"All human things are subject to decay"

 “All human things are subject to decay”  

Thomas Mack died Monday. The grand memorial service was Thursday at First Methodist Church, across from where I used to work. It was an occasion for me because I knew the office was closed for the funeral, to slip in and slip out again unnoticed. I'm not ashamed to say why - and I will - but . . . Was it Stephen Crane that said every story is allowed one coincidence?

     Here's this one's.

Mack was a lovable dimwit. He had, as Uncle Albert said of him, “the brains God gave an animal cracker,” and he (Uncle A) would always greet him (Mack), “Hey! Flecknoe!” Mack assumed, I think, that Uncle Albert was hard of hearing and had misunderstood his name when they'd been introduced; and he was too kind to correct him. "Albert!" he would call back. “Good to see you!” (This was after that first meeting the extent of their conversation, as far as I can remember, punctuated always and only with exclamation marks.)

     Now I was slipping into the office with the key I'd never returned because no one had ever asked for it to retrieve a book I had hidden in the basement men's room, pushed to the back of the shelf about eighteen inches deep just inside and above the tall door. The door was marked "Men," though there was nothing manly about it, just a toilet anyone could sit on and a sink anyone could wash his or her hands in. 
     Why there was a shelf above the door I never determined. It was empty as far as I could tell except for the book I had pushed all the way to the back. Maybe Kareem Abdul-Jabbar could have seen it if he jumped up looking for it, but it was invisible to anyone else. I could reach it, however, and it had provided over time many hours of enjoyable on-the-can reading: Selected Works of John Dryden [introduction and commentaries by william frost], a Rinehart Edition published in 1967 and pretty beaten up by the time I got it maybe 20 years ago.

     I don't think I beat it up much more as I never read anything in it but Absalom and Achitophel, The Medal, and (over and over again) Mac Flecknoe. Which I could read in one sitting and felt so good in my mouth and sounded so good in a whisper bouncing off the tiled floor, the plastered walls, and the unusually high ceiling that I read it again and again and again, always thinking when I got to the lines about the "neglected authors" whose works had become "martyrs of pies, and relics of the bum" that there were plenty of relics in Frost's Dryden if needed as I was never going to get past the first 70 pages or so (of 426).

My key still worked. The book was still there - of course, it was - if dusty from sad misuse. It slipped neatly into the right front pocket of my cargo pants. I didn't dare one last sitting, for fear the funeral would let out earlier than I anticipated - unlikely as that was - and I'd run into loads of mourners choking the way. But I did not, I could hear as I walked up the sidewalk across from the church the trebles squeaking (for fear of death?) and the basses roaring (courageously against it?). The book slapped pleasantly against my thigh as I said half aloud, "O Church Street, may thou be hereafter Pissing Alley."*

07.01.17

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 * The name of an actual London street, Frost is careful to point out in his introduction. Let me point out that Church Street is the name of an actual street in our town.