Category Archives: prose

2024, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

Swing Shift Watch: The Time Between

This is the transition hours. She’s.next to me, askeep. I’m dressed for work and drinking coffee, waiting for the first of my two overnight watches for the week. We had a nice supper together.: bow tie pasta with roasted tomato, pesto, and sweet Italian sausage. One of those suppers that was so good, we talked about it an hour after, along with ways to make it even better or change it up a bit. This is what we do.

An old standard from classic BBC TV is playing on the TV: As Time Goes By. I’ve been watching this show for years. I first watched it on PBS when I was a kid. Saturday nights . The Red Green Show, As Time Goes By, Keeping Up Appearances, Have You Been Served?, Waiting on God, Last of the Summer Wine. I introduced Amanda to these shows after we got togther. I never get tired of them. I don’t know why. I’m not what you’d call an Anglophile. But there’s something comforting about them.

She’s sleeping hard. It’s been a long week for her, and it’s only Wednesday. Me getting back to work on the wharf after my hip replacement surgery has been an adjustment for both of us. She likes having me around, and I like being around, though I do get antsy if I stay around the house too long. I don’t light out on the road anymore, so I pour that into work, into the river.

On Swing Shift, we only sleep at the same time 2 nights a week. This makes the time between that much more important.

I’ve got about an hour left before I need to finishing puttering around and leave for work. The weather is warmer, but wet. From the weather reports I’ve read, I expect more thick fog and then rain after 4 in the morning. I pay attention to weather forecasts and river forecasts, even when I’m not working. Work didn’t make me this way, being on the road did. The weather and river patterns give me something to obsess over. It’s a sort of passive obsessiveness, always running in the background.

I’ll leave soon trying not to wake her up, and disturb the dogs as little as possible. She’s deep into one of her complicated dreams. I’m going to head out to mine soon enough.

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2023, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

Stand By

When I can’t sleep one of the dogs usually stays with me. Tonight it’s Nala, the husky mix. They’ve been keeping watch over me during the days while I’m recovering from hip surgery and Amanda’s at work. They’re good company, and I fully expect some temper tantrum from them… Nala in particular… when I go back to work.

I probably drank too much coffee today. I drink a lot of coffee in general, but I’ve been pretty good at dialing it back while convalescing. The idea has been to stay on the same wake / sleep schedule as Amanda. Been doing pretty good too, until today.

It could be the coffee or it could be that I feel like I’ve been away from the river too long, my recovery is going really well, and I’ve wound myself up about getting back to my life. Grateful as I am that the surgery has been successful and the recovery is going as well as it can, and as blessed as I feel that Amanda has been so amazing through this whole ordeal, most days my brain is just rattling around in my head.

My curse is a particular itch. In the past it sent me out on the road. Working on the river, on the Belle of Louisville, somehow scratches that itch. And as I round out the 4th post-surgical week, and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, I’m anxious to get back to my life. It reminds me of working the firebox on the Belle, keeping the boiler pressure at 180, waiting for the telegraph to tell me it’s time to launch.

And it’s not just about getting back to the boat. I’m anxious to spend time with my wife that isn’t a perpetual post-op. I’d like to visit my daughter and her family, get back to the perpetual hide-and-seek game with my granddaughter. I’d like to visit my mother ln Cincinnati and my brother in Cleveland. I want to start walking everywhere again and do so without the hip pain my surgery fixed.

But for now it’s me, Nala, and some cheesy TV. I’m sitting in my chair, feet up on a pillow on top of a small footstool. I’m down to one or two painkillers a day, and I’m finished with the post-op blood thinners. Life is good. The boiler’s up, the wheel is spinning, and I’m just waiting for the call to come down the telegraph to launch.

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2023, incomplete memoir, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

A recovery update: 4 weeks to the day

Some of my post-surgery recovery reading: the new memoir from Werner Herzog.

Trying to keep busy is awful. Waiting is the worst. You’d think I’d have all this time to write, and generally, the amount of writing I do corresponds to the amount of time I have.

But I also tend to write better when I’m on the move… or at least in motion. At work. On the road. In between. Something. I feel a little stuck in my head. All the words tumbling uncontrolled like a high water crest rolling downriver towards a broken dam.

Waiting is unnatural for me, in the same way that being this stationary is unnatural. People are sometimes surprised to learn that my natural state is in motion, since I’m on the tubby side. But the human body is a machine made to function best in motion. At least this works towards some advantage with my PT.

Amanda got home from work yesterday, exhausted from the Good Work of the World. She fell like a lightning struck oak on her side of the bed face first — not even bothering to remove her purse or hoodie. To her credit we still managed to get out of the house. We went to Lowes yesterday to buy a new toilet seat because the old one cracked, and no one likes getting bit on the butt. I was very little help in the replacement process, but I did enjoy the outing. Scratch that. I NEEDED the outing and she, rockstar that she is, tolerated my lousy mood.

Maybe there’s truth to the stories of hardware stores’ rejuvenative powers?

We also at dinner at Kashmir, our favorite Indian restaurant. The saag paneer was amazing, if not a little spicier than normal.

The couple in the booth behind us reeked of an odor that I call “redneck headshop”… that powdery, floral combination incense that very white midwesterners associate with Far Eastern Enlightenment. [NAMASTE Y’ALL!] Even a little chokes the oxygen out of the room like the incense used during High Ceremony Catholic Mass. It didn’t take away from the food, though, or the amazing company.

Which is to say: thank you, Amanda, for being so amazing. I don’t deserve you. Then again, you knew what you were getting into… ❤️

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