We have been feeding a neighborhood cat who was our dear departed neighbor-and-friend’s main pet. Pittypat misses him as much as we do. A newly-installed late last year backyard gate lock prevented us from our nightly feeding and watering visits to this cat’s bowls on the back porch.
So, we slowly enticed this truly independent creature to venture near our porch for an occasional feed and pet session.
During that summer 2020 night he passed, Pitter’s owner had had a large group of friends over for cards and many large format bottles of cheap white wine. He was fast asleep well past midnight, when Death glided in through the back screened-in porch, shadowless, over the dead soldiers waiting to be recycled out back.
Our departed neighbor ‘s house has been getting prepped for sale these past few weeks, so its former owner’s sister, her daughter’s family, and his maintenance man and longtime friend, Carl, have been sweeping out 26 years of accumulation like that found in junkyard cars and abandoned buildings.
We started peeking at the actual residue of his life as it piled up on his backyard porch and back-alley lane trash cans. There was no way of telling what things had been truly refuse and what had perhaps tragically been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, flyers advertising specials at the old no-longer in business market, old half consumed packages of butts, various combs and brushes, room rental ads, Yellow and White Pages torn from very old phone books, rags of old underwear and remnants from the various, handmade costumes for high society events he once attended as the arm candy of his hair salon’s elderly female clientele, tissues for wiping the fog off the inside of the windshield of his jalopy car with no working defroster so he could see whatever was out there that needed to be avoided, like a back road, small town cop who might pull him over just for drill, and all the rest — bits and pieces coated like a salad of sadness, in a grey dressing of ashy dust — it made heads spin and hearts sink to look, but we had to look.
Ted was his name; his life stories, triumphs, losses, and high wire acts became part of our lives’ accumulated but shortening daylight. It included harrowing escapes from tempestuous at-sea squall-lines and terrestrial F5 tornado touchdowns as well as laughter, hilarity, and infectious zest for living and loving his fellow man. No one of us knew the full him to list them all. Despite dedicating ourselves for months on end to making sense of his loss and what he had left behind, all we had didn’t even amount much beyond the piles of stuff on his back porch.
We wondered whether, at the end of this, we’d might be left with only the compiled memories, clues, announcements, intimations, but never Ted’s central truths, which somehow blazed out with no warning, leaving us overexposed when the daily humdrum world would flood back in.
Yet somehow, we were comforted when we recognized that these piles said his life was truly old school America, he lived in it, he let it happen and made it happen and he let it unfurl.
What a legacy — like truth and trash: inside-n-safe or outside-n-lost.
Our brief, four-year-long road trip with him really was, one fancied, this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere into the vein of our back-alley lanes, these veins nourishing the town’s homeless and junkers and the hungry from starving, while his sustenance injections into them kept many from incoherence and protected many of the suffering from pain, or whatever passes, with this city, for pain.
As his sister and Carl finished their cleaning and closed the back porch’s screen door this past Thursday night, we heard the lock click shut; the sound echoed a moment. They looked unseeingly our way and spread their arms out and upward a bit in gestures that seemed to belong to a priesthood, perhaps towards an ascending angel.
Friday and today, the last few shoppers are clearing out his things as keepsakes and touchstones. Folks in the house’s first floor’s rooms tarry one last time to talk and share stories of him as the accounts are settled, cash is counted, and the house is readied for sale to become someone else’s.
We and neighbors will still feed Pittypat. As Ted would have wanted.
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