EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING - "Independence Day"

First comment: a phobia - Kevin Doherty: Agoraphobia
Second comment: a television show which is no longer on - Michael Bunn: I Dream of Jeannie
Third comment: a foreign language - Diana Back: German
Fourth comment: a U.S. city - Christopher DeBoard: Paducah
Fifth comment: when I think of the city above (#4), I think of ____ - Scott Barnett: Inbred hillbillies

　

I was almost finished with my first cup of coffee before I realized that it was the Fourth of July. The store was closed and technically I didn’t even have to be out of bed. But, by then it was too late, there was no turning back. It didn’t really make that much difference, anyway. The grocery business means early mornings, and I’ve been getting up early for so long that I tend to wake up by 7 or 8 in the morning anyway, even without an alarm.

I work for Higgledy Piggledy, not to be confused with Piggly Wiggly, which is a huge grocery market chain in the South. Higgledy Piggledy is a small, mom-and-pop chain of markets, if you can call three stores a chain. Two of the stores are in Coonskin Falls, Alabama, which is where I’m from, and one store is in Paducah, Kentucky, which is where I am now.

Coonskin Falls is a pretty small town, just a few miles away from Rogersville off of Route 72. I had been working for Higgledy Piggledy ever since I got out of high school, and I had been supervising the front end for a while, auditing the cash drawers and making sure the baggers weren’t out back drinking beer or smoking weed in their cars. One afternoon I got called upstairs to the office, to see Mr. Perry, the general manager of the store. The whole way up the stairs, I was wracking my brain, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. When I got to his office, he just smiled at me and motioned for me to take a seat. I tried to sneak a look at his desk to figure out what was going on, but the only thing there was an unopened, blank, manila folder.

“We’ve been watching you, Jacob,” he said.

At that point all I could hear was the blood rushing through my ears as my heart started pounding, and I’m sure my face was turning bright red. Classic fight-or-flee response. I’ve never dealt well with stressful situations.

But then I realized that he was saying things like, “...like what we see,” and “opportunity for advancement,” and the pounding in my ears started to subside.

“The company has acquired another outlet,” he was saying, “In Paducah, Kentucky.”

“Hillbillies,” was the first thought which popped into my head. “Oh my god, they’re shipping me off to work with the hillbillies.”

Mr. Perry said, “Now I know what you must be thinking, Jake. You’re thinking: ‘What the hell is there out in Paducah? A bunch of inbred hillbillies?’”

I shook my head and tried to look incredulous, as if that hadn’t been at all what I was thinking. “No…” I said.

“Nevertheless, that’s not the case at all. Paducah is as vibrant and exciting a place as Coonskin Falls, or even Rogersville. It is two states away, though, Jake. So if you did take this job, you’d be pretty much on your own out there.”

He explained that I would be moved out to Paducah, and that the company would hook me up with a place to live and all that. He told me to take the rest of the day and night to think it over.

“Sleep on it,” he said, and I promised that I would.

So, I thought about it, of course. I thought about it a lot. I never went to college, so I knew it was a good idea for me to grab at advancement, whenever it came my way. The money sounded pretty good, too; it was way more than what I was already making. And getting out of Coonskin Falls didn’t sound too bad, even if it was to someplace like Paducah.

The truth is, there really wasn’t anything keeping me in Coonskin Falls. I had been born and raised there, and lived there every one of my 28 years. But I was an only child, and Mom and Dad had moved to Florida a few years earlier, after Dad retired. I have some cousins who are really nice, but they live way down near Mobile and I really only ever see them at weddings and funerals.

I really had no friends at all in Coonskin Falls. This was not a revelation to me, in fact, it had been something that I’ve been trying to work on for quite a while. I suffer from extreme shyness. Even though I am able to interact with people normally at work and out in the world and stuff like that, when it comes to opening up and revealing the real Me to other people, I have a really hard time. This kind of makes it hard to make real friends. Truth is, though, that I would really rather be alone during my off time than be in the company of other people. But, as the years go by, I realize that this is something that is getting in the way of a lot of things, things like overall Happiness, Fulfillment, and Afternoons Watching Old Movies With Friends.

So, that night, I decided that I would make the move. I decided to come here to Paducah. But I also decided that if I was going to be making this fresh start, that I was going to try to start improving myself, too, by making an effort to reach out more to the people around me. So, the next day, I went in to Mr. Perry’s office and told him that I would take the job.

Six weeks later, there I was, standing at the end of a long walkway, and looking up at the pretty Victorian house I was to call home, as the movers hauled my belongings up the two flights of stairs to my apartment. The company had gotten me a one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of this house. The landlord was a little old lady who lived on the first floor, and the second floor was rented to some guy who I just prayed was quiet and didn’t smoke clove cigarettes.

In the foyer, as I made my way up for the first time, I noticed the names on the mailboxes. “Mrs. K. Kaufmann” said one. “D. Murphy” said the other. Someone had recently added “J. Stubbs” to my box, on paper, in that fancy, European-style script. I thought that was nice.

Up the stairs I went, and I walked into my apartment for the first time. Even with boxes everywhere and everything in complete disarray, I liked it right away. It’s a nice-sized one-bedroom, with windows on all four sides, and a decent kitchen and bathroom. It looks pretty much the way you’d expect the top floor of an 1880s Queen Anne Victorian to look: full of crazy little nooks and odd crannies, not one thing in the whole place level or plumb. It was much better than the cookie-cutter, concrete box garden apartment I had been living in back in Coonskin Falls.

A few hours later, the movers had left and I was puttering around the apartment, trying to get things livable. I had gotten the bed put together, and the stereo hooked up. The TV was plugged in, but the cable hadn’t been turned on yet, so that would have to wait. I was trying to think of things that would make my morning a little easier, because there was no time to waste, I had to be at the store at 7am the very next day. I got a shower curtain hung in the bathroom, and at least got my toothpaste and shampoo put out where I could get at them. I moved into the kitchen, and got the toaster oven and the microwave plugged in, and got some dishes and some silverware put away and somewhat organized. I got the coffee maker set up, too. I have one of those programmable coffee makers that will have your coffee all hot and ready for you as soon as you get out of bed, as long as you remember to get it set up the night before. So, I got the coffee ready for the next morning, and got the cup set out and the spoon and the non-dairy creamer, and that’s when I realized that I didn’t have any sugar. Now, I can live without a lot of things in my coffee. I can survive without my International Delight Hazelnut creamer, I can even do without milk or half and half altogether. But I can not drink my coffee without sugar. And there’s no way I was going to make it for Opening Day at the Paducah Higgledy Piggledy without coffee.

“A cup of sugar? Really?” I thought to myself, as I made my way downstairs. “They’re just gonna think I’m some kind of psychopath, with a line like that.”

Nevertheless, I found myself a few moments later on the second floor, knocking on the door of D. Murphy. Part of me, the part that finds it hard to let go of old, deep-seated assumptions and stereotypes, half expected to be greeted by a snake-handling, toothless hillbilly. Would he be like Jethro Bodine? Or more like Uncle Jed? Instead, D. Murphy looked pretty normal, at least the half of him that I could see behind the three inches of open door which the security chain would allow. Behind him I could see a small hall stand, with a vase and a small bowl which contained a stack of business cards.

“Hi, I’m Jake,” I said through the three inches. “I just moved in upstairs. Believe it or not, I need to borrow a cup of sugar.” I held my empty sugar bowl up as proof.

“Really?” he said.

“Yeah, really,” I answered.

“Look, I’m sorry, Jake. I can’t really help you. This might sound strange, but could I ask you to call me? On the phone?” He turned, and took a business card off of the pile on the table. Apparently, this was something he did a lot. He handed the card to me through the half-open door. “I’ll explain everything then.”
“Umm, okay, I guess,” I said.

“Okay. Cool,” he said, and he closed the door gently.

I looked down at the card. It just had his name, Douglas Murphy, along with a phone number and an email address, and what I recognized was the address of this house. “Strange,” I thought to myself.

I put the card in my pocket and brought my sugar bowl down to the first floor to try my luck with the landlady.

I knocked on her door. A short time later, the door was answered by what I can only describe as an adorable little old lady. This was not the sort of old lady who looks as though she could shatter at any moment like a fine Meissen figurine. Nor did she look like the sort of ornery old lady who would come out with a cane in one hand and a shotgun in the other, screaming, “Get the hell off of my sidewalk!” No, this little old lady looked right out of Central Casting. She was plump, but not fat; her grey hair pulled into a neat chignon. Her cheeks showed just a hint of pink, and her brown eyes seemed deep and wise, but mostly merry. When the door opened, the air smelled like a curious mixture of musty upholstery and rosewater perfume.

“Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said. She nodded.

“Hi, I’m Jacob Stubbs. I just moved in upstairs.” I offered my hand, which she took and shook warmly. “I wonder,” I asked, “if you have some sugar I might borrow?”

She stood there, smiling, staring at me blankly.

“Umm, Mrs. Kaufmann?” I said.

“Sorry,” she said, in a thick accent of some kind. “No English. Deutsche.”

Deutsche. I knew that meant German.

“German?” I said.

“Ja! Cherman! Ja, ja!” said Mrs. Kaufmann, her German accent thick as a Bock Beer at Oktoberfest.

I know maybe five words in German, and most of those I learned from watching reruns of “Hogan’s Heroes”. I did take two years of Spanish in high school back in Coonskin Falls. My teacher, Mr. Burnside, had such a thick Alabama drawl, I kept expecting him to say “y’all” after every sentence. “Buenas dias, y’all! ¿Cómo está todo, y‘all?”

“No comprende Deutsche,” I said, stupidly. She just smiled at me.

I thought for a moment. Then, I started an elaborate pantomime. I pretended to be bleary-eyed and drowsy, yawning and stretching, then making coffee, breathing in the aroma and licking my lips in anticipation. She was smiling and giggling a little at my performance. Then, I pointed at my empty sugar bowl and made a sad face that Marcel Marceau himself would have been proud of.

Her face lit up. “Zucker!” she exclaimed.

I was a bit taken aback. What had she just said?

She grabbed the sugar bowl from my hand. “Zucker!” she said again, and I realized that must be the German word for ‘sugar’. She disappeared into her apartment and came back a short while later with the bowl full.

“Danke schön,” I said, showing off some of my Hogan’s Heroes German. She smiled when I said that.

“Willkommen, Jacob, willkommen,” she said, taking my hand. I knew that meant ‘welcome’.

“Gracias,” I said, and went back upstairs.

Later that night, I had eaten some dinner and gotten some more things put away. I didn’t have TV, so I decided to get ready for bed even though it was only like 8:00 at night. As I emptied my pockets, I found the card that my neighbor, Douglas Murphy, had given me. Ordinarily, I would have thrown a card like that onto my dresser, and there it would sit, gathering dust before finally being thrown away months later. But I had made a decision, when I left Coonskin Falls, to start reaching out more to people around me.

No time like the present, I figured. So I got into my PJs, made a drink, and called the number on the card.

“Hello?” came the voice on the other end.

“Hi, Douglas?” I said.

“Yes.”
“It’s Jake. Jacob Stubbs. From upstairs. We just met. You, uh, you said I should call you.”

“Oh, Jake! Hi, How are you, man?” he said, as if we were old friends.

“I’m good, I guess,” I answered. “Moving is kind of a drag.”

“Yeah, for sure. For sure,” he said. “Me, I haven’t moved since I moved in here, and that was in like 2005.”

“Listen, Jake,” he went on. “I don’t want to sound like I’m blurting all this out, or like I’m laying all this on you at once. And it’s not something I would ordinarily do-”

I was getting curious now. I took a sip of my drink.

“-but since you’re going to be living here, in this house… Well, I figured it would be easier just to lay all my cards out on the table from the beginning. The reason I couldn’t really help you tonight, why I couldn’t open the door for you- well, among other things, I have agoraphobia.”

“Well, okay, but, I don’t really understand. What does an irrational fear of spiders have to do with it?”

“No, no,” he said, and I could tell he was chuckling a little. “That’s arachnophobia. Agoraphobia is a fear of open places, of the outside world, of being anywhere that you can have a panic attack. For me, that’s pretty much anywhere outside my apartment.”

“Now you know why I haven’t had to move since 2005,” he said.

I don’t know, but for a guy who hasn’t left his house in eight years, he sounded pretty normal to me. Nice, even.

We talked on the phone for a while longer. I told him about my move here with the grocery store and he told me a little bit about living here in Paducah. Once he had told me about his agoraphobia, I think we both kind of agreed not to talk about it for a while, until we could both get used to the idea.

After I hung up the phone with Douglas, I put some soft music on the stereo and sat for a while, finishing my drink. My mind was awash with all kinds of thoughts: a new job, a new home, a new town; and about three people living in one house. We were all prisoners, in a way. One, a prisoner of loneliness, one of shyness, and one of fear. I decided, as part of the New Me, my fresh start, to reach out to these two people. Maybe we could help free one another from our various bonds.

The next morning, my coffee was hot and ready for me when I woke up. As I spooned the sugar into my cup, I thought about Mrs. Kaufmann. What could I do to reach out to someone when we didn’t even speak the same language? The answer was clear: I would have to learn German.

The store opened that day, and so began the day-to-day grind of my job at the Higgledy Piggledy. The company had found an apartment that was literally a stone’s throw from the store. All I had to do was walk out of my front door, turn left, pass two houses and a dry cleaner’s, and I was there, in like two minutes.

After I made my two minute commute home a few days later and I was walking in the front door of the house, I saw a woman letting herself out of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment. I introduced myself, and she told me that her name was Nancy, and that she used to live in my apartment. She had grown fond of Mrs. Kaufmann and stopped by to check in and say hello every once in a while.

“She has no one,” Nancy told me.

She told me that Mrs. Kaufmann and her husband had moved here from Germany in 2004, to live with their son, who was raising a family here in Kentucky. Her husband ended up dropping dead of a heart attack two months after they moved here; and then her son and his entire family were all killed in a horrible traffic accident six days after that.

“It’s unimaginable, what that lady’s been through,” she said. “I think she’s been kind of frozen since then. She hardly ever leaves the house, and she doesn’t really know anyone here, except maybe for me and one or two people at her church. I hope you’ll keep an eye on her for me.”

I told her I would and we exchanged telephone numbers. I went straight upstairs after that, got on my computer and ordered Rosetta Stone. In German.

Over the next few days, I called Douglas a couple of times. The calls were pretty quick and mostly just small talk. I talked about work and we complained about the weather, that sort of thing. But it sounded like he was glad to have the conversation, and little by little the calls started to get a bit longer. One night, just before we hung up, he said to me, “You’re gonna have to come down, Jake. Take a look at my apartment.”

“That sounds awesome, Douglas,” I said. “We definitely have to do that.”
I hung up the phone, feeling like I was making some sort of progress.

My Rosetta Stone German lessons had arrived after a few days, and I jumped right in. At first I felt kind of stupid, sitting there with a headset on, talking to my laptop in German. But after a while, I actually started to get the hang of it, and it felt like I was making pretty good progress.

One morning, I ran into Mrs. Kaufmann in the foyer as I was leaving for work.
“Guten Morgen, Frau Kaufmann,” I said.


She did a double-take, surprised and tickled at my German greeting. “Guten Morgen, Herr Stubbs. Es ist ein schöner Tag, ja?”

I knew what she meant. She meant, “Isn’t it a lovely day?” It was pouring rain outside.

“Ja, sehr schön,” I said. Yes, very lovely.

Mrs. Kaufmann just stood there for a moment, her hands clasped across her bosom and smiling broadly. “Ja. Sehr, sehr schön.” It was a lovely day, even if it was raining.

That very night, there was a message on my answering machine when I came home. It was Douglas.

“Hey, Jake, it’s Douglas, from downstairs,” he said. He sounded nervous. “Listen, if you feel like it, maybe you’d like to come down tonight after you get home. You know, hang out for a while. Just, knock on the door if you feel like it, okay? Cool. See ya later.”

Amazing! Of course, I decided to go. So I ate a quick dinner, grabbed a six-pack out of the fridge and went downstairs to Douglas’ apartment. I knocked on the door. It opened, all the way this time.

There stood Douglas Murphy, who I was seeing for the first time, even though we had been living in the same house for almost three months. If I thought there would be something about him which said “Agoraphobe”, there wasn’t. He just looked like any normal, ordinary guy, maybe a little skinny and pale, and in need of a haircut, but normal.

“Come in,” he said. “Come on in, Jake.”

I really wasn’t sure what to expect, walking into the home of an agoraphobic. I suppose I expected a cluttered, oppressive place, like one of those houses on “Hoarders”; or else a Paranoid’s Command Center, like a wall full of computer monitors and radar screens and things, designed to keep Government Gamma Rays at bay. What I found, instead, was a perfectly tidy, perfectly neat little mid-century room, filled with clean, spindly, blond wood furniture and just enough wood paneling to make it look like an apartment right out of a 1968 edition of “Better Homes & Gardens”.

“Very nice!” I said, looking around and handing Douglas the six-pack. “I like it.”

“Thanks,” said Douglas, as he placed the beers in the fridge. He brought back two bottles for us.

I sat down on the couch and Douglas turned the TV on. We just talked for a while, small talk mostly, drinking our beers, but as we did, I kept looking around the apartment. There was something about it, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But somehow or other, the room looked really familiar to me, as if I had somehow seen it before.

After a while, I said, “Douglas, I’m having the strongest sense of déjà vû right now. Do you believe in that sort of thing?”
“What do you mean?” he said.

“I could swear I’ve been in your apartment before. And I know that I haven’t.”

Douglas’ face broke into a huge grin. “Really?” he said. “It’s not déjà vû, Jake. But you have seen this apartment before.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.

Douglas just folded his arms across his chest and blinked hard. He was looking at me as if I were supposed to react.

He blinked again. I had no idea what was going on. Maybe this was some sort of OCD thing that agoraphobics have.

Douglas looked exasperated, like there was some sort of joke that I just wasn’t getting. “C’mere,” he said, finally.

He led me down to the end of the hallway, where he opened a closed door and turned on the light. I looked inside.

I could not believe my eyes. I saw a room, wallpapered in a purple metallic paper decorated with elaborate Moorish designs. I saw a couch, a circular couch, filling nearly the entire room, upholstered in purple velvet and piled high with pillows of all different colors. I was looking at the inside of Jeannie’s bottle, from “I Dream of Jeannie”.

“Oh, my god,” I said. “That is awesome.”
Then I realized why it had all seemed so familiar. Douglas had turned his apartment into Major Nelson’s house in Cocoa Beach.

“Remember that first night when you called,” Douglas said, “and I told you that I have agoraphobia, “among other things”? Well, one of the “other things” is this, this little “obsession” I have with ‘I Dream of Jeannie’”.

“So I see,” I said, as I flopped down onto Jeannie’s purple couch. “So I see.”

“When I was little,” he told me, “I wished I could be like Jeannie. I wished that I could just blink my eyes and blink away all the bad things; that I could just blink and everything would be different, everything would be okay. Over the years, I guess, it sort of turned into this.” He gestured to the room around him.

“Well, I love it,” I told him. “I think it’s fantastic. I could live in this room.”

Douglas seemed relieved in a way, that I actually kind of admired his obsession. And I did. I mean, it was cool, and funky. Weird and obsessive, yes, but still cool and funky. Most of the cool and funky people I’ve met in my life also turned out to be sort of weird and obsessive anyway, so it was kind of no big deal.
So, we hung out there in Jeannie’s bottle for a while, drinking beer and talking about old TV shows and stuff. We argued for a while over who would win in a fight: Jeannie or Samantha Stevens from “Bewitched”? We settled on Jeannie because Douglas would never be satisfied otherwise, and I thought it best not to upset an agoraphobic.

As we finished the last of our beers, Douglas began to open up a little about his phobia. His entire world had basically become the inside of this apartment. Once a night, after he was sure everyone else was asleep, he would screw up the courage he needed to tiptoe down the stairs and get his mail, and once a month he would slip his rent check underneath Mrs. Kaufmann’s door. “I’ve never even met her, Jake,” he said, “and I’ve lived here for eight years.”

I told him the little I knew about Mrs. Kaufmann, and he looked positively wounded as he contemplated her sorrow. He sat for a while, quiet, and then he said, “You know, Jake, I need to meet her, face to face. Sometime soon, some time when I’m ready, do you think you could take me to meet her?”
“Sure, Douglas. Sure I could. That would be nice,” I said.

Soon after that I said that I had to be at work in the morning and that I needed to get going. I turned as I left the apartment, and Douglas and I regarded one another for a moment. We were both smiling. Douglas took a single step out of his apartment.

He grabbed my hand and shook it. “I’m really glad you moved in here, Jake,” he said to me. “And I’m really glad that you’ve become my, well, my friend. I feel like my world is opening up a little bit.”
“Thanks, Douglas,” I said. “So do I.”
He closed his door and I went upstairs to my apartment. I began to get an idea, about widening Douglas’ world. I mean, if we started with his apartment and occasionally the foyer and the mailboxes, maybe I could talk him into trying out the rest of the house. My apartment, maybe Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, eventually his world could include the entire house, and from there, who knows?

I started working really hard on my German lessons, and calling Douglas every day, and even dropped by on the weekend when we watched the ball game sitting on Jeannie’s purple round couch.

A few days later, Mrs. Kaufmann came out of her door when I got home from work, as if she had been waiting for me.

“Herr Stubbs!” she said. “Möchten Sie zum Essen kommen?”

She was inviting me to dinner. I think she was trying very hard to speak slowly and clearly and in easy Beginner German.

“Ja, sehr gut!” I answered, accepting with enthusiasm.

Dinner at Mrs. Kaufmann’s was delightful. Sitting in her apartment was like sitting in a stage set for “Arsenic and Old Lace” or “The Whales of August”. It looked like Grandmother’s house because that’s exactly what it was. The furniture was all old and soft and comfortable, well worn but never threadbare, upholstered in warm burgundy velvets. There were fade marks on the arms of the sofa where the sun had hit it in the same place day after day. Lace curtains on the windows, lace doilies on the armchairs, and black and white photographs of stern-looking Edwardian ancestors lined the walls. The food she served was delicious and plentiful, and it seemed to me that she missed cooking for someone else. I think it pleased her that I asked for second helpings of everything, including dessert.

We started out having the kinds of conversations, in German, which only people in second-language classes have:
“Hello, Mrs. Kaufmann”
“Hello, Mr. Stubbs.”
“How are you?”
“Fine, thank you. How are you?”
“I am fine. The weather is good.”
“It is warm today.”
Then, I would say something like, “Thank you for asking me to your typewriter.”

She would laugh, and eventually I’d catch my mistake. Soon, though, I began to feel more comfortable, and even though our conversations were simple and kind of superficial, we managed to actually communicate with one another. I told her about my home town and my family, and she told me that she had been a teacher back in Germany. That explains why she was able to communicate with me so easily as if I were a dim-witted little German child.

Before the meal ended, we talked a little bit about Douglas. I tried to explain his agoraphobia to her as best I could in my halting German. She is not a stupid woman, and I think she understands pretty well. I asked her how she felt about meeting him, and she said, I think, that it would be lovely.

I tried to tell Mrs. Kaufmann how much I enjoyed the evening as well as I could with my broken German, and she told me that she enjoyed having me very much. I kissed her gently on the cheek before I left.

“Gute Nacht, liebe Dame,” I said. Good night, dear lady.

“Gute Nacht, lieber Freund,” she answered. She had called me a “dear friend”.

Over the next couple of weeks, things started to happen more quickly. I was continuing my German lessons on Rosetta Stone, and a few times a week, I would stop in to Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment and we would have tea and work on conjugating my verbs and stuff like that. I started seeing her in the store now and then, and I would help her find things when she was having trouble; and before long I saw her smiling at the other patrons and cooing over babies, that sort of thing.

I managed to get Douglas to come up to my apartment one night for pizza. Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to stay behind closed doors, and he found the strength to leave his apartment and climb the stairs up to my door. When he knocked, I opened the door and found him there, pale and sweating, and gnawing the fingernails on his left hand. In his right hand he held a six-pack of beer, which I knew must have been piss warm, because I know for a fact that it had taken him nearly 45 minutes to get from his apartment to mine. I could hear the sound of his jacket as he tried to slide his way up the stairs with his back pressed up against the wall, and every few minutes I could hear him hyperventilating, probably sitting on the steps.

“Hi Jake,” he said, forcing a smile and trying to appear nonchalant. “Thanks for inviting me over.”
I asked him to come in and he did, although I could tell it wasn’t easy at all for him. I just acted like everything was completely normal and everyday, and once Douglas got settled in the living room and we started talking and watching TV and stuff, he started to relax.

After a while, I could tell that Douglas wasn’t looking at the TV at all. He was just looking around himself, at my apartment, and the view through my windows and things like that. My apartment is nothing special, it’s not so much ‘decorated’ as it is ‘furnished’. I’ve always called my style “Early Salvation Army”. But it dawned on me that Douglas hadn’t seen anything, really, beyond his own four walls, in eight years. He seemed to be drinking it all in, letting it wash over him, the newness, the tiny taste of the outside world.

At the end of the night, I heard him fairly skipping down the steps in one shot. It took him about 30 seconds, and I think he was humming the whole time.

Two days later, when I came home from work, I came across Douglas, standing by his mailbox in the foyer, leafing through that day’s mail. It was like 6 o’clock, the sun was still up, and everyone in the house was, presumably, awake.

He glanced in my direction when he heard me come in. “Oh, hi Jake,” he said, as if this were nothing at all remarkable. “What’s up?”
“Nothing much,” I answered. “Same shit, different day.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he muttered.

I breezed past him and went upstairs to my apartment. Same shit, different day, I thought. Hardly.

That weekend, Mrs. Kaufmann invited us both to her apartment for dinner. Douglas and I both wore jackets and ties, and Mrs. Kaufmann put on a beautiful dress that made her look fifty years younger in the soft light.

Mrs. Kaufmann and I had to promise to be safely ensconced in her apartment before Douglas could come out and make his way downstairs. He seemed to come down pretty quickly, though. I think he spent more time at the door of Mrs. Kaufmann’s apartment, stressing out and hyperventilating about actually knocking.

He did knock, eventually, though, and when he did, the rapport between the two of them was instantaneous. He treated her as if she were visiting royalty, and she treated him like a long-lost nephew. I was able to act as translator, but before long, the three of us found a rhythm in our conversation which made it very easy for all of us to understand what was being said, and for all of us to contribute.

After another one of Mrs. Kaufmann’s amazing meals, we all went in to the parlor for some strong German coffee. She put an old classical record on the record player, and the three of us just sat there for a while, sipping our coffee as the music played, saying absolutely nothing. And it was okay. I think sometimes it’s harder to be quiet around people than it is to make constant chatter. But the three of us had begun to feel comfortable around one another, like a little family.

All three of our worlds were expanding.

And soon it was the Fourth of July. We made plans to have a good old-fashioned Independence Day picnic in the backyard. This would be a big deal for Mrs. Kaufmann, who has never had a Fourth of July anything, and an even bigger deal for Douglas. He had gotten pretty comfortable within the confines of the house; he could move pretty freely among all three apartments, even when Mrs. Kaufmann and I were still around. But he still hadn’t stepped outside. He only agreed to even think about it because the back yard is enclosed by a huge high hedge all around, and there is a door to the back yard only feet away from the stairs back up to his apartment.

So, after getting up early for no reason on that day, I put together the classic Fourth of July Picnic for my little dysfunctional Paducah family. I made potato salad, cheeseburgers, hot dogs, corn on the cob, cole slaw, baked beans, jello, a cake with red white and blue sprinkles, and s’mores. There was enough food for about fifty people, even though I knew there was only three of us.

Mrs. Kaufmann and I were waiting for Douglas in the back yard. It was just getting dark. He had been wrestling with his demons for quite a while just within earshot. When he finally appeared in the doorway to the house, he was waving a tiny American flag in one hand. “Happy Independence Day, y’all,” he said.

Mrs. Kaufmann walked over to him slowly. He took a few, tentative steps outside the house and froze. When Mrs. Kaufmann reached him, she simply enveloped him in her arms, embracing him as if she were embracing her whole, lost family. They stood there for a moment, and then she led him over to the picnic table.

“Hi, Jake,” he said.

“Hey, Douglas. Beer?”
He nodded yes, and I walked over to the cooler. Just then, the first of the fireworks started over the river. We could see them between the two old oaks at the far end of the yard. As I walked over toward my friends, my family, I watched them as they looked up towards the sky and smiled, and laughed.

I began to realize how much I had done for myself, for them- how much anyone can do, by reaching out. We’re all a little happier.