Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk

by Kathleen Rooney

The only century I’ve known. Or so I claim—born in 1900, I always say. I’m lying, though, because my real birth year, 1899, made me sound like a grotesque relic, even when I wasn’t.

In the sixties, long after I had been forgotten, a clever young man even published a well-regarded book by that title—Lunch Poems—and although I wanted to resent him for jumping my claim, I could not; his lines were too full of the real sounds of people’s voices and the vitality of the street.

I very much enjoy that MTV, for instance, those music videos, and I watch them often, though I still find that a long walk through an unfamiliar neighborhood teaches me more about what’s new and exciting than any number of hours of television can.

I am old and all I have left is time. I don’t mean time to live; I mean free time. Time to fill. Time to kill until time kills me.

Progress is loud: riveters riveting, radios blaring. The decay currently taking place is mostly quiet, a steady dissolution, almost inaudible. But everything was new then. So was I.

“There is something about the year’s end that leads to a taking of stock that can lead in turn to melancholy. Isn’t that so?”

I figure Chelsea is a hair under three miles away as the crow flies, but I’ve never been inclined to let crows plot my routes.

If you can fool even your closest friends into thinking you’re sane, then maybe you’re not so crazy after all.