One Dog Barking
It was a wild night in the old settler town that sat in a bowl on a hilltop, tipped on the edge of the future. There was singing and screaming and dogs barking and the howls of people whose gender or race or age could not be discerned. The arrogant accelerations of excessively loud engines ripped asphalt off the streets and the pop of what might have been guns punctured the night.
It was a routine night for me.
All day long some guy down at the petrol station had been singing, in a guttural and broken voice a song of only his imagination, while random hooters popped the air. He had stopped for a few hours and then begun again. Such endurance amazed me.
By the time came close there were voices everywhere. They could have been coming from the trees on Hill St. or the belfry up at St. George’s Rhodes , or just any group of Saturday night people who were both near and far.
People were partying in their way, as I was in mine.
I sat there and I thought; ‘I will die, and no one will know my story.’
And then I thought; ‘Life’s like that.’
Friday had been an interesting day.
It all started when I woke up and realized I’d forgotten to pull up the little green latch on the alarm clock. So I was late in getting going. I don’t have to punch a time clock, but it doesn’t look good.
Of course, that’s part of the problem. The Episcopalian adherence to early to rise, early to bed, ran like a gash through the gut of the life I sought after. It was the dominant paradigm, and it was pathetic, but I confess I had it far better than in all those years of frozen dawns and bare fingers on fire, scraping ice from a broken windshield.
Within minutes people started to draggle in to see me, as if they’d been hovering in the corridor waiting for my arrival. On any given day I could go for hours without a soul recognizing my existence, but sudden bursts of supplicants penetrated the brief period between lock click and log on.
I didn’t begrudge any of them for those moments, for it was my job, and unlike the other side of my life this one was a social life. It allowed the other side of my life, and I was grateful for that.
The stream carried students, staff, salespeople, colleagues, maintenance workers, and various more or less lost souls, some of them plain flotsam and some of them sparks, brilliance in the making. I felt lucky to be in their presence.
None of them knew where I had come from, or where I was going.
It was a day much like any other day. I had my day routine and my night routine. It was too damn bad one had to sleep somewhere in between.
Not that I don’t waste time. I succumb to the enticements of the internet as much as any of my compatriots – for example. The intellectual life is fettered by trying to frame it in filigrees of mahogany or oak.
So when Jimbo came in, shuffling around a bit, shy as a duiker caught in the lights, I was taken a bit by surprise.
“I just wanted to thank you for all you’ve done for us this year. It was a good year. I got a lot out of it.”
“I’m glad to hear it Jimbo. All I really wanted to do was to help you guys out a bit.”
He thanked me again, and bowed backwards through the door as if he was a wraith.
I looked out the window at the plane tree that stood out there and which had marked the seasons for me, now in full greenery, with a weaver pulling at a recalcitrant bit of phloem or xylem. Clouds were rolling in and I saw a bolt of lightening split the darkness above the township. I knew the temperature was dropping like a stone into a bottomless well, the typical late afternoon loss of summer or spring that happened in this place.
And then the building shook; the walls and floors seemed to ripple, and the ripple rolled up my jeans, ran across my thighs, grabbed my gut, slid up my sides and pulled my ears, and finally skitched my scalp. What would make a building rumble so?
I sat dazed for less than a minute….they were having training manoeuvres up at the Army base. It was not common, and it had never made the house of science shake before.
The reality of my leaving gripped me - a warm glove or a cold vise, I wasn’t sure.
By in the morning, the aural environment had become softer, and silence was no longer a foreign thing. It was lovely to hear very little at all, and it was so rare a thing that I simply sat and listened, and then listened some more, for quite some time.
Finally there was only the sound of one dog barking.
The night was not hopeless.
