Warm Recollections #13
More from the Bitz Files
As introduced here, these Warm Recollections are random cullings from thirty years of notes files…
The kind of Autumn afternoon that makes you want to get a job as a pub dog, spending long boozy afternoons lapping at beer from a bowl and taking a nice snooze on the floor in front of the fire. I’d be a good pub dog. I’d be no trouble at all.
One of the things about children of a younger age — and part of what seals a parent’s relationship with them — is that the child responds to the adult with a commitment and simple need which you will only ever have previously experienced before through romantic love. In your adult relationships things may have become settled or drab or fractious: but the child looks at you and is delighted when you appear, or distraught when you go away, emoting with a simplicity and nakedness of feeling you’re not likely to experience again… except perhaps when it is clear that you are dying. It’s a reminder of how unbelievably strong emotions can be. Or were.
It must be strange, in those final stages of life, when people start being nice to you and looking you yearningly in the eyes… because you’re about to die, rather than because they’re in love with you or because they’re your child. What an odd — but possibly comforting? — reminder of eras gone by, just as things are ending forever for you. You are seen and loved, at the finish of it all. People see you.
The point at which you somehow realize, through a deadening clarity in the ether, that someone isn’t just late — they’re not coming.
Grief: Strange, those occasional forward glimpses you get, of a time where you will feel if not okay about your loss, then at least reconciled to it. Like alien birds, flying back from the future: anachronistic, fleeting, but not illusory.
To make sense, human life — and in particular urban life — should be contextualized by the inhuman. A city should be in the shade of a mountain or within sight of the sea, or preferably both: something that speaks of history and geography and purpose. If a town has not even a river passing through it, it makes no sense at all.
It’s just there. And so why are you even here?
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Re grief I had to cut short my musings on your musings because my kind wife had made me dinner as a treat as I'm a sad sack because our hedgehog died last night. The problem was she cooked a meal that I've never had the courage to tell her I hate...
I would like a city to have a vast green space outside it, preferably forested. As a native Brit we don't go hard on mountains per as so see and trees would go down a treat.
Our pub dog, Flea, was a golden Labrador who was the size of a house. He loved people, kids and attention. Every now and again the police would pop in when we were working the door and we would get the police to take the dog and have a walk round the pub, especially in the height of summer, full of young surf dudes and toffs. You've never seen a pub empty so quick😋
The greatest smile I've ever seen is the smile my young son gave me when I saw him for the first time after his mum and I split up. I nearly burst into tears before I'd even said hello to him. I've never seen a smile that made me react like that since, nor would I expect to. It's graven on my heart and all smiles now are redundant.
Hang on, my wife's shouting something at me...