He Was Dust

He was dust.  That was his conclusion.  It was who he was, where he lived.  He had rejected more likely descriptions such as it was dusty, as too passive.  It was a dusty place to live, and he breathed in the dust and breathed out the dust, and he kicked up the dust with every step he took…that was true, but ultimately too indirect and beside the point.

            He was dust, not dusty, and definitely not Dusty.  D., yes; so maybe Dee.  Dee was dust.  So long as you remember that, you’ll get it.

            Dee was also lonely, in that I’m not alone yet feel like I’m apart kind of way.  It’s not that Dee would get lost in a crowd, but when he was with other people Dee was not always present.  His mind couldn’t help but shift over into that stream of thoughts that began with futility and that eventually ended up going nowhere.

            Somehow Dee had hoped that it would be different, moving from Chicago to Santiago, Chile, in the middle of the U.S. Midwest winter to the middle of the South American summer.  January here was hot: skies overtaken by a sun that refused all cloud cover, fickle breezes and thus occasional stultifying nights, and yes, dust. 

            No clouds meant no rain.  An entire summer without rain.  And that was normal.  Walking around in the mornings and late afternoons, Dee would pass people with water hoses and sprinklers, wetting the dust that rose to reign in the front of their houses.  Patches of grass existed in this part of town, but it was ruled by the hard-packed dirt and so yellow dust.

            It was hard to grasp, this watering of the dust.  Watering front lawns to grow things, he got.  And people did water their patches of grass, their flowers. (Though that too suddenly struck Dee as futile.  Why water the grass to make it grow only to cut it down?  Too hot, this work, but at least water for plants made some kind of natural sense.  But not water for dust.)

            The thing that really killed him was when Dee would pass an early morning dust sprinkler where the water splashed across the already warmed over concrete of the streets and sidewalks.  Do you know that smell?  That evaporating water that carries the essence of the concrete into the air kind of smell. 

            For the years Dee loved that smell.  The smell of an early summer sprinkler splashing the sidewalks of a small town USA sunny day’s morning walk would remind him of the days on end with no school no cares no worries but getting home in time for supper.  The smell of clean, the scented trail of possibilities. 

            But the nose is the most devilish of memory sparks.  Odors travel faster than touch, more sure than sight or sound.  And every time, every yellow dust-forsaken time Dee caught a whiff of that mist the memory would catch him up and toss him down. 

            The dust that usually brought it on was the concrete dust of a construction site.  That was the most powerful, and piercing.  But first cousin to the hovering dust of concrete powder mixing with water smell was that of water on a hot road.  Dee couldn’t help it, this memory chain.  It’s like telling someone Don’t you dare even think about elephants and see what happens.  Pachyderms flood the mind.

            Dee tried to disassociate the dust from, well, he didn’t know what or why, but Dee couldn’t do it.  The very effort to not think about it brought it to bear anyway.

And what was it?  It was the two weeks he spent in NYC, the two weeks that began at the end of September 2001.  The two weeks-plus-whatever that began at the end of September and stretched into October.  And it stayed with him, long afterwards, long after he stopped staying in Manhattan, soaking up into the slush and sun of Chicago.  Stayed even now, in yellow dust of Santiago. 

            Of course in Santiago they don’t say two weeks, but quince días, fifteen days.  Sort of like the fortnight of the UK.  The same, mas o menos, only different.  And so it was.  Dee was dust the same only different.

            The day that towers fell Dee had stayed late in bed, enjoying the pleasures of a pastor’s rare Tuesday morning off, when the kids are at school and the schedule is clear for the morning, and the Monday had been too much and yet not enough.

He had sat up in bed that morning and turned on the TV, the Today Show and suddenly the tone changed with an odd report not yet understood, and Dee thought what everyone thought, and turned to CNN and saw what everyone saw.

            When the phone rang later that morning, it was one of the chiefs at HQ. 

“We’re putting together a team, Dee, the first group to reinforce the locals in New York will be from Chicago.  Can you go?”

“Sure, probably.  I mean yeah, I want to, I gotta clear the schedule. What would I do there?”

“Well, the official title is Grief Counselor, but, you know...it’s all kind of fluid right now.  Things change.  We’d have to know by Friday.  The team leaves on the 28th.”

A couple of days to decide, and a week to prepare.  The phone rang again, this time his best friend from a couple of states away.  Dee tells him about the trip.

“You better be ready, Dee, ready for how it’s gonna change you.”

“Yeah, but that’s why I’m here.  That’s why I got into the ministry.  This is what I want to do.”

This is what I want to do.  The same thing he had said when he and his wife pushed HQ to send them out of the country.  I want to serve overseas.  And now here he was, in Chile.

In Chile, where there were mountains all around that you could see sometimes, if the air wasn’t too thick with smog.  The best days were after a hard rain, but the relief of rains wouldn’t begin until after the Fall.  In Summer, the mountains were brownish smudges against a dirty haze of a blue sky.

And Dee arrived in Summer, in the dry season. 

One day, about a year and a half after he landed, after an unusually cold and wet Chilean Winter, and an unusually long and pleasant Chilean spring, Dee set out for another walk.  It was a Tuesday in mid-November that had Summer firmly in sight, with temperatures already in the 80s and removed by at least two months from the last of the seasonal rains.

His students were finished with their classes, and were away from the school where they all lived, for two weeks of practicum work in the area.  The sudden cessation of the busyness of the long school year that had begun in March appealed to him.  And yet.  And yet after only one day of this relative quiet and emptiness of the school, he felt the solitude returning, in all of its towering empty presence.

And so he set aside the final grade reports, pushed away the planning pages, turned off the computer and went to change his clothes for a walk on that almost-Summer Tuesday afternoon.  Dee pulled on shorts, a t-shirt, and decided on a pair of sandals that he’d never wear in Chicago but which were almost required by the heat here.  Coating his neck and face with sunscreen, he pulled on a baseball cap and then sunglasses. 

Turning the first corner, Dee saw the streams before he saw the sprinkler.  Rivulets of water were moving toward him, slowly filling the cracks in the road between him and the man halfway down the block with the water hose in his hands.  Watering the dust.

Dee stepped around the streams, walked ahead, shook his head again at the thought of someone wasting water like that.  And in his half-wasted effort to protect his new sandals and dance around the moving puddles, Dee stepped in it anyway, a confluence of water and the dust, and made some mud. 

And then of course it flashed in his brain, like a musical odor returning to flavor flaccid senses, a wrong lyric to an old song about the yellow dirt down in his toes. 

He gets up every morning and he lights upon the floor.
He migrates to the washroom and he opens up the door.
The whiskers on his chin tells him he's in, and then
Through the paste and the soap, sees an image without hope.
He's a broom of a fellow, an oddity in parenthesis.
So infected with disease of yellow dirt down in his soul.

He usually spends his spare time counting hairs upon his arm.
The ants upon the cupboard to his thinking add their charm.
He never starts to notice that his shoes are full of lead.
He's dead, through cough. Labored breathing, he is seething.
He's a sandwich of a fellow, an all-spread personality.
So infected with disease of yellow dirt down in his soul.

Last night a thousand stars were his to mold like clay, and so
In one split second's anger he did reach and take a hold.
He saw himself a captain way off in some kissin' situation.
That would have made his father proud, he laughs out loud.
He conceals the hurt. He reveals the dirt.
The yellow dirt down in his soul. The yellow dirt down in his soul.
The yellow dirt down in his soul. The yellow dirt down in his soul.

(Lyrics by James Seals & music by James Seals & Dash Crofts, 1971; from the album Summer Breeze, 1972).