I should be sleeping

    I should be sleeping. It’s 12:15 AM, and I should be sleeping. I should be tired, and body is but mind isn’t; so I hear the whisper “write” “write” “write.” Insistent and persistent and damned annoying. And much too talkative of late. So, in spite of best efforts to the contrary, I am awake, and writing.

     I have been resisting the whispers. Writing is too personal, too telling. And there are things that if said would perhaps be uncomfortable for people I don’t wish to cause discomfort. Perhaps I will start an anonymous blog. Perhaps I shouldn’t say I will. Perhaps some obsessive person or another would see that as a challenge and set out to scan all blogs in netspace to find the one with my telltale writing idiosyncrasies. Because I have them, I’m sure. I’m not sure I could recognize them for myself, but I am sure I have them.

     But for now, for tonight, for this blog that has already been identified as belonging to me, I will write something not quite crazy. Although I am sure there will be some who think otherwise, but I have to write something and the story of the formaldehyde man seems to be the one that wants to be written. Tonight. This blue moon night. Once in a blue moon …

    When I was a young girl, growing up in various neighborhoods of Memphis, TN, - which is another dozen or so stories in themselves - I would pray to be made blind. That is not a new revelation. I have mentioned it to a few people before. It’s one of those comments, when said, is most often said offhandedly because I must say it but fear if I make it sound too important the person to whom I am speaking will be uncomfortable with the revelation. As if I am opening a door they really don’t want to look inside because they may see more than they want.

     Which is exactly how I felt for the first 20 years of my life.  It took me that long to figure out how to not see too much. 

     But in early years, before I had learned that convenient survival skill, I had the occasion to encounter the formaldehyde man.

     I rode buses a lot as a child and teenager and even young adult. They were inexpensive and convenient and most often the only form of transportation available to me unless I called a taxi, and taxis were definitely outside my budget. So, I rode buses, Memphis city buses. We did not have school buses then, we did not have desegregation then. School was far enough away that I chose not to walk unless I didn’t have 10 cents for the student fare. Sometimes, when the weather was having one of those “I’ve just got to get outside” kinds of days, I would walk home in the afternoon. But mostly I rode. I continued to ride when I got my first real job downtown and even after I started college, but the incident I remember of the encounter with the formaldehyde man was during the high school years.

     He often got on the bus at the stop after mine and walked past me to his seat. He didn’t go all the way to the back, which was designated “For Colored Only”, so I assumed he was white or Caucasian as we said then. (When did that stop being a designation of race? When did we start identifying race by color?  I guess we always did, we just weren’t as honest about it. We were still selectively naive.) He always stopped at the last seat just before the back door of the bus. Convenient to exit, perhaps, but I will never know because he never left the bus before I did. So, he walked passed me on boarding, and I walked passed him to exit. And he smelled like formaldehyde.

   He was the oldest person I had ever seen. Maybe the oldest I have ever seen. His face had fascinatingly deep wrinkles and reminded me, in spite of myself, of the apple head doll I had made one Christmas. I can’t remember the procedure for the project, but I do remember the creases and crevices as the apple aged and withered. But more than his face, I remember his hands. They were dark, browner than a coffee with milk brown, but not as brown as black. And so papery thin there were places where the skin appeared to be peeling back, folded back, like the corners of very old pages in very old books.

    More than either the face or the hands, I remember the formaldehyde. I had been exposed to the odor in the biology classes I took in high school.  I had dissected crayfish, earthworms and even fetal pigs. I knew the smell of formaldehyde. I wondered, and not just briefly, if it might be the reason for his longevity, his preservation. I knew the only way to know for sure, if this man was alive or … not … was to look into his eyes. 

     Life is in the eyes. It’s obviously there when we are living and just as obviously not there when we are gone. 

     One day, in spite of the danger of seeing too much, curiosity overwhelmed self-preservation.  I nervously, but with determination, reached for the cord to signal my stop, gathered my books close to my chest and walked reluctantly to the back exit. I avoided looking at the man’s face and the man’s hands, and anywhere at all except the floor of the bus ridged with rubber matting. I wasn’t breathing as I reached out with my left hand to grab the pole to steady myself for the first step down. I didn’t breathe as the brakes hissed to a stop nor as the door snapped open. I didn’t breath as quickly, surreptitiously, with my face partially hidden, I supposed, by my extended arm, I looked.

    There is a moment, sometimes longer than moments as we are accustomed to counting them, but a moment, nonetheless, in the continuum of life, when there is neither life nor death in a person’s eyes. It’s that moment between the two.  I think that day on the bus is the only time I have seen it and known what it was. Now I only recognize it in retrospect, after the fact, in pictures, perhaps, that were taken near the end, before we knew, even, that there was to be an end. 

     I think that’s the way it should be. I’m not sure our eyes need to see that much.