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Tomorrow is the final exhibit at Gallery 9700F, and that also means my time writing for it has come to an end for the time being. Here is my final piece, and I hope you’ll all go visit the website and keep checking back as text and video from the second, third, and fourth exhibits will be added to the site once the semester is over and we get some free time to work on it. So, here it is. The title of this one is “Peace, Be Still.” Thanks for reading this blog.
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He couldn’t understand why he kept smelling oranges. Was it this new medicine his doctor had him on? He’d been slowly losing his sense of taste for months, but that was a side effect he’d been warned about. He didn’t remember the doctor saying anything about smell though. But then again, he hadn’t been remembering much of anything recently. When his daughter came to visit him, he could never tell her whether he’d already eaten lunch or not, and the surfaces in his house were beginning to be covered in sticky notes reminding him of where things were. He’d lived in this house for the past sixty years; you’d think he’d be able to remember things about it better.
Most of the time, unless his family came to visit, he would sit in his chair and watch television. He used to leave the house for groceries or to go walk at the gym, but once he got lost in the middle of the supermarket and another time he couldn’t remember how to open his garage door, and after that he was too scared to drive anywhere. So now his family brought him food and did whatever he had forgotten to do around the house. Sometimes he would get out of his chair at night and go to bed, and sometimes he’d stay in the chair and forget that he wasn’t already in bed until he woke up the next morning.
Once when his family was over a program on the war came on television and they started asking him about it, because they knew he had been a soldier and he liked to tell stories about his time in the service. He happily began to talk, and it took them some time before they realized he was just repeating what was on the screen. It depended on the day, really, whether he could remember things or not. His family learned to be patient when he would repeat questions or ask a person what their name was over and over.
For the past few days he hadn’t been able to shake this orange smell. His memory, strangely, had been pretty good lately; he’d remembered everyone’s names and hardly had to look at the notes to find things. Besides not being able to taste anything he felt pretty good. He felt a little lucky, actually, because his family had gone on a vacation and he had been worried about what would happen to him while they were gone. But the first night after they left, he slept in his own bed. The next morning he got up, ate half a grapefruit, and sat down in his chair. In the evening another war program came on, and as he watched his memories from being on the ship in the Pacific came flooding back. He remembered the taste of the military food and the smell of the mechanics below deck. He remembered his friends and all their names. He remembered how they used to go into the port cities when they had a couple days off. He remembered the sound and shock of the ship being torn apart when it was torpedoed.
When the program was over he got up from his chair and went into his bedroom, slowly and calmly changed into his pajamas, and got into bed with all the weight of his military memories making his shoulders sag. And still, he just couldn’t shake it, he smelled oranges.
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A very nice piece of writing.
Comment by Fred 11 December, 2009 @ 11:29 am