We live in a complicated time and none more complicated than now, this day, and the days unfolding after it, like an endless procession of lawn chairs crossing this collapsible universe. The world is a dizzying place, much like the Tilt-a-Whirl at the county fair, and with much the same results on my digestive tract. I awake at night and lay gasping at the endless swirl of obligations, deadlines, and official filings a man is expected to maintain, until my breathing becomes so short that I pad into the kitchen for a cup of water.

Much of today's world too closely resembles the state of modern dentistry, which strikes me as nothing so much as a black cloud of descending pain and papered expense. A person with no appetite for paperwork is doomed in the world today. We are besieged by hosts of insurance policies, warranty agreements, and personnel policies, each the size of a phone book, bristling with litigious caveats and vague exclusions. They reek of ink and impending doom. They fall likes leaves each decaying layer atop another until they form a fossil record that chronicles a man's passage from embryonic water sprite to terrified and spindly specter. The armies of tear off tabs, and utility bills adorned with structured rate changes and justifications for fleecing the average man, align against me. They lean precariously on my kitchen table in sad, slanting piles. Each stack a reminder of how ill prepared I am for this world.

But to say that complexity affects the sexes differently would be an understatement. The female sex is, as everyone knows, eminently more adaptable and flexible and given to enroll in Yoga classes and drink bottled water with just a dewy hint of sun-ripened peach in it. Women crave and seek the interactions of others. They recognize its utility and seek it out. They cultivate it like a row of bright, blood red tomatoes arrayed in silver metal cages in a garden row. They correspond and converse and celebrate as if nothing could be more important than the birth of a friend's new baby or the occasion of a promotion from sales clerk to manager of the large sizes section in the local clothing store.

The male is less disposed to change and like any lumbering beast is bewildered by complication. He stares out of his tiny, close-set eyes as if the future were a city ablaze and he can not quite make it out through the smoke and haze. As the world becomes more complex men become more ill suited to it. We have strayed off the evolutionary ladder onto the branches of a nearby tree. We sit there hooting and pawing and scratching ourselves in distraction. The papers and magazines and network news shows are full of stories of men who have retreated into the shadows of hardwoods and fir. They are moving in the opposite direction from the rest of the world, drawing a coarse woolen blanket festooned with burrs and twigs over their heads to shut out the lights and beeps and buzzes of an economy and culture that has become all gatherers and no hunters, or all keepers and no finders as my friend Earl says.

None of which has anything to do with the tale at hand except to say that is has everything to do with it and sets it in context like a fine china dish rests in a cabinet of maple, comfortable, and rested, at peace with its surroundings. Sometimes you can't fish a creek until you know what's around the next bend. So it is with most stories. But this life I now live started easily enough as do so many others in a clean, well-lit kitchen festooned with pretty wallpaper of oak clusters and pilgrim maidens.

I had been dating Ms. Ellen Solowitz for some 6 months, just long enough for us to become comfortable with one another. But not so comfortable that one would simply indulge the music of the body as if it were a wind instrument, and emit a low flat E and never think twice. To the contrary, I was careful to keep myself shaved and combed and bathed and had even purchased a bar of pumice soap to free the coarse effluvia and imbedded grease from my skin to sensitize my epidermal layers to Ms. Solowitz's touch.

Her kitchen that evening was awash in smells. The pots set high upon the stove with a variety of blue flames rising up to meet them, burbled with heat and the slow, sighing expansion of metal. I had worked a good long week driving forklift in the warehouse west of town. By the time the table had been set and dinner set upon it, the marrow in my bones had turned to steam and only the hunger in my stomach kept me from collapsing into myself like an accordion. I sat awake and anxious to consume the assortment of food before me.

This meal marked a special occasion for Ms. Solowitz who, that very day had been promoted from her post as playground supervisor and teacher's aide to a regular teacher. A bliss born of the belief in an improving future had settled upon her like the mantle of optimism that infects every Chamber of Commerce from Maine to Mexico and nothing was going to disrupt it.

Why should it? She was a woman of intelligence and talent, born of good parents who steered her toward college and away from the career in cosmetology that welcomed so many of her girlhood peers with open arms. She had avoided an early marriage, and saved her money. Her grades had been good and her term papers immaculate. She had shown them to me once. Bundles of plastic coated missives festooned with red marks proclaiming "Good Point!" and "Excellent Organization!"

She had poured a glass of wine from some winery in California named in a foreign tongue I could not pronounce. The wine rose in her cheeks and blossomed as she unveiled the potatoes. I was quite taken by her at that moment and could imagine her alabaster skin, a masterpiece adorned with a single errant freckle and a nailhead sized mole at the nape of her neck. I imagined at that moment that the comforts of this home and this woman and a hot meal were all a man really needed. All the models splayed casually out on deserted islands wearing bikinis woven from coconut hair that torture and torment men's dreams and make them wish for stiletto heeled mavens with jaguar eyes were sheer nonsense. I could see that the cultivation of American's males was a lie and a sham. It was a carnal ephipany.

It was no wonder so many of us ran into bridge pillars or drowned overturned in drainage ditches. We had been lied to and none of the fat cluster of grapes that make up life's bouquet were every going to be fed into our open, gaping mouths one at a time.

Here amidst the sweetness of rising bread I could see it now. I knew the path to contentment lay in the company of a good, solid woman with unspectacular undergarments and a paid-up book club membership. The light shone on her hair and reflected in the casserole dish as she lifted a spray of asparagus spears to my plate.

The soft surface of her soufflé heaved like a bosom. "Is that enough?" she asked and I could only nod. My tongue was wooden with hunger and splintered with the aroma of meals laid out before me for years unfolding. Someone once described this unceasing flow of illuminations that crossed my bow like the realization that the pain in financing lay in the interest rates as an awakening. And so it was. I had come home.

The rest of the meal passed in rapturous glory. She was luminescent and I basked in the glow of her light. Contentment oozed out of me. My stomach was swollen in a tight, round bowl with the bountiful harvest she had laid before me. Her voice was melodic, rising and falling, with tales of rapscallions apprehended and lost and her hopes for a clean chalkboard the first day of school. I envisioned the future as a clean chalkboard myself, awaiting only to be written upon in her fine, feathery hand.

I must admit I was lost in this reverie when it became clear that at last the meal had ended. She had pushed back her chair and said "Would you like coffee and pie?" Of course I nodded. What happened next though was a shift in the universe so profound as to be unmistakable. I had read that some scientist had suggested that the movement of a butterfly's wing in Japan could influence a hurricane over the Atlantic. I had originally passed this off as the wishful thinking of another grant starved researcher looking for his next funding source, but suddenly I understood what he meant.

She exhaled and the butterfly wing trembled. "I'm bushed. You wouldn't mind doing the dishes would you, dear?" Taken at face value this was a simple enough issue. But for man whose marrow was steeped in pleasure and contentment it was like scraping a bread knife down a bone. The words swirled in the thin curlews of steam still rising from the potatoes and I watched them rising to the ceiling, lofting upwards to hover beneath the frosted glass globe of her ceiling light. As they spun there, the air sharpened their edges and ground their points until they looked like nothing so much as the spreading canopy of a thorn tree, and I floated beneath it a scarlet, fat balloon, rising, eyes wide open, to meet my piercing fate.

I rose and began carrying dishes in to set on the counter. Steadily I watched the broad smooth swathe of speckless formica disappear beneath a circular array of china. I was seized by the sudden remembrance of sitting some 30 years before, in the living room watching a man on the Ed Sullivan show spinning plates on the end of poles. He worked to keep every plate spinning of the end of a pole, fearful that one false step would bring the whole fragile arrangement crashing down.

Still, I worked on until the dining room tablecloth was clear and the kitchen counter piled so high, that I left the pots on the stove. I ran a heady stream of hot water into a sink and squeezed a lemony soap in for suds. The scrubber was plastic and shaped like a kidney. I started with the plates and placed them one by one, each sliding beneath the soapy surface like a stone.

As I began scrubbing the first one, something drew my eyes to the kitchen window and outside above a hedge of oleanders and privet I could see a line of stars burning out above a line of telephone wires, beyond the edge of town. As God is my witness, I was suddenly filled with a sense of longing and sorrow so deep I was riven by it.

I waved the plate back and forth under the tap, rinsing it clean. The air in the kitchen was warm and close. I wiped my hands on my pants and walked out on the back porch. Ellen's back porch light was out. She had been asking me for a month to replace it and the bulb hung opaque in its cradle, bug encrusted and useless. Beyond it the entire sky blazed, each star sunk deep in its canopy.

Suddenly, I heard Ellen cry "On no!" and I raced back inside to find the kitchen filled with smoke. One of the burners beneath the baking pan was still on and the crust of the soufflé had dried and finally ignited. I scooped up an oven mitt, grabbed the back corner of the pan and walked out into the back yard trailing a cloud of black smoke in my wake. The pan was so hot I set it down on the edge of the yard. The thick crust continued to
burn, so rather than pick it up and carry it closer to the hose bib, I turned on the sprinklers instead.

The fire burned bright yellow and blue, each flame rising and falling, consuming what was left of the soufflé as eagerly as I had. The arc of the sprinklers reached the pan in a ragged pattern, each drop falling like a tiny comet into the pan. As they struck the flame hissed, unrepentant, blind in its hunger, gorging on its own downfall. I stood there in the darkness watching the dark, wet pan. Then for whatever reason, as I stooped to retrieve the pan, a large spark blew out and upwards, caught by an errant breeze, and I watched it go, a single red coal, like Mars I thought, winking in the darkness.

Turning back to the house I was startled by Ellen standing still in the doorway. "Did you burn the grass too?" she snapped. The condition of the grass had never occurred to me. Now I wondered if I had killed the grass, too? Too? Dichondria is a fragile form. She was right. A rectangled flaw would greet me as a reminder for the next few weeks, until the new growth took over. But even new growth only covers. It doesn't really erase. People have longer memories than Dichondria. As I turned to move toward her, Ellen simply eased back inside, shaking her head.

Before I knew it I had crossed her back yard, hitched a leg up over the fence and vaulted into the alley. I thought just once I heard her voice but I couldn't be sure. A dog set in to barking and I lost the sound. I simply kept walking with a feeling in my chest that I can't explain. Sometimes we know we're digging deeper but that shovel in our hands just won't stop falling and we seek refuge in a hole of our own making.

I walked, watching the stars as they sparked through the trees. After a few blocks I launched into an old song I hadn't heard in years. I wondered if I had reached a place in my life, as everyone must, where there are songs they will never hear again, just as there are people they will never see again, until at last they are beyond the reach of any song.

But whether I heard it again or not, I remembered it now. My voice rose past the open windows of houses and I imagined it over the roofs, floating in space, a tiny, tuneless thing, worn thin by the distance, weightless and free. Another carbon life form, crusted and burning for such a brief, clear time. Just a song and a voice, unencumbered. Floating far away, beyond the grasp of gravity.

Gary wears his A Prairie Home Companion hat everywhere, though he does remove it in church and for the singing of the national anthem. He finds it functional, attractive and the closest thing to a thinking cap he's ever found.

Gary has no plans for a first novel or a sequel. He can be reached at: gary@gsandy.com