In Case of Fire

Here is an example of some of my recent writing meditations on signs, titled "In Case of Fire":

Doesn't this sign seem to be giving bad directions? I mean, "In Case Of Fire: Run Into The Flames?"

I took this photo in a nursing home elevator. It may become a painting. A series of paintings. A series of collage paintings titled "Mixed Messages." Mixed Media collages with all kinds of messages forming these crazy graphics we see every day that tell us not to slip on wet floors. Or that things are poisonous. My other new favorite is to discharge electricity before touching a gas pump. It appears that a man, the same man who adorns all Men's Room doors, has gained command of lightning. Or is getting struck. In either case, it is no time to man a gas pump.

Maybe this photo will become the basis for a poem. For a series of poems. Although, poems with accompanying imagery might be called children's books. Or coloring books. Poems are the black lines we fill with the pigment of our minds, our loss, our joy, our first ice cream sandwich of the season, the girl with tall boots in Copley today who may have noticed me too. People require room to fill the poems they read with color. Giving them a picture might dismantle this experience. Might be handing them a coloring book with stark-black pages. A connect-the-dots night sky without the stars. Giving them a picture might be like saying "Coloring time is over. Head to your room." No, poems shouldn't be disciplinarians.

Besides, this is prose. What would Patricia Goedicke, poet-extraoridnaire and former matriarch of the Creative Writing program at U-MT, say? Is this a poem? Is it a short story? What is a poem? Would her hearing aid start a shrill tone of anguish and emergency that her poet's ear couldn't recognize so deafened by the words of pages upon pages being torn against her lobes for years and years and years so that she couldn't even discern the alarm of technology reminding her to change the batteries or else she couldn't hear?

What else is a poem then, I should have said to Patricia Goedicke, but a shrill reminder from something outside ourselves that we can no longer hear? A coloring book we cannot touch but look at, longingly? A dark-haired girl who just bought a coffee and surely smells amazing and lingers at the pushing glass door for a moment and turns. What else is a poet doing besides begging the world to listen, to hear; a harsh, shrill sound that becomes the pattern in our minds as we decide between images and sound?

Patricia definitely wouldn't buy this. She would thank God for bum ears.

What was I doing in the nursing home? I was visiting my grandmother who has started a Gertrude Stein phase. "What's the blame? What's the rain you say? Do you blame much? You don't have any rain?" Little did she know, when she was working as a maid for rich people at the age of 14, that one day she would be imitating one of the most revered poets of the 20th Century.

True story: My grandfather had a hearing aid himself. He was also kept together by a variety of other technological devices. He had a pacemaker that he called a computer in Washington DC once a month to have recalibrated over the phone! The ear and the heart pounding through the veins of AT&T, progress and commerce. Thump, thump, thump. Without an electronic metronome for his heart, recalibrated through phone lines and far-away computers, my grandparents would have never made it to their 65th wedding anniversary. Which they did.

True story: My grandfather, they said—they being my mother and my grandmother—had selective hearing, or selective deafness. They both suspected that my grandfather never needed a hearing aid at all. It was a ruse! Because when my grandmother bellowed at him, "Red," from the kitchen to come do something, he never heard her. But if the oven door opened to release an apple pie he was right there. Bam. Teleported. Faster than the speed of smell.

Maybe, unlike Patricia Goedicke, my grandfather never needed a hearing aid. He certainly would have gone mad at the shrill sound screaming at his ear. In fact, many surmise, this is why he faked the requirement for a hearing aid. My grandmother was the shrill sound. My grandmother was screaming in his ear, "you can't hear me." And he learned to tune it out. Unlike Patricia Goedicke who couldn't hear it because her ears were filled with the sound of poems upon poems of students who had provided a coloring book without access to crayons, or had created an infinite starless sky. She was deaf from hearing too much. My grandfather, allegedly, from hearing too little.

My grandfather's name really was Red. My grandmother wasn't just hollering out colors. She wasn't into her Gertrude Stein avant-garde stage then. Otherwise, yelling out random colors like "red," "white" and "blue," would be a statement. No, my gram wasn't into her poetic stage yet, but she could bake the shit out of an apple pie.

Not literally. Shit is hardly ever one of the ingredients in apple pie. Except if you are making a statement. Like, there is a performance artist in my building who comes up with these great ideas for political event art: handing out nooses; dressing up like Uncle Sam and having people kiss his ass. Literally. Milan Kohout is his name. He might add shit to the ingredients of an apple pie as a statement. He might even yell out "Red," "White" and "Blue" as he bakes it.

To clarify: Milan Kohout is the artist’s name, not the true name of Uncle Sam. But getting Uncle Sam’s name changed to his own would be right up Milan’s alley. So to speak.

I like his art, which I find both funny and serious. Like life. Also like Kurt Vonnegut. Often, my writing tips toward him if I have been reading “Timequake” or something. I have been reading “Timequake” and “God Bless You Mr. Rosewater” again. This is becoming a poor impersonation. This is my version of Michael Scott on The Office doing Bill Cosby. I am now scanning the room to see if you are laughing. Or crying. Life is funny. And sad.

Like the man racing from the building and jumping into flames. Like my grandmother who seemed to hate my grandpa while he was alive. So much so that he grew selective hearing. So much so he needed a phone to call his heart and check on it. And now that he is gone she can't believe it. She is 98.

Sometimes she tells me "life is short, you know." Which seems funny and sad. Life is short, you know. When she was born, there was no electricity on her farm. No phone lines. My grandfather never would have survived. Patricia Goedicke would have never been able to hear. Technology couldn't keep any of them alive or hearing, or having machines stream into their ears "You can't hear anything right now, change your batteries." But life is short, my grandmother says.

And before you ask. No, she is not still around doing a Gertrude Stein impersonation because she is hooked to machines and computers, phone lines and oxygen masks. No, my grandmother doesn’t even have a hearing aid, although it is hard to tell what she can hear or not. Sometimes my mother calls the nursing home because she’s sure that there are years worth of waxy crayons building up in my grandmother's ears. My mother asks the people at the nursing home to clean her mother's ears. Talk about role reversal! In fact, yesterday when I visited my grandmother, I had to clip and file her fingernails. I was a manicurist. This was not role reversal, as I don't remember her ever being a manicurist to me. But she did tell me to wash my hands before dinner a lot. And dry them. She would check: I would hold my hands out for inspection, as I did to her's yesterday.

My grandfather taught me how to tie my shoes.

I wasn't good with lines. Kept getting them tangled or loose. They would fall apart in the middle of the day and I would stare down and have to wait to see him again.

Patricia Goedicke tried to help me with lines too. And now I am writing prose. This was like when I cheated and bought Velcro sneakers. And now the 80’s are back in full-swing. Life is short, you know.

My grandmother couldn’t see her hands yesterday when I was her manicurist: She is blind. There was an operation she could have had to cure it, but by then she was 80. What's the use, the doctors thought, in chancing it? How much more time does she have? That was 20 years ago.

Life is short, you know?

She often says, when not doing a Gertrude Stein impersonation, or homage, "it's better to be dead than to be blind." She liked to sew. And cook. And read. Play cards. The world is a sky filled with dark night and no stars to her now. The world is a coloring book without lines.

Maybe this isn't a Vonnegut impersonation. Maybe it is homage. Maybe Kurt Vonnegut has become the shrill screaming in my ear that is telling me to change my batteries or I won't be able to hear. I am certain now that Patricia wouldn't approve of this as a poem. I am uncertain now if it is the start of a multi-media series of works titled Mixed Messages. It is so difficult to choose between pictures and words sometimes. It is so hard to read. This is why little stick figure men try and tell us how to not slip and fall on wet floors—except it looks so fun, like they are breakdancing. The 80’s have returned!

I sure am glad my grandmother is blind now though. The last thing I would want to happen if that nursing home caught on fire would be for her to run as fast as possible down the stairs and into the flames. “No matter what the cost,” the sign should read, “you must avoid the elevator.” Or, “go down the stairs, but avoid the fire.”

Instead, it says, “At the bottom of those stairs is certain death. You might as well stay put. We’ll get you either way.”

Luckily my grandmother can't read either. At least not anymore. She was very literate for a woman from a German immigrant mother... for a girl who had to work as a maid at 14 and give all her money to the family. She married my grandfather at 19. And read a lot. And played cards. She was very literate for anyone.

And before you ask. No. I was named after my grandmother's favorite uncle, Kurt. She read a lot but literary giants like Gertrude Stein and Kurt Vonnegut would have been lost on her. Plus, when she was yelling "Red," she wasn't making a statement for or against America or anywhere else. She was hoping my grandfather's selective hearing would allow him to get up and help her do something in the kitchen, even if a fresh apple pie wasn't about to emerge from the oven: piping hot.

But even without the assistance of literary giants, or words, or eyes, my grandmother would never exit a burning building in an elevator. She is suspicious of technology even without an understanding of the internet. No, she would never use the elevator. But only since my grandfather died would she go sprinting down the staircase and give herself to flames. If she thought that they were waiting.

Except the sign isn’t saying anything about breakdancing or a monster fire at the bottom of the stairs. It is saying this: don’t take the elevator. The wet floor won’t make me a better dancer. The avoidance of the elevator won’t reunite my grandparents. The signs are sending mixed messages.

On The Office, Creed wondered why the Men’s Room was “white’s only,” he was so confused by what that little man on crosswalk signals, gas pumps, and elevator walls was trying to cry out. The little man is a shrill sound screaming at your eyes saying, “Just in case you can’t read, I am part of a picture that’s just as confused as you are.”

The little man said, “help me,” then ran downstairs and into flames.

It’s hard to tell what you should do sometimes. A poem or a picture. Or what to ask when your husband’s in the kitchen. Or what you might find waiting there for you whenever you arrive.

And sometimes endings are hard to choose. And they send mixed messages. Like “I love you,” and “goodbye.” Or, like “this is the end of something” and “this is the start of something new.”

Someone should yell at that little man running down the stairs and warn him of the impending fire. Here he is, selflessly careening down the stairs to warn us that the elevator is dangerous only to be met with his two-dimensional demise. Or he's standing there frozen staring at the licks of fire that are seducing him like sirens from the shore. Frozen in the flames. He’s screaming at us but no one can hear. He is a poem filled with asteroids where the permanence of stars should be, or the scribbles of Crayola in and out of lines. Hopefully his hearing aid is working, at least so we could stop him.

It’s the problem with words and pictures. With listening for something and looking now someplace else. When combined, they’re so confusing.