Smelling Roses & Eros On A Linoleum-tiled Floor
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
I have been thinking that 14 years ago,
seem not too long ago but time has passed in a way that I am reminded that 14
years (I am 71) from now statistically speaking I will be dead. So little time,
but time enough to remember and contemplate.
Getting out of the tub is now a chore that
I must accomplish with great care. I know that tons of old ladies fall in the
bathroom, break their hip and go to the hospital. Most always never return
home. Now I am not a little old lady but… and going up and down the stairs is another painful activity. I am sure that if I filmed a week’s goings up and
down I would notice that incremental slowing down.
Food is not so important. The idea of
food is, but like the smell of coffee and sex, perhaps, the actual consumption
of it does not match up to expectations. It could be that I am losing, little
by little my ability to taste. I over-pepper my food with no appreciable
improvement.
But smell, the smell of roses, is a sense
that was hyper good for me last year. I cannot understand that if smell and
taste are intimately related, why the divorce now?
By now many reading this will have left
suspecting I will go on a rant about getting old. A pity for them because this
is not a rant.
My eldest daughter, the one that lives and
teaches in Lillooet told my Rosemary a few days ago, “Now that you are retired
you can do all that.” My wife had complained that lately she had been sleeping
in and doing little. To this I can add that sometimes (hey sometimes I feel I
am cutting edge) I must stare at my iPhone 3G to find out what day of the week
it is.
Retirement if one does not park incessantly
in front of a TV can give one time to reflect, think, invent, plan, compare. It
seems that my wife’s complaint of inaction can be easily converted into
something quite transitive in a verb/grammatical sense. René Descartes would approve.
If food is not as pleasant as it used to be
and a large, very hot and very strong mug of good tea now pales to my former
idea of it, I must latch on to other events of my existence that might give me
pleasure. Reading is one of them an since I stopped buying books some three
years ago my VPL has provided me with lots of reading material as well as some
of the best old or uncommercial movie DVDs.
They say that eating and its opposite are
two almost supreme (superior to skiing they say) pleasures. Of the latter I can attest that I have no problem
and I enjoy in the process reading Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies and
The New York Times The Best DVDs You’ve Never Seen, Just Missed or Almost
Forgotten Edited by Peter M. Nichols and with an Introduction by A.O. Scott.
At age 71, as I may have hinted above, the
idea of sex like the smell of coffees is supreme.
I sort of know just about everything I need
to know about the sex act and I am not in the least naïve about it.
And so I can now get to the reason (justification?)
for inserting the pictures you see here. I will be perfectly honest. I looked
at them in a file in my computer and I asked myself how I could write about
them so that I could put them up and perhaps begin to fill some of those blog
vacancies of the last few weeks. The slicing off (rose clippers) of the tip of
my middle finger rendered my ability to type in a most limited way. It is
better so here we are.
The justification? When I looked at these
photographs I could remember the smell of the tiles of my old studio on Robson
and Granville. I do not want to reveal here the identity of the two women but
they were and are my friends. I especially appreciate their sense of trust and
their understanding of what I was trying to achieve. I remember their laughter and the smell of those Doc Martens. The stocking did rustle.
In this age of pornography, of unsubtle
pornography, of banal pornography, of boring pornography, of unimaginative
pornography, of lurid pornography, these images do more to erase years from the
age of my imagination that I feel young again. I feel young enough to look
forward to smelling my roses this May. Now where would I find women, in this
age of facebook (not that it must be written in lower case) willing to trust
this dirty (?) old man?
