My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

I’m getting to be middle aged. 36 years old. I suppose some horses live longer than that, but not many. I have not become the person I thought I’d be by now. But I’m a lot more than I could have imagined. Just not all of it is so great.

I think about my lady, who I won’t commit to. She’s getting older too, and that means no kids even if she wants ‘em. I wonder if not having kids is like not being a guitarist in a band. Not reaching dreams. I’ve dreamed about that since I was a boy in roller skates watching girls go by with guys holding ‘em under dimmed lights and silver disco ball squares swirling across the poured floor. I was hanging onto the rail by the arcade games, too poor to play them, too clumsy to skate. If I played guitar I could impress people without being seen. I wanted to be big.

I never spent the time learning how to really play the thing. I never put the time into any relationship. I pick things up, put them down. I work for a guy doing construction, then skip town for an adventure. When I come back, people still want work done on their houses, so I pick up the shovel and dig out catch basins and sprinkler lines. Just about the time I remember how lay out a french drain I find something else to learn about. I’ve had some jobs. Lots.

I move around. Some gals might be okay with that, but this one I’ve been with isn’t that way. I’d say most aren’t. She’s a good one. She likes to bathe me. Can you believe that? I didn’t like it at first, I felt like a handicap. Why didn’t she just let me soap up and scrub myself off? No, she wanted to run hot water and have me sit in the tub. I felt like a cat in there, sprayed by a skunk, held down in the sudsy water.

After a while I came to like it. Maybe too I was afraid to like it because then I’d have to do something nice for her. “If we could just each take care of ourselves,” I thought. I didn’t tell her I liked it. I said, “If it makes you happy, go ahead.” That was the fourth time. I said it so it was like I was doing her a favor, since she seemed to enjoy scrubbing me so much. But I’d come to really enjoy the hell out of it.

I’d always been a shower-man. Quick. Easy. Didn’t have to scrub the tub out to lay down in it, just stand under the water. I’d had some pretty nasty looking showers. Black rings of soap scum and dead skin. Drain choked up with hair and strings of semen. Nothing pretty. But this gal, she spent the weekend doing landry, washing floors, scrubbing the tub. I don’t get around to washing my bed sheets more’n once a month I’d bet you. Half the time I fall asleep on the couch or in a chair, so I figure they aint getting used much.

It’s just nice to be with someone who approaches things a little different from you. You learn that way. She got me using lotion on all my body, head to toe, after I get out of the bath. So I won’t be all wrinkled up. “Black don’t crack”, she’d say. Black people don’t get the wrinkles like white people. It’s all that lotion they use. White people like me, we can’t tell when our skin is dry. Well, it feels dry, but it doesn’t look dry. Black people, their skin gets what they call ashy, so they can see it’s time to moisturize. Otherwise they start looking white.

I’ve always been that way, interested in learning about other people. Traveling, talking to folks. Never been interested in settling down and adopting their ways. I suppose I’m a romantic. Which means I don’t want to commit to something real, I’d rather keep looking for new things to dream about. Makes it hard on a relationship.

I wouldn’t mind at all knowing a few good women around the world, and when I was handy, stopping in and getting to know ‘em again. Doesn’t work that way. Cuz I’m asking ‘em to wait around for me, without even knowing it. This old gal here, who bathes me, she aint waitin’ around no more. She left the door open for me long enough, she told me. Too hard on her to have me coming and going. Time for someone who’s gonna stay around.

People like building things that last. That’s what they say. I don’t see much of anything that really lasts. But I suppose even a life time is long enough. To build a relationship over all those years and differences, that’s a lot of work. Some folks, sixty years of marriage is all they can say they’ve made of their lives, but I wouldn’t knock that. But me, I pick up the guitar and play the couple of chords I learned years back, and try to find an old tune I was working on, and then it’s time to head to the out of doors.

Real smart folks, you read their biography or catch it on t.v., they talk about taking things apart as kids. Taking the radio apart and putting it back together just to know how it works. Me, I took my radio apart and that was enough. It laid on my bedroom floor for over a week, the silver tuning knob and the dial face and some wires dangling onto each other like limbs in a blast, tiny shreds of what used to work left for the imagination.

Maybe I fooled myself that I understood it and could put it back together, so I left it there and my mother threw it away after a while. Or I would dig holes and bury things, planning on coming back in thirty years when it would be valuable. I have toys buried all over the woods on Great Bay Road. From what I hear, those woods have been cut down and houses put up. You leave things alone and they change. I never expected that.

I never expected someone else to move in and take away what I had. Suppose that’s why people marry off. Stopping by to say “I love you” every spring leaves three other seasons to put their touch on a woman. So I can’t blame her for asking for more from me. She deserves it. She treats me real good. Better than anyone. I can’t say I understand it myself, why I still think about heading south in a few months here, and seeing what turns up down there.

Maybe I’m still waiting to learn that guitar before I make another promise to myself.