The Shrapnel-Wounded Heart

by Dennis Green

I know that even as my shrapnel-wounded heart fuels me, it’s also killing me little by little. And I get off on it.

What a notion! And yet, it’s plausible, viable, maybe even likely. That the very same things that make us whole, or successful, or wise, might also at the very same time be making us foolish, failing and fragmented. I get off on that thought too!

So let’s examine that wounded heart. Is it nearly destroyed by LOVE? I doubt it, seriously. There’s something about love, and romance, that no man in his right mind can take seriously enough to kill another person over it, or himself. And those who do are crazy. Or appearing in a soap opera or a chick flick…

Is the wounded heart so threatened by time alone? Aging, the decay from within, a mind less tethered to something real? Again, I doubt it. Those kinds of changes are merely to be expected. Nothing to get overwrought about. We adjust slowly. Incrementally.

So what is that “shrapnel” that wounds the heart so badly that it, the heart, might better understand? Gossip? Failure? Mortality?

I’m coming to suspect that the shrapnel which most wounds us is the sense that perhaps we didn’t matter at all, nothing that we did, or said, or wrote, that even the attainment of riches or artistic greatness could insure that we had mattered, made a difference, after all. In other words, that Nihilism that infects us at times. “Our Nada which art in Nada, Nada be thy name!”

The man who wrote those words put a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth and pulled both triggers.

I have now beside me a wonderful little ceramic chotchkey “Bait Shop,” sporting a sign that reads, “Bait Shop,” a work of folk art wonder indeed. It is about the same size as a small flower pot, but shaped like an outhouse, and it is pierced with many windows, a door, a chimney, several open windows, and two openings on its little roof — one the shape of a spaceship, the other of a big five-pointed star.

I want to meet that Bait Shop proprietor! A fat, white life ring over the door bears copy that reads, “Tackle” and “Worms • Fly’s” and beside the half-open door, which has a sign on it reading, “Open” and “Dawn — Dusk” a seagull sits perched on what looks like a porcelain bedpan. There are other features we need not go into just now. But the piece is signed by the artist, “Heather Goldmine.” And who is Heather and where O where is she now?

I found this little objét d’art at my favorite Alameda thrift shop and junk store, “Second Home,” a source of dozens of art and crafts works in our house, located on Santa Clara Street just a few doors west of the Lemon Tree Inn, which was, when I was much more mobile, my favorite watering hole. I savor the memories.

So many such memories, so fine. I’ve lived here now for more than 20 years, and have had just one fine adventure after another. If the island of Alameda becomes my burial ground, so be it. I’ll certainly rest in peace.

But for now, I’m still struggling with that shrapnel-wounded heart, and all it can tell me. I’d like to leave this life, after all, with a little better understanding of what it was all about. And I always felt that way about it!

What can we know about life? Love? Hardship? Our feelings of immortality superglued to our mortality. And all of the other contradictions…

©2010 Dennis Green