Gaining Prospective
Barry W. North Trying to adjust to life after prostate cancer, I am sitting on my porch this morning, drinking coffee and watching the young girl across the street waiting for someone to answer the door. Sent by the agency, she is on her twice-a-week mission to bathe the frail octogenarian. Her back is to me, her legs slightly apart, red hair put up in a hasty bun. Her snug clothes, even from this distance, highlight the youthful and pneumatic figure, stimulating the stumps of desire still within me in this torturous post-surgery world in which sexual arousal produces no physical reaction, like salivating over food without having the ability to eat. Mercifully, before my self-pity gets up to irreversible speed, the door swings opens and the girl disappears into the dark interior of the house. In my mind I follow her inside and see her energy, like an open window on a breezy day, replace the staleness in the air with the scent of youth, and watch her help the old woman, not even twenty years ahead of me on this road, settle into the warm, soothing water, in preparation for her bath, no doubt, one of the few muted pleasures she still has in the anteroom of death. Back at the one-man pity party, I glance around at the emancipated outside world in search of some profound revelation and, instead, find myself thinking of that determined old lady across the way, confined to her house, who would not have even a shred of sympathy for the guy on the other side of the street sitting on his porch “like a fool on a life raft,” I can imagine her saying to the young girl, “complaining that it is still afloat.” |
About the author:
Barry W. North is a seventy-year-old retired refrigeration mechanic. Since his retirement in 2007, he has won the 2010 A. E. Coppard Prize for Fiction and Honorable Mention in the 2011 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Awards. His published books are Along the Highway, Terminally Human, and In the Maze. For more information please visit his website here. |