The Sky

My eyesight is on the blink and the hearing is none too sound. I ask the dentist about the old choppers. ‘O your teeth are fine,’ says he, ‘it’s your gums I would worry about. You’ve got gum disease.’ A disease? I’m nae wanting nae disease. I get these stabs at the heart that have nothing to do with women. My right knee groans referee when I tackle too many stairs. I keep on wrenching something in my arm. The doc says that it’s tendonitis. An -itis? I’m nae wanting any -itis. He tells me to rest it. But it’s my right arm, says I, it’s my second most used muscle. He freezes a smile. Possibly the old ones are not all for the best, in this…Something flops through the letterbox.

There’s the NHS logo, that’ll be those test results. The envelope’s suspiciously plump. There’s a symptom that ‘is quite common’ that ‘may have many causes.’ But the reassuring words are undermined by the brief ‘urgent.’ There’s no doubt about it. It has started. I am dying.

But fifty-four and there’s so much more. I don’t want to leave, I like it here. I’m the guest that’ll outstay his welcome for as long as possible. But, come on, what’s the big surprise. Everyone’s life falls into this personal Niagara. All animals sicken and die. I am an animal. Therefore I will sicken and die. It’s sure. Sure as a syllogism.

I drink tea look out the window. Last night’s storm has gone and the sun is sparkling, turning everything bright with promise. I go out into the wide world in search of wonders.

Without thinking I head downhill, towards water, towards the river. Where else is there?

I swing in by the botanical garden, to the arboretum. The trees are wearing their reds and browns. Is this what paradise would be like? Then I think this doubtless is all there is. And here’s me, descended from billions of survivors, sitting here, surviving.

I start to harvest the plums, supposedly from Normandy. Robert the Bruce and his murdering cohorts were Normans, and I wonder if there’s a connection, as Bobby Bruce once trod around here. I see the medlar tree, and remember reading of its fruits. I go to explore. They are sharp and sweet. They’d do well stewed, or maybe wine. I start to gather them too. Then I fancy I hear a clamour of complaint from the surrounding birdlife. I consider that these fruits stay edible into deep winter and I leave them on the tree, leave them for the wild things. I, after all, have Sainsbury’s. Then I pass what I take to be a Rowan, but on closer inquiry, what I thought to be rowan berries are clusters of tiny apples. On tasting, yes, apples. I speculate that this must be an ancestor of the fruit we all know and love. I go out onto the Chanonry, and head for the river.

I pass St. Machar’s Cathedral with its twin spires stabbing at the heavens. I see that an ash tree, exhausted by its own weight, has fallen in last night’s storm. I urge myself to look out for the men that’ll come to clear it. Nothing burns better than ash. The tree has smashed into the graves below and I think, ‘even gravestones die.’ I like the line, resolve to remember it, and use it in some future poem or other.

I meet a friend who’s armed with a camera. His talk is full of otters and swallows and ospreys. The otters are called Oscar and Kate and I say I must look out for Oscar and Kate. After all, they now have names.

Today, I decide, will be a foraging day. So I head upstream to Grandholm Bridge, to the other side of the river, to an ancient garden where horseradish, apples, rasps, gooseberries and apples live. I pass the Wallace Tower and wish it back in town instead of Marks an’ Sparks. It looks lonely here, granite walls glowering over the river below.

I go down to the bank and meander along. I marvel at the miracle of sunlight, turning the water to champagne. The river flows deep and slow here, as though catching its breath before its last galloping rush to the sea. And there’s the swan that hangs about here. It’s said swans are monogamous. Has there been some tragedy or other? He takes fright and crescendos across the water, then, with a great yawn of wings, settles down once again. And I wonder if he ever he ever questions the point of his existence, here, all on his ownio. I say ‘he’ because he’s like me. I suppose.

My feet clatter over the old footbridge that once took the workers from Woodside over to Grandholm Mill. I remember seeing a photograph of them in their hundreds, all smiling. They must have been coming off shift. And I think about all those gone lives, and the gone mill, gone these twenty years, after the Soviet Union collapsed like a rotten tree, exhausted by its own weight. (The politburo wore Crombie coats).

I consider the endless thousands who have made a living on the Don. The mills, the weirs, the fishing. Here and there the remnants of all the forgotten work of the forgotten people. These cobbles, that wall. No-one now makes a living here, and life, abhorring the vacuum, has returned, now that the toxins have gone with the people. But some folk remain, with their dogs and binoculars, ambling along by the inevitable housing estate. I pass and they say ‘aye, aye,’ and ‘morning’ and ‘fine day.’ I muse about the green places and try to imagine folk saying ‘fit like’ to strangers on the city street.

I come to the old garden and I pick apples and horseradish. I will lament its destruction should the new bridge arrive. All this life flattened and paved and lawnified, for wildness isn’t ‘clean and tidy.’ Soon a tentacle of road will stretch here and there’ll be streams of cars and lorries and fumes and noise. Man keeps on coming back at ye, like the monster in the movie. Then I wander along the river bank to the nature reserve, where the deer and the fox and the rabbits live. They scurry and leap away from little old monster man me. For I too am part of men’s dominion that justifies that ill opinion that makes ye startle.

I stare down into the gloomy depths below the Brig o Balgownie, and think on alcoholic toxins. I nip to the supermarket and pick up a fizzy white vino. Then after rage-raging against the King Street traffic, pass the new planted trees and the Golf Links that was once the bed o the Don, centuries ago.

I walk along the path between the course and the beach. Just for five minutes you’re in the hairt o the highlands, yet bang in the city. I see a kestrel, hovering, hovering, hovering. Then it turns all gravity, and I think I hear a tiny scream. How short it can be, this life thing! ‘Sprung frae night in darkness lost.’ You’re nibbling away on some grass or other, then from the heavens, these claws, that beak. And I wonder if it was like that at the twin towers. Bored with this office, then, looking out the window, there’s an airplane heading right at ye.

And I head up the wee hill looking out o’er the Donmouth. I look at the miles up north towards Balmedie and south to the lighthouse. I take a blast o the sparkling wine, full o promise. A seal pops up his head and stares. ‘Eyes of Picasso.’ And I look at the seal and the people and their dogs and the seagulls. This is their day in the sun, mine too. And amid all this motion, thinking all things will die, watch the river turn to ocean, and the ocean turn to sky.

 Douglas Thomson

Mildly interesting video on youtube. Search 'third don crossing'