have you ever?

have you ever looked back at an occurance in your life and wondered what you'd learned from it?

this occurred in Aug of 2003
but I thought ya'll might enjoy reading it again...

So it occurred to me some time this summer that I am 48 years old and that’s 2 years away from 50 and that’s a freakin half-century!

Now I know that I have been jokingly saying that to my mother for months, which usually prompts her to look me square in the eye and turn her hearing aid off. But I don’t think that the actual fact sunk in till the last couple of days.

Here I am confronted with my longevity, or the lack there of. Which by and large only serves to make me a depressed person. It makes me examine my life in the minute, and I hate it when that happens.

I understand that I have remained youthful in many things because I don’t have children and I live next door to my mother. These facts can be supported with the argument that raising children ages you, as you have concrete evidence of your dotage staring you right in the face, and of course, no matter how old you are...yer still the kid at your mom’s house.

So I have been musing over my accomplishments, or in my eyes, the lack there of. I was doing just that, quietly, in my apartment, yesterday afternoon when it also occurs to me that part of the cacophony of sound sneaking through my closed patio doors from the park next door, is my mother’s voice raised in something akin to anger or fear.

At the time I was sitting in my living room, bare feet up on my coffee table, wearing jean shorts and a Harley Davidson t-shirt and looking for all the world (in my mind anyway) like a relaxing Buddha. In actual fact, I am pretty sure at the moment of recognition I was wallowing in self-pity (also known as taking stock).

Here I am 48 years old. I am bald, unemployed, I live in a 650 sq foot apartment, and I drive the incredible $100.00 car. My motor pickle is ill, I can’t afford a new front end, and I am likely 100 lbs overweight. (Not that I’m counting or nothing) I have no relationship with a member of the opposite sex, nor do I suppose that a woman with a temperament and a waist like mine will have in the distant future. (Can we all say bitch?)

I am broke, as they say, flatter than piss on a plate and have just recently found out that my employment insurance will run out in December. So I have to, yet again, pull my “game face” outta the closet, dust it off, and go back out into the world of insecurity and self-doubt.

Sound like fun?

Anyway, so I’m sitting on my couch on Friday afternoon, ostensibly playing with my belly button lint when I hear through my closed patio door, my wee mother’s voice raised in indignation.

I immediately assume that she’s hollering at the squirrels or rabbits that have been eating ‘the daylights’ out of her flower garden. But in almost the same thought I understand that this is not my mother fussing, but my mother, hard core upset.

My Mom, as you can guess, is older than me. She’s a tiny woman full of love and fire. She likes a good laugh, she tells a good story, (the older the better) and she even enjoys the occasional sip of Scotch. She’s a soft touch for the underdog and she will go out on a limb for those that she believes in.

She takes the trials and tribulations of the world on her shoulders just like Atlas. (Please don’t get her started on the subject of genetically engineer foodstuffs or the plight of the North American farmer.) She played a large part in teaching me good from bad, right from wrong, lessons that I struggle with to this day. She don’t get mad often my Mom, but when she does, it’s likely that all three of her kids get mad right along with her.

I get up off my couch and pull open my patio door, just to make sure that I’m mistaken. The overall decibel level of the noise from the park, combined with hearing my Mom holler “don’t do that!” makes me head out the sliding door, through my wee West Coast patio and yard and out through the gate to have a look at what is going on.

As I step through the gate and past the big ole pine tree to my left I hear my mother from in front of her gate holler again. This time it is “Stop! Stop! Stop!” and as I turn my head to look through the 7-foot chain link fence that separates the park from our apartment building’s property I spy a crowd of approximately ten to twelve “kids.”

Teenagers, in the park next door, have become the bane of my existence. They are noisy, disrespectful thieves. Over the years that I have lived here I have had my car broken into in the parking lot. The little heathens stole some precious mementos, some music and defecated in the back seat. Cost me the price of a window and my mother’s sense of security about her home.
I, continually, in the middle of the night, have to go out and pull the patronizing little punks off of my motor pickle. (You all remember the story of the young man that told me “don’t get excited Grandma”?) It’s obvious to me by now that I just don’t get the next generation. That in essence I have become my parents, and this of course only further complicates the musings and meanderings I have been doing about my age…but I digress.

As my head turns and I glance through the chain link fence several things occur to me at once. The crowd is mostly boys. They range in age from twelve to seventeen or eighteen, young men whose bodies have grown faster than their brains. They are all dressed in something akin to gang colours, in that they are all wearing matching basketball team jerseys, shorts and many of them are wearing the same style sneakers. More than half of them are wearing their heads wrapped in pseudo gang do-rags.

One of the older looking boys has a young girl of perhaps fifteen or sixteen on the ground, sort of, while the rest of the boys’ crowd around egging him on.

She is lying with one leg curled under her and the other splayed out awkwardly to the left, her tiny skirt is bunched up around her waist and I can see her thong from here. The top half of her body is pulled up off of the ground by the front of her shirt. At first I think that this young man is helping her up. That she has fallen and this nice boy is helping her.

As if in slow motion, it registers to me, that the boy holding her top half up from the ground is not helping her. He leans over her holding her up with his left fist bunched in the front of her lavender shirt and his right arm is cocked and fist clenched as if to punch her in the face. She has one arm wrapped over her head to try to protect her face, the other sort of draped back to the ground. She is crying, and from where I am standing I can see the welts raised on her face and the blood tracking from her nose over her lips and down her chin. This is not the first time she has been hit.

I turn my head again to look at my mother and it seems as if she and a couple of other seniors that live in our building are pressed up against the fence from our side hollering or screaming. As my mother’s face and voice fully register I understand that she is mad and sad, that she is yelling and there are tears coursing down her face.

That is my last cognizant thought for a while.

According to my mother and the other onlookers, I scaled the fence in no time flat. (Fancy that from a tired old fat broad?) I jumped off the top of the fence landing one foot on the ground and the other foot running. (That would account for the big bruise in my instep and the long scratch on my calf)

I reach the little thug in a matter of seconds, and body check him from behind. He literally bowls over the girl he is assaulting landing on his back kind of spread eagle and still holding her shirt but now his arms are over his head.

His face is stunned; he has no idea what has happened or how he got there.
He starts to get up but now I am standing with one leg on each side of his chest with my fists bunched, raging at him like a big bald madwoman. I tell him that “boys shouldn’t hit girls” and as a result of what he has done “I’m gonna fuck him up bad”.

Somewhere in the farthest recesses of my mind I think rather matter of factly that I am spitting on him, that I am shrieking like a fishmonger and I am cussing a blue streak in public and that’s gonna make my Mom cranky again. (Do you remember the story of the words we should never ever use together in the same sentence?)

The kid scrambles back a bit and begins to get up again, his head swiveling back and forth on his neck searching for an opening. He’s got a welt on his forehead, so maybe I did hit him. He and I do a dance where he gets up and I shove him and he gets up and I shove him half way around the park. He is now screaming at me that he’s gonna get his father and I tell him, “No problem, I’ll fuck him up too!”

I am brave and crazy.

One of his friends punches me in the shoulder and I smack him off without even looking at him. The rest back away I don’t know if they are smarter than their friend or just plain scared.
The assaulter gets up and starts for me swinging. In some feat of magic I am able to slap away his hands and give his ears a boxing that would have made my Granny proud.

He drops to his knees, holding his head as the police arrive.

The rest, once again, as they say, is history…the police and the kids begin to sort out what has happened and I walk away home, this time down to the end of the park, around the community hall and into our parking lot, ouch, ouching at my bare feet and the gravel.

I make it to my mother and she is shaking her head and puts her arm around me as we head through her gate and yard and into her living room. She tells me that I am gonna be some sore tomorrow and tells me to go home and have a hot bath and a stiff drink and to not to forget to take some bromelain as that will help with the soreness. I figure that I am likely to need it all. When I look into her face I see pride mixed with fear and anger.

As I step through my front door I start to shake as it becomes apparent to me that which I have just done. I tell myself that I am tough, just like the old days and that coupled with my being full of self-righteous indignation allows me to believe that I have only done what any other sane person would have done in my place. Which makes me cry and then I am busy convincing myself that once the police figure everything out I am going to end up in jail.

So I sit on the floor just inside my front door and have a good sob as the anger seeps away and feeling returns. I spend a fair time just crying and berating myself for getting into trouble yet again. Now all I can think of is that my Dad, the retired policeman, is gonna finally burst a vein in his forehead when he hears this one, but at least I won’t have to break it to my Mom.

Eventually the police come to our building, to my mother’s via the yard and she comes to get me via the hallway. I wipe my face, blow my nose and get up and follow her to her apartment convinced that I am going to jail.

The police officers are both seeming twelve, but likely in their thirties. Young men in uniform, one kinda grumpy and small and the other with big blue eyes and very muscular arms. They ask me to tell them what happened as they have already heard it from everyone else. They have not only talked to my Mom and my neighbours, but the kids in the park, and an elderly couple that happened to be walking their dog and the parents of the young girl who is now in the hospital. As is the delinquent, apparently he is having a problem with his ears.

I tell my story as literally as I can remember it, liberally sprinkled with comments both pro and con from my Mom. She and I are sitting on the love seat while the officers are standing over us in Mom’s Wedgwood blue and white living room. Mom is occasionally dabbing at the scrape on my leg with one of her never-ending supplies of wadded tissues.

When I am about half way through the story I look up and directly into the twinkling eyes of the blue-eyed cop and it takes me aback to realize that he is struggling to keep from laughing out loud. Eventually the gruff cop tells me that “next time I should call the cops and then wait and let then knock the snot outta the little beggar”, and that the young girls parents are charging him with assault and that they would love to meet me and best of all, I will not be charged with anything. The police leave.

In retrospect, several things occur to me. Maybe this getting old shit ain’t so bad after all?…and it’s a poor day when you can’t surprise yourself.

I know that if I had set out to get into a fistfight I’d surely have got my ass whupped, and whupped badly. I even feel like I did today, but I hear stories of adrenaline doing amazing things to people all the time and now I can only look at that fence and shake my head in wonderment.

I better understand that the lessons that I have learned, both good and bad, last a long time. I understand that wearing your “game face” is just part of everyday life. I understand that I am not going to jail and I thank my lucky stars for that.

But above and beyond all else…I understand that I’m getting too old for this shit….and I gotta stop watchin them freakin “hero” videos.

I'm about to turn 52 now and as I re-read this I'm reminded of how instinct always takes over when I am beyond fear or anger, I am reminded that children are the product of their environment and I am reminded that now - 4 years later the little brat is in jail as he went to court charged with assault as a minor and was remanded to his mother's care because she avowed as he "wasn't a bad child" a year later he beat her (his mother) so badly that her jaw was broken and now he's serving time for assault with a weapon on someone in the city.

I am also reminded of how lucky I am to have not truly lost my temper and hurt the little brat while I was bouncing him around the park...cos I too could be in jail.

In 4 years my life has changed in that I am no longer "upset" with myself for being bald, single or plus sized...I've quit beating myself up about it...and I am lucky enough to have found a group of world class friends that fill the void in my life (for the most part)...I have a good job with benefits (even if the boss is nuts) I have no car but my trike is like brand new - so life ticks on....

...and life is good