Mean Old World

It's rainy and dark and I almost don't see the old man pushing the overloaded shopping cart when he steps into the street directly in front of me.  I slam on my brakes and he glares at me, shaking one gloved fist in the air and shouting something unintelligible into the wind.  It wasn't close enough to be a near miss but still my heart hammers a little faster until he reaches the other side, navigates the curb and gets swallowed up by the darkness.  

I thank my lucky stars that I wasn't going faster, that the brakes didn't take a sudden notion to  hydroplane, that he didn't step out a second or two later.  It's the what might've beens that give me the most trouble. There are times they seem to be everywhere, chattering like a flock of seagulls, deafening me with their cries.
Their cousins, the what if's are never far behind.  As Marl Young and T Bone Walker wrote, This is a mean, old world to live in all by yourself.

My eyes aren't what they used to be - but then again, what is - so I check both sides of the streets before I drive on.  The State House building is empty but lit up like a Christmas tree, the now defunct hospital is closed and dark, the single three quarters enclosed bus stop is vacant and littered with debris.  There's not much here beyond the local bar, an abandoned corner lot with a shabby For Sale sign, a recording studio that has seen better days and a solitary block of small buildings with vandalized walls and smashed windows facing the ever present and somehow lonely convenience store with its blaring neon lights and self service gas pumps.  The interstate is just a block or two ahead and then you're on the outskirts of downtown, block after block of sad, decaying structures, pot holed streets, dark alleys and fenced off sections of forgotten landscapes.  It feels forlorn and miserable, like a terminal illness.  The homeless and those who prey on and condemn them prowl the filthy streets along with the feral cat colonies, the hookers, the drug dealers and the rats.  At times it feels like the whole city is dying and dying badly, without dignity, without putting up a fight.

Determined to derail this particular train of thought, I pull up to the stop light and crank the Hugh Laurie cd a little louder.  Police Dog Blues by Blind Blake, The King of Ragtime Guitar, fills the car and makes me smile.

It may be that nothing brings on the might've beens and the what if's like sitting at an empty intersection in the rain and the dark, waiting for the light to change and thinking about a homeless old man with a shopping cart, worrying that one day I might become him.

It may be that nothing chases them away so fast as an elegant, well educated Englishman singing an old blues tune by a ragtime guitarist dead since 1934.

It may be that all the might've beens and what if's the world conjures up don't make a damn bit of difference in the what is.

Move along, I tell myself, nothing to see here.

Late at night, when I can't sleep and end up replaying old tapes and old choices and listening to the old voices in my head, I backslide.  I think of opportunities I gave away with both hands, of choices I made on impulse, of roads I took out of restlessness or boredom or mild misery.  I think about the uncertain future.  When you're thirty something, you don't think about being sixty something.  You think you have time, that something better will come along.  You can't imagine being old, sick, miserable, or poor.  And then one day - just like that - you are.

The scariest monsters are the ones that lurk within our souls ~ Edgar Allen Poe