother, John. |
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