The Lifespan of a Mourning Dove

I was walking on 30^th near Grape Street, where I live, and saw a man painting an apartment building all by himself. Right then I was thinking about how I was sad because I no longer wrote poetry. Or at least hadn’t in a while. Earlier that day I had read a poem translated from Korean into English and thought that I’d never write a poem as good as that. It was written in unrhymed couplets that were just barely being held together by some theme I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I walked this street nearly every day. Sometimes I’d be going to the liquor store. Sometimes I’d be going to Target to buy utility knives and glue sticks. To buy dogfood, cat litter, soap, you name it. Sometimes I’d just walk to be out in the world. Each time I walked by that apartment building over the last few months though I noticed the same man was painting it or preparing to paint it again. It was very subtle. He didn’t have scaffolding up or anything like that. He worked alone with just a ladder. And he didn’t use an air compressor, but instead old-fashioned brushes and rollers. One day he’d be working on the apartment proper, another day the trim, another the short little stucco wall that separated the apartment from the sidewalk, and yet another on the wood overhang that protected cars from the elements. At first it seemed completely normal and of a piece with the day to day existence of an apartment building, but over time it became strange. Like that myth of the Golden Gate Bridge, that once the painters complete it, they begin again, creating the illusion of newness. I thought that it must have taken some Zen-like fortitude to tackle such a Sisyphean project and I tried to put myself in his shoes, to figure out why he was engaging in such an endless task of repetition.

Another thing was that he didn’t seem to be listening to anything. There was no paint-spattered radio or headphones on (or in) his ears. He worked in silence. Maybe that was normal, but I thought it was strange. If it were me, I’d want some kind of noise to keep me company. I like to be distracted from the maelstrom of my thoughts. In fact, I woke up that morning with a headful of menacing dreams. In one a man with no shirt was brandishing a machete. I was hiding in some kind of redoubt that may have been a mountainside or may have been the patio of a condominium made to look like a mountainside. That’s the funny thing about dreams. The man with the machete looked like he meant business. In another I tapped a car with my car. Not even hard enough for it to be credibly called an accident. But the driver of the other car got out to get a gun from the trunk and began firing on me as I drove away. In yet another, I was in the apartment of a journalist I followed on twitter and had committed some kind of sexual faux pas. I awoke stewing in guilt. Dreams are strange because of how the self becomes bifurcated. You are both inside and outside your body, both the subject of the dream and the object who dreams it, with two separate contexts at play, like watching yourself in a movie.

As I walked by the man who was painting the apartment, a profound need to disclose these dreams overcame me, but I knew it wouldn’t have been appropriate. He was on his hands and knees on the grass washing his brushes. Instead of telling him about my dreams or asking him why he continued day after day painting this apartment building, I asked him why he chose to work in silence. He seemed taken aback by the idiosyncratic nature of my question and even I was surprised that I asked it. I think I really just wanted to understand this person, to get inside his head, so to speak. There was a bit of an awkward pause and I thought he was preparing an answer, but he just looked at me and said, what? I tried to explain that if I were doing such monotonous labor that I’d need some kind of voice or music to keep me company, something to help keep all my thoughts and fears at bay. I guess what I was really wondering was what he thought about all day while he worked and so I asked him, what are you thinking about while you do all of this? He looked at me in a way that shouldn’t have been surprising. I was clearly encroaching on the private world of his innermost thoughts. But he did actually seem to be considering the question. Finally, he said, this may sound funny to you but there’s not enough time in the world to explain all the weird shit that goes through my head all day. Fair enough, I thought about saying, but before I could get the words out, he said, just then he had been thinking about Heather. Heather was the last person he slept with before he met his wife. He was lonely at the time. They met, he said, in the late nineties at an art school in Oakland. He couldn’t afford it any longer so he took a job with a company that repaired window screens. And then they had reconnected on Facebook in 2008, him and Heather. He was living in Albany at the time, in the garage of an old woman named Keiko. They talked on the phone and it became clear that they were similar in their loneliness so he bought a train ticket to visit her where she was living in Portland. She lived in the basement of a house right off Division Street, across from an elementary school with grass around it so tall that it looked abandoned, but it wasn’t. He told me how when Heather went off to work at a bakery each morning, he’d lay in her bed and just pretend he was someone else. A new man in a new town, that sort of thing. He hadn’t made any kind of art in years and marveled at everything she had been able to accomplish. She’d come back with the leftover buns and pastries or whatever and they’d feast on them and drink late into the night. But he said, he wore out his welcome and it all just petered out. The specific thing he was thinking about though when I first began speaking to him, was brushing his teeth with her toothbrush as the two of them just looked at each other in her bathroom mirror. It was funny, he said, whenever he saw a mirror or even his reflection that memory came back to him. I tried to picture it in my mind, or rather tried to picture myself in a similar circumstance of such pure intimacy, the toothbrush of an estranged lover in my mouth. Then I noticed him looking over at two birds scrounging around a patch of dirt where the grass refused to grow. That’s when he asked me if I knew the lifespan of a mourning dove and I had to tell him that I had no idea.