A small life

Sad and lonely, scared of large open spaces with no walls

Thomas and Dale in St. Paul’s Frogtown. C. 2024 The brick building used to be Diebel Drugstore. Speedy Market is still across the street.

When I was young, I dreamed of living a large life. My world then was a neighborhood — Frogtown in St. Paul, to be exact. We had three blocks down to the Victoria Hill, two blocks over to West Minnehaha Park and when we were older, hopped over the fence to the BN railroad tracks and walked the three miles to Kmart. There was Thomas and Dale to the Diebel Drug Store. Across from that drug store was the Speedy Market and down the street was St. Agnes Church and the school I went to for 13 years.

A little further on Dale was University which led to the library on Lexington and Ax-Man Surplus, a glorious playground of everything old, reeking of dust, grease and sweat. But we had to cross in front of some crack houses to get there, even though crack wasn’t really a thing then. Coke, smack, snow; whatever you called it and scarier drugs that needed needles. If we got past those houses without being harassed, there were the hookers outside the Belmont and the 25¢ peep show houses to cross, but once we got to the bakery with the best doughnuts in St. Paul, we were safe. Nobody bothered kids on University between St. Albans and Snelling. We had no money and the fight wasn’t worth the grab.

Man, I wanted out.

When I was nine years old, I got three paper routes when St. Paul had two newspapers, the Pioneer Press and the Dispatch. Every day, I was up at 4:00am to deliver the papers before school, then home in the afternoon to deliver the Dispatch. Every day for five years. No days off, no weather too bad to skip.

That’s how you knew which kids were poor back then. The kids with the paper routes had a little spending money for the drug store, but could never take a day off. My family couldn’t afford a vacation and the most we ever went anywhere was Lake Gervais in the summertime.

My world was small, but I raged every day. I didn’t want to deliver the newspaper, I wanted to write for it. I didn’t want to slog through manual labor, I wanted to be paid for a thinking job. I saved my money for college and a car. Up and out, that’s where I was going.

The pandemic made my life small again. It’s still small.

Some days, I like it in my cocoon. I should be satisfied with what I have, that this is all there is and I should be happy with who I am and what I’ve done. I have a house, an income for now, a dog that walks with me every afternoon, though she is now fourteen and I’m not sure how long that will last.

I’m getting old now and things cross my mind at the oddest moments, like how easily America throws away its older people because it is a place where the only use for a human body is to make money for someone else. When you can no longer do that easily, you are discarded like a piece of worn machinery.

I’m not whining, I’m just stating an empirical, observable fact.

Or how I have spent my entire life making life frictionless for others and realize now too late that I have not done what I wanted without compromise. Not entirely what I wanted, just somewhere in the comfortable middle which almost always seemed to be the exact thing others wanted for themselves, but tolerable for me. It was still in the zone, so I relented.

I can always tell when I voice a dream too far out of the comfort zone of others. They get really quiet, perhaps fearful that I will actually do it.

---

It’s just too late to live a larger life without being marked as a difficult person, perhaps even one who abandons friends and family for selfish pursuits. Nobody ever remembers how you made their life frictionless. Or how much money you made them.

Most weekends, I wallow in the sad. Joy is a luxury I can’t afford.

I think often that statistically, I have less than a decade to live, fewer than ten years. That’s roughly about ten more Christmases. I love Christmas, but with the exception of one a little over two decades ago, I have had to celebrate the Christmas everyone else wanted. I nod, I smile and say “thank you” at the gifts, I show up when and where I’m told. I put up the tree every year, but every year, it’s always decorated not quite right, not shaped quite right, the lights are all wrong.

Maybe next year I’ll get it right and not have to apologize for screwing up the holiday.

I’m not “anything.” I’m not a doctor, lawyer, plumber, teacher, roofer, accountant. I’m just … a big mess who did whatever job paid the bills best. Now, I’m just a shell of a small life. No, it’s true, so if your inclination right now is to disagree with me, that you see me as more than what I see myself, please stop. I am a small person in a small place doing small things. And when all my Christmases have expired, I’ll be a small blimp in a memory somewhere for a very small amount of time.

I draw the shades and nobody knows I’m here, though they watch me walk my dog in the middle of the afternoon. One day, I won’t walk and the next, they might look in on me.

But I won’t be here.

The only thing now keeping me to this small life is knowing nobody else will walk the dog. When she goes, so will I¹

1. In a Chuckie goes to pick up Will for work at the end of Good Will Hunting sort of way.