Storm Drain

Storm Drain


By: Gaspar Bartko
Copyright Gaspar Bartko 2009

In Honour of My Mother’s Birthday.

I had that dream again.

It was raining and I was sitting in a large old open-ended cardboard packing box. Even though I had dragged the box under the cover of a bridge to get away from the rain, it offered little shelter. The downspout from a storm drain channelled the water from the bridge deck above me and sent it falling in a spraying torrent on and around the box making it seem it was raining harder than it really was. I couldn’t move out of the wet. I just sat there in a trance looking over the miles of sodden summer grass and scrub that grew on the flood plain of the river.

Everything was sopping wet: the sky, the ground, the cardboard cube around me. The humidity penetrated everywhere and I was a passive sponge, soaking it all in. My hair, once blond, platinum blond from summer sun when I was a small boy, was grey. It was matted and plastered to my skull from the dampness and slid its unwashed, greasy way down to my shoulders. It parted over my face revealing skin that had the ashen, jaundiced pallor of the terminally ill or the terminally drunk.

I was wearing layers of shirts made of navy-green flannel, pants of industrial polyester twill, and somebody else’s old shoes. Everything was pilled and torn and damp. There was no fresh newness about my clothes for everything was gathered from dumpsters and the reject piles at the back of the Goodwill store. Over the years the layers of cloth had moulded themselves to my form. Time, sweat and accumulated filth had reinforced them making them surprisingly stiff and strong. The clothes had become my armour and my prison: keeping others out and keeping me in.

I had no family to speak of. We had drifted apart. I hadn’t had contact with any relatives or friends in years. I just had memories of sensations of what it was like to be in someone else’s company. Sometimes, though, while dumpster diving for clothes, or waiting apathetically in a soup-kitchen line, a passing voice would penetrate the shifting layers of my consciousness and trigger a moment of clarity. A fleeting and vivid memory would become tantalizingly real.

I would remember a particularly special time in Czechoslovakia where I was born, and spent the first eight years of my life. It was August and I could feel the heat of the blazing summer sun trying to penetrate the cool shade of the immensely tired and old apricot tree under which I sat. The tree grew in the middle of my grandparents’ dirt back yard and, as all ancient things, surprised everyone as it managed to renew itself each spring, and bear sweet fruit each summer. I was facing away from the house under that comforting tree, as it shaded my impossibly blond head from the sun. I was hugging my legs tightly against my chest with my chin resting on my little-boy knees. My eyes were staring trance-like into the infinity of the potato fields that were the outer boundaries of my universe.

My mother’s voice softly sang to me from seemingly far away.

“Gaško, kde si?”

I heard her footsteps coming lightly, dustily near. The dry airy sound gradually drew me back to my childhood present, now past, the nearer she came. Closer and closer. Finally she was beside me.

“Tu si moj mily.”

All was soft and warm as she knelt closely by and wrapped her arms around me. The sounds of the small world of my grandparents’ yard slowly came to me: crickets chirping, hens clucking, the dog barking at the other end of the yard.

An eerie awareness dawned in my little-boy eyes, as I sat wrapped in my mother’s arms under the apricot tree. And across the Atlantic, sitting in an enveloping and sopping cardboard mess, the same awareness dawned in my homeless eyes: past meets future meets past.

“Mamichka kde si?” I called out from the sodden box.

There was no reassuring answer to be heard in the rainy gloom.

Future meets present.

I awoke with a sweat-drenched jolt.

“Mother where are you?”