And so this is retirement, huh.

It’s not so bad.

I have been cooking and moving my legs in outdoor settings. I have meandered about at book fairs and worked wine-tasting banquets.

I have eyed red leaves in hopes of making them mine. But they blow away before I can snatch them up.

I sometimes wave to the neighbors when I collect my mail, or take my garbage to the curb for collection.

It’s all coming together nicely in nice ways and all that.

However: I have not played a single game of Yahtzee or Solitaire, and have not been overly excited about any impressive bowel movements in recent memory.

I have done some more things, now that I remember: I print (not clip!) coupons, because retail is for suckers. And sometimes I find myself driving my car, and sometimes I find myself driving my car on Sundays, which of course is the day when the old drive their automobiles like blind rats.

However: I do not drive on Sundays with the intention of eating the same meal at the same restaurant and leaving the same paltry tip for the same bubble-gum-smacking server who hates my guts and talks to me like I’m three-day-old baby.

As far as I can tell, I’m dangling over madness; I am yet submerged in it. We can say, perhaps correctly, that I have lost only half of my mind. The other half is safe and sound, dry and alone, smelling of dead leaves and Tibetan incense.

And what a wonderful smell that is.

Here I am urged to say something like this: “Recently, a friend of mine told me that . . .” even if I would be lying in saying so. But: nothing has happened recently with anyone, and I can’t think of a single Goddamned thing that any friend of mine has said that permits itself to be repeated here, in text, in this “narrative”, which shivers calmly as though it is something that is perhaps important.

Not a single word!

And so there will be none of that . . .

No stories, nothing. I don’t feel anything about it, good or bad. I am indifferent as the tumbling red leaves on my doorstep.

Though, something did happen recently. Recently, I visited my father. I did not choke him. This is something that we, who are retired, do — we visit our parents. We share meals with them and tell them all about the big bullet points in our lives when they ask. Only now, as a retired man in his twenties, I can say this, when asked what I’m up to in that godless state of Maryland: “Just the same as you, Dad.”

Dear old Dad says: “All the same, huh.”

No kidding, I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be in that state with those people. Two and a half months doesn’t sound like such a long amount of time to be away from something, but hell, it really is. If I stay away from the source for more than just a few weeks, something in me cracks and rapidly it does this, and I just maybe lose my mind.

Half of it, at least.

Don’t know where the other half ran off to. Might be gone for good. Hell.

What do old people do when this happens?

Maybe they shrug, I don’t know. They probably put up posters with pictures and a reward.

Anyway: I sat in a rocking chair for four hours, and we said some things to each other. We watched a two-hour special called “National Parks”, maybe, I think, and it just about moved this old man to tears.

Real ones, too. At first I thought something in me had cracked again, and the other half of my brain was making a break for it, leaving my upstairs a vacuous dome full of used matchsticks and homeless brain cells. But no, my eyes bubbled like warm marshmallows and, a rare feeling was felt in that big empty place inside of my chest, right there in between where my mother used to pick me up with both hands and say happy little words to me.

There were numerous interviews with conservationists and park rangers and the children and nieces and nephews of important dead people whom I now find myself harboring tremendous respect for. Everyone who spoke had eyes like my eyes: circular and dark and far-reaching for another place that is not accessible in any other plane of existence other than the warm pockets of a humming mind. They would say things about their childhoods, and of their childhoods spent in the tens of thousands of acres long-gone governments protected because they ought to have been protected, and God bless them for it.

One man spoke of the wolves. He said that wolves had not been in this particular national park for almost seventy years, because they’d been labeled nuisances by long-gone peoples and slaughtered for existing in a place that was their home, and acting in a way that was normal to them.

Through time and money and effort and respect, the indigenous wolves were bred in captivity, and released into their home again to act like wolves act, and do what it is that wolves do.

Shaking, his eyes in that far-off place that I vaguely understand but do not know personally, he said that he heard the wolves cry out in unison. He said that this was the first time any human being had heard the crying of those wolves in seventy years.

Some wolves were shown standing on a rock, the six of them howling together at a Mars-red sky. The camera cut back to the man telling the story, and he began to cry.

Man.

My father and I said nothing to each other, which gave weight to the air. It had a nice heft to it. I knew that we were both thinking the very same thoughts, and if we had been inclined to make those thoughts into conversation, it would have been the first thing we’d have agreed on in a very long time: Goddamn. What a thing we just experienced. And from a television set. What a world, what a world. Goddamn, what a world.

Ten minutes later I was tying my laces and looking out at the big blackness. I was preparing myself to drive in that big blackness. My father, he said: Please stay, don’t go. If you head off, well, I just don’t know. Stay here with me, sleep in my home. When you wake up, you can go.

I said, no, I’m going to go. It’s late and I’d rather be driving.

It had been two and a half months since I was presented with the opportunity to drive on the highway at night. My leg itched and my eyes bubbled some more.

When I hugged him — and I did hug him — I didn’t even think about choking him in an alternate reality where I put a stop to my own birth. I was happy, at that moment, to have been created to live for two decades and a little more so that I might hug that man, and scratch at my leg with my opposite foot, and drive at night when all is deep and black-dead-silent. When the sounds could tumble through the half of my mind that stayed behind. When I could drive on empty highways and dream the things that little boys dream.

I won’t even pretend that I didn’t think about wolves.

When I last heard a wolf howl, I don’t know. I have never heard wolves crying in unison.

And presently I find that I don’t mind if I never do end up hearing that sound. I know that the sound exists, I don’t need to hear it. Its existence is enough. It is more important than me.

I sit tonight at my black wooden desk in the corner of my room — my mind, the half of it that still exists, whirring and sparking with kernels of static electricity and indifferent feelings. The nighttime air creeps into my space through poorly-insulated windows. I’ll fix the windows before the snow settles in. It’s all I can do, these days. I’ll do it on a Sunday.

It has been a year since I have worn this gray sweater. I wear it to ward off the cold. And now I think I will sip my tea and settle in to the sleep of a retired man in his twenties. I will sleep under the weight of three blankets. It is cold, but I don’t mind. I’ve lost my mind, maybe, but I don’t mind.

And now I think I hear music . . .