OLD PIRATES OF THE HEART

2020 WINNER AGELESS AUTHORS SHORT STORY CONTEST

WHO AM I?

A friend and former shipmate of mine and I, both of us old pirates on the sea of life did not pass quietly as ships do sometimes in the night. We hove-to, dropped our sails and spent a few hours juxtaposed and adrift together. It was not smoke and mirrors, cannon blasts or fancy swordplay. It was genuine, problematic intimacy. She, the world navigator reported a tumult of miracles, bombings, and Beruit taxi rides. Always the positive. Always ahead of the games. On the way to care for grandbabies between world-wide gatherings armadas of small pleasure craft-lives into workshops in which she boards, and opens treasure chests of the heart in a therapeutic ransacking.

     There is a deranged proximity about us – and the others. Some were monks, are still monks, will always be monks out of the flow. They loving their logic.  We have left them in the monasteries while we freebooters cannot sit so still for so long. We think better beneath the flysheets dealing with the flow, the forces far bigger than ourselves, the gales, the currents, the tides, apparently still surviving. Desiring for the difficult, the unsettled, the potential exotic, the flesh. The vital words without logic. The rap of lives rhymed, and always very much alive, very much flowing, flowing.

WHY AM I HERE?

Freedom. We serve no King nor flag except the tattered hearts and push the debate. There are hints of prostitution but only from those who see life as a debit-credit scheme. We are under the waterfall of life, pleased at all costs. Suspecting emotions. We are linguistically in disarray rubbing up against our apparent feelings. There are obvious conclusions.

     A glass of red wine. Two Margaritas. Grilled fish. A large bowl. And the stories, always the stories. The pitfalls. Blindsides. Near misses. We dissolve into tears. Touch as only old pirates of the heart will permit themselves to be touched by another. There is no myth of dominance. We plunge into desolation. Dive into the unfulfilled, never to be fulfilled, what were we thinking?  We short-circuit our best and most well-worn vanities. We imply old successes but tread on the deck of tragedy. And laugh. We laugh. We know we will not stay. Cannot stay. 

WHAT DO I WANT?

Piracy is not carried out in a monastic order. We are lonely. We turn our loneliness those destiny moments with others - fierce and mad enjambments. Crowd scenes where everyone but us is clothed in burkas where we only see their eyes and then comes their revelations of secret, childhood (teenage, adult, mid-life, elder) abuse they have held onto so tightly they have pressed into jewels. Their lives have been arranged around these jewels to protect them because, they would be adrift otherwise. The heart chests hold such awful jewels. And, pirates, well pirates help the agonized victims open their chests and look at the jewels of great value.

     Like an oozing, unasked snake that is fascinating and coils around us and between the piratess and I filled with venom and investment, is the question, “So, how are you, really?” with the drop into the abyss on the word “really.

     But, we don’t pry. We are shy. We know the awfulness we have in our chests and we presume the other has the same – probably worse. After all, she is older, walking the plank of age, disease, doubt, fear... or am I talking about myself again? Probably.

     That’s why we move. Move away from the coiling questions, which we give to others. We know the questions, we can shift the wind, the currents, the question. We don’t want to be faced with actually looking into what the other has in her heart. “Look at that, will ya?  What will I do about that fetid, stinking treasure I love so much?”

     Awful jewels are what people keep in their chests. Better not hurt one another. Another day. Maybe a mooring in the future. The note with the black dot. Treasure Island?

© Copyright 2015, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

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ARTHRITIS PIRATES

WHO AM I?

I was a landlubber who was “free” but not adrift in any way. I lived in New England, inland, far from the sea. I was not a sea man, I was a land man. My longtime love and joy was hiking in the beloved Green Mountains. I loved the forests. I felt free. Expansive. The Appalachian Trail. Now I have been captured. My freedom to ramble was taken away from me by a War Lord. Like the War Lords of the 1600s who came ashore in New England to “impress” or imprison landlubbers through force, and compel them to work on sailing ships, Lord Arthritis captured me, took away my freedom, and bid me do his service.

For more than a year since I was impressed into Lord Arthritis’ service, I have been bound on a sea of pain over which Lord Arthritis is commanding Admiral. My once, joyful earth-bound gait, became a lumbering, painful, awkward side-to-side cartoon across the deck of my life. Arthritic grit and bone spurs in both knees grinding together, took the wind out of my sails, and held me painfully captive day by day. Pain foamed and swirled through my knees like sea water drawn in and squirted out of feeding bi-valves. I heard later that in the same way that sand polishes the inside of bi-valves, my hinge joints had been polished smooth and shone like mother of pearl as the bone began to wear through the bone.

Lord Arthritis’s physical war on humanity offers a grand opportunity for Pain Pirates. An armada of large, brigantine, regional hospitals anchor in the major cities. These larger vessels deploy small, specialty clinics, like quickly moving attack sloops to combat each War Lord - Arthritis, Cancer, Cardiology, Urology, Surgery. You can see a virtual armada of these sloops lying in the lee of the larger hospitals. They ply the social coastline which connect the surrounding villages, the community islands: the club, arts guilds, community centers, libraries and elder-care facilities to find and capture patients. The large hospitals provides the big guns, the technology, surgery suites, hospital beds, the cannons of warfare to protect the sloops. But, the specialty sloops are where battles are waged and prisoners taken.

In the physical battle, specialty sloops Lord Arthritis had stopped me, captured me in pain. Then I was sent aboard an Orthopedic Clinic Sloop manned by hardened, experienced fighters. You can see it in their swagger. They offer me an array of battle plans which I must take “or else!” I had to pay them, and handsomely, or they would not do battle with Lord Arthritis. They would maroon me to the War Lord’s tortuous work. “Take it or leave it!” they smirked. And, I knew what “leave it” meant. My blood ran cold with fear. It took a treasure chest of the booty.

WHY AM I HERE?

Before the surgery I was told that having a knee replacement would take “20 years off your life”. But, what kind of change can a metallic peg-leg contain? The brochure for the new, replacement said that many people have surgery and are up and walking with support “quickly”, “independently mobile” within several weeks it said. Maybe.

Less than two weeks after Medicare funding was granted, the tide changed. Pain Pirates no longer threatened me. I was prepped. I was given a cocktail of pain relievers which had me floating on a sea of imaginative warmth and sunshine. My life floated away from me. I am sure that the anesthesiologist launched me on a small boat which took me over to the side of invisibility where I could not physically see.

Then the Pain Pirates, like a small, assault group, followed a captain armed with weapons that were sharpened to precision, lit special lights and wielded saws, cutlasses and drills. I was ripped and had one of my arthritic knees sawed off. They replaced Lord Arthritis’ playground with a new, titanium & plastic knee. Lucky me!

I was marooned in time. I viewed the my past as a vast continent. In the foreground, a land of gnarled and attrited experiences. I did not want to go back there. Then further away, the brighter it became. I arrived in the sunny days of youth with a longing for bright sandy shores. I was on a new island - my Treasure Island.

Does one really recover? Go back? I remember coming to in the recovery area looking around wondering who were these smiling, friendly people? They had put pulsing, swelling plastic sleeves on my legs, like something breathing me. I was sweetly told they were going to get me up and out of bed so I could walk behind a walker down the hallway – down the first path of my Treasure Island.

Like a drunken Long John Silver between my wife and a nursing aide, with my rear sail a’flappin’ we pulled an i.v. pole along behind us down the hallway. “See, you can do this!” But what am I doing? Oh, yes, I’ve replaced my old pain with my new pain.

WHAT DO I WANT?

            In the end, there is no recovery, really. You can’t recover and go back to where you started. You are changed. It is precovery.

            My old days were filled with teeth-gritting movement dealing with Lord Arthritis. My days are now filled with teeth-gritting therapy. I wake in the night and lumber cartoonlike to the kitchen to get plastic bags of frozen English peas to ace bandage atop ice my swelling knee. My freezer is a treasure chest of frozen peas and corn. Booty call.

            The Pain Pirates have been replaced out patient Physical Therapists and exercise regimens. “If you don’t do the exercises,” they warn, “you’ll never walk.” What happened to 20 years off my life?

Oh yes, that 20 years is out there! You just have to go get it. Being set adrift on your life. Being marooned in time. Going at a different pace. Being alone until, as you walk down the beach of Treasure Island, you find footprints of someone else. Someone new. Not the Pain Pirates, not Lord Arthritis, someone else because you are someone else.

Aaarrg!

© Copyright 2016, Jean W. Yeager – All Rights Reserved.

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WHERE TO BUY:\ TH3 SIMPLE QUESTIONS: Slice Open Everyday Life
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BARNES & NOBLE: http://tinyurl.com/hzsyxun
NOOK: http://tinyurl.com/h7td54a
APPLE iBOOKS: http://tinyurl.com/hfexmsl
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