Living in this world, I hardly ever have to make things up.
We used to live in a 75-year-old farmhouse on a rural road on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Whether the property had ever been an actual farm is questionable, although there was a rusty 1920s vintage John Deere corn planter in a shed along the hedgerow, and I’ll bet it’s still there, buried under thorns and honeysuckle. I do know that the previous owner was an alcoholic house painter, and that there was something funny about the old wooden garage.
The most amazing thing was that it was still standing, although with a decided tilt to the north. (That would be the fault of termites. Maryland, remember). Inside the garage, various semi-failed structural components were spliced sufficiently well with 2x4s and pieces of old lumber that I had little fear of the building collapsing, but it certainly did lean. It had windows set into one side and the back, so it almost looked like a house, and there was a concrete floor.
One of the first things I noticed about that garage was that it smelled of piss when it rained, but only toward the rear, where there was a grimy wooden workbench and dirty glass jars full of screws and carburetor parts. In the corner, I found something I had never seen before but quickly understood: a rusty metal funnel stuck into a length of garden hose that passed through a hole in the board siding and extended outside into the flowerbed! On the wall near the funnel was an old wooden medicine cabinet with a mirror on the door. A “bathroom” and a home away from home, in other words. A place where he could hang out, drink, and piss it all away without getting yelled at. Maybe he even used the mirror to clean himself up before going back into the house, which he apparently shared with his mother. (They later built her a house of her own right next door.)
That was pretty weird (and smelly), but he topped that by moving to a larger old farmhouse across the road after the old lady died, so he could put what would become our place up for sale. Before we ever looked at the property, he passed away. In the process of buying it, however, we learned that he hadn’t had that much of a family and didn’t get out much, with the result that he had actually died at home, in the house across the road, but wasn’t discovered until a couple of weeks later. Smelly is as smelly does…
I don’t know where I’m going with this, exactly, but the next farm to the south on that side of the road had an even bigger farmhouse where a nice old lady lived, the barns and silos having long ago gone empty and abandoned. One day our cat disappeared, and I reasoned that she could have wandered across the road and holed up in one of the big wooden barns. I got permission from the owner to explore and search all I wanted, so I headed for what I thought was the hayloft in the largest building. I never found the cat (Clementine was bad to the bone), but I did discover an apartment that took up half of the loft.
No one had been there for ages. It was the kind of place a hired hand might have lived, or a couple of teenaged boys. There were a few rudimentary pieces of furniture, an old bed, this and that — and a punching bag mounted on the wall, like in a gym! There were yellowed newspaper clippings of boxing news thumb-tacked to the walls, and even a dusty pair of ancient boxing gloves. No cat, however, and I left things as they were, feeling like I had violated someone’s private memories but grateful for the privilege of a peek.
The old lady died soon thereafter, and the last I knew, a daughter or some other heir was living in the place, plotting to turn the acreage into building lots. For all I know, the whole thing’s gone, boxing gloves and all.
This was my little corner of the world before moving to the terrible high desert of New Mexico: there was navigable water a mile and a half away, geese in the cornfields in the fall, and the garage leaned north and smelled of piss.
(The funnel is gone, but I’ll bet it still does.)
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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
John wrote: “Living in this world, why does anyone have to make things up?”
To comfort ourselves, perhaps?
You mean like, “Oh I am such a stud” and rewriting history? That kind of comfort? Or the comfort and satisfaction of that comes from spinning a fantasy for education, propaganda, entertainment, or its own sake? All of that is natural, right?
What I meant was, geez, there’s always been so much weird crap going down around me, all I have to do is write about it. And now that I think about it, that opening paragraph sucks!
Watch me change it…
HAH! Much better.
a buddy and i were recently discussing how as we get older, we find we have less patience for “fiction”, and if we want to entertain ourselves reading a book or watching some other media (movies, tv), we prefer “real” information instead of contrived made up nonsense, since as you point out reality is *always* more interesting.
there was an episode of Star Trek-Enterprise, and they’re meeting the new friendly alien race and doing the whole cultural exchange thing. at one point one of the alien women is with Trip (the chief engineer, from Texas btw) at “movie night” on the Enterprise, watching an old black and white western or some such, and she expresses bemusement at why anyone would waste their time with such an activity, and Trip asks:
“Don’t you have movies where you come from?”
“We had something similar on our world a long time ago, but eventually people figured out their own lives were more interesting.”
and yes, i’m fully aware of the meta-irony of that point being made in a piece of “contrived made up nonsense”