ran 3.1 milesHere is Chapter 6 of “I am Erica”. To read it from the beginning click on “I am Erica” in the categories to the right.
Chapter6
Jonas followed his defrosted path back to Fifth Street. Now exhaling smoke instead of steam, the sun prevailed over the cold moisture. Leaves would soon be crackling and rustling instead of sticking together like cold, wet flakes of oatmeal. Whitened rooftops would once again be faded back to black and birds would soon be foraging on a newly moistened earth.
His knock grew inpatient tapping against his denim pocket. His left toe touched street with every other step through his worn sole. The meager weight of his backpack snapped another of the final threads on his shoulder strap. His jacket was not at all sufficient to warm him in the cold evenings. Jonas’ rare feelings of neglect and compromise were usually immediately followed by an urgency of strength and a familiar will to succeed. He was empowered by the frustration of adversity. But for an instant he felt like one of the paper shamrocks that gas station clerks asked customers to donate a dollar for towards muscular dystrophy. Most people would rather not part with their dollar. They often felt that because they had donated a dollar earlier in the week that the month of March’s charitable donation quota had been reached. Jonas was admittedly one of these people, himself, and he did not mind feeling the way he did. Suffering was in his nature and part of what he believed to be the greater part of existence.
He thought about the dollar he had found earlier and suddenly perceived it to be an unexplainable form of charity that somebody or something had donated to him. Offended by the idea that mere luck or chance proximity may have taken pity on him and given him a dollar immediately devastated his pride. Jonas crumpled up the dollar and threw it back in the street as though it were an insult to the integrity of his struggles. He preferred to remain blighted and ignored like dystrophic muscles in children or a stale box of Girl Scout cookies.
The aged, frayed and weather-beaten door stood like an immense monolith that a common, run-down house just happened to be squeezing. The cuts and scratches were like hieroglyphs of a forgotten history. The undulating knots swelled with stories that would never be told. There were numbers stenciled by the sun where a two, one, and six once hung at eye level. The doorknob was porcelain fired on cast iron and it tilted downwardly as though a couple screws were hanging on by a final thread. Jonas determined the door had to be at least a century old. One hundred years of weather, openings and closings, friends and enemies, good news and bad news, all passing through various decades over a vast amount of time.
Jonas was certain he would never live to be one hundred years old. Nor did he find himself capable of standing in one spot for even one hundred minutes. He wondered about the occurrences the door may have been a part of and then reflected on the underwhelming little he had seen in his own young life.
Jonas Martin Cassidy was thirty-five years old. He was born into the Reagan administration and the first big post-hippie “Just Say No” movement against drug use. John Lennon had died the year Jonas was born and, before he had quit collecting baseball cards or had crashed into puberty, the Berlin Wall had fallen.
Compared to one hundred years there was little Jonas had seen. What he had seen had amounted to even less as half of it had been viewed through primarily adolescent and juvenile eyes. He could not possibly have had any idea of the scope of events that had occurred over the last century.
Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”, San Francisco and the most damaging earthquake in U.S. history, Reverend Algernon S. Crapsey found guilty of heresy, Charlie Chaplin, Nan Aspinwall, the Ludlow War, WWI, the influenza epidemic (202 deaths daily), John Scopes’ evolution debate, deep channel green and rich windsor maroon, the Great Depression followed by the Social Security Act and the Wagner Act, FDR, John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, WWII and Normandy, Bernard Baruch coins the term “Cold War”, the Korean War (165,485 American casualties), Vietnam, Bay of Pigs, Grenada, invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, intervention in Bosnia and Herzegonia, 9/11...
These people and events cannot sum up even a small fraction of the past century. They are loose reflections of an uncertain future that is begging for direction and meaning. What history distinctly earns through patience and concision the future squanders in blind repetition and excess.
1,359.0 miles to go.
