45 years and a Gold Plated Watch

I don't know who you are.

I sit in my kitchen every morning, Sanka steaming, pajamas still on. It is what it is. I am retired, my wife died 15 years ago, my kids - middle-aged - have entered into their own orbits, mine left long behind.

After decades working as a grocery warehouse manager I managed to squirrel away enough money to sit here, at this table, and watch you.

You have so many dogs, little dogs, dogs on leashes that extend out 10, 20 feet, maybe more. They shit in my yard, in the neighbors yards, sometimes they even shit on the road. And you, always at the ready, baggie in hand, the dutiful public servant there to remove the evidence and keep our little world beautiful.

What have we reduced ourselves to that in order to get a grip on the need for companionship so much a part of our makeup we are capable of suffering the indignity of handling the warmed feces of a small mammal with nothing between the pile and your hand but a microscopically thin sheet of plastic? It can't be good.

I wonder how this day will go. Will the young boy from up the street drop in after school to pander his melted chocolates in order to support the local special ed kids, or the drama club, or whatever bottomless void is in need of a good tithing.

I have it on good authority that this particular young man is wont to take the earnings from his many bogus altruisms and use them to purchase the sexual favors of the woman who lives on the other side of my back yard.

She lives on a government stipend and the remnants of an inheritance given her from her late husband. Bit of a thrill seeker who tries to keep it honest by cloaking her deviance in the guise of professionalism.

Maybe I will receive another post card from my brother. Ever since our parents died in the seventies he has lived in the south of Spain on a fucking vineyard of all things.

We grew up in the 30s on the outskirts of Youngstown, Ohio. Nobody knew anything about wine. My brother knew his way around the beers of the Midwest, alright, but wine was out of the question.

Perhaps he wanted little more than to escape this reality and build a new one.

His postcards never contain more than one sentence, and honestly enough, he often misspells my name.

My wife spent so many years of her life in this very kitchen. Only God knows now what it was that occupied so much of her time in here. Even in the face of her unavoidable death at the hands of the cancer that reduced her to a virtual skeleton she spent her days in this very room waiting for the end to come.

I would come home late at night from my job to find my dinner warming in the oven, butts in the ashtray, her notes to herself in her own shorthand most likely gibberish anyway.

I would sit in the dark and eat and wait for the sun to come up so I could watch you.

Today the revolver sits on the table beside my coffee cup. One of my socks is sagging, the elastic long since worn away. My hair is unkempt. The sink is full of dishes.

You pass by, 6 AM on the money. After this morning, I wonder how this day will go.

I know what to do.