Running down the street joyously carrying a mattress on one's head

Running down the street joyously carrying a mattress on one's head

fiction
Edward w Pritchard


I haven't yet ran down the street joyously carrying a mattress on my head but I did work as a furniture mover for a moving and storage company once to earn money for those I loved at the time. It was heavy and difficult work and not everybody could do it. It took a lot of fortitude and vitality.

Working on a moving truck is hot, heavy and difficult. But I remember being dropped off each morning at 6:55 AM if we were lucky enough to have a moving job that day. We worked straight through lunch at my moving company job because my boss didn't take breaks in the day but he did sometimes buy me a beer on the way home. I only had one beer because I wanted to get home and I never messed with the waitress' but now and then one would want to talk to me there at the table. After a long days work I still had time and energy for fun and games in the evening but I didn't run carrying  a mattress on my head but I did have a mattress at home I remember.

I remember going home each Friday with my pay, we got paid in cash and it seemed like a million dollars at the time to share my earnings with my close family. Although I was tired we always went out and had burger King special, whopper, fries and a coke, no one was vegetarian then, and then bought some household furnishings to go with the mattress. Even though I had worked all week at the moving company carrying furniture I carried the newly acquired new furnishings up the stairs to the apartment without stopping to take a breath on the steep stairs; I was quite vibrant in those days. Sometimes I played poker on Saturday nights and brought a little more money home to the household, it seemed like another million dollars in those days but I didn't mess around with the " ladies" who came to the various poker crowds at all those Saturday night poker games not even if they followed me to my car asking for a ride home more than once.

It's funny what you remember looking back forty or fifty years and what some people choose to remember and how someone can change and not remember how things were once and even try to recant their previous feelings. It's funny and all but it still doesn't make me now want to run down the street joyously running carrying a mattress on my head.

I guess running down the street joyously with a mattress on one's head is a metaphor for something like an item from a Breughel painting, like the Breughel painting " the triumph of death" you know, the one in Madrid Spain at the Prado where I went once and stayed in a hotel that once was home to a King of Spain. I remember they had a real comfortable mattress on the bed at that hotel. When you slept in it you were warm and comfortable and the whole world seemed as it should be safe and secure with no need to run down the streets with a mattress on your head or anything like that.

Only sometimes do I remember old times like being in Madrid, Spain or working as a furniture mover, or the " ladies" at the Saturday night Poker games in all the nefarious places I use to go when I was young or how I was such a straight arrow in those days; keeping my promises and being contented with what I had. My own mattress so to speak, that's what Breughel might interpret  the metaphor of someone running down a street joyously with a mattress on their head as I suppose.

I won't post an image from google images of the Breughel picture " the triumph of death" though, you had to be there at that hotel in Spain or at the Prado to understand what the metaphor of someone running down the street joyously with a mattress on their head really means. You can't learn it by just getting old or anything like that.

It's funny what you remember looking back forty or fifty years and what some people choose to remember and how someone can change and not remember how things were once and even try to recant their previous feelings. It's funny and all but it still doesn't make me now want to run down the street joyously running carrying a mattress on my head. It's like my final lamentation, lamentation of understanding or something like that; I wish Breughel was here to paint something for me about my most recent deciphering of some of things that were said to me that confused and confounded me a long time ago. That's life I guess, but it's just sort of sad really, not profound, or epic or anything just confusing. Oh, that it were different and all that.

end

Lamentation 11

fiction
edward w pritchard

Who tore down the great nations of history has cast his gaze on me. I fall and suffer, slowly dropping into nameless obscurity. Forgotten as I live, soon to be unknown forever into creeping perpetuity to the descendants of the sons of Men. Broken by the challenges of random fortune at the end of my existence I stumble alone deafly waiting for my last cue from him who created cosmic order and significance.

Hear my pleas! Where do I go?  There are so many persons scurrying fro and yon as I sink into whirling ectropy.

What do I say and write?