Full On Sweet Mystery

In summer’s fading glory there is joy sublime.  Patches of once vibrant but now slightly dusky flowers abound. Breath deep and you will sense of both infinite and finite time.  The blooms upon the flowers still strike the eye from afar.  Upon closer inspection even the untrained eye can see the tints of age have started to scar.  Bright red and yellow and purple flowers abound shout out to the eyes of bees and bugs and humankind I am here, I am alive for this glorious moment.  They roar singing let me fill you heart. But the end of the green stems supporting them grow straw-like and burnt/brittle at the edges.

The glory of the flower takes us away from the finite moment into an eternity of delicious joy, I would call these moments the time of ripe peaches.  As the liquid from that soft fleshy fruit drizzles down after you take a mouthful the sweetness is fully satisfying, almost as sensual as great sex.  The sloppy joy of the sweet taste take us beyond this mortal space into a moment of eternity.

This single summer’s kingdom will come falling down.  Look my friend, you can see it in the silvering leaves of the trees.  This year’s time of short sleeves, short pants and water play will be done soon.  The beaches where we retreated seeking relief from the heat will soon be cold and desolate places. But when you see flowers full and exploding you suspend the reality of time and age and fragility. The tall grasses blowing back and forth with full beard let the clock slow for a minute so that it tick-tock-tick cannot even be perceived.  The thumping of the human heart is lost in the background. 

In the summer warmth of late August I will wrap my warped and worried frame in the joyful colors of the spectrum.  I will let the bird song and the rhythmic hymn of bees’ wings seduce me and hypnotize me into believing this will be forever. Let us celebrate the time of sweet tastes and perfume like smells. Let us revel in the sounds of nature wildly at work, the rustling grass and the buzzing bee.  Let the soft grass be our bed. Let our eyes be awash in the royal purple of lavender as time winds down on this short eternity.

Walking Toward the Water

Last day at the beach today. Waking early (after sunrise but out of the house by 7:40 a.m.) I made my trek the 3 or 4 blocks to Wawa for 20 ounces of decaffeinated coffee. While there I grabbed a cookie and a Philadelphia Inquirer. This my friends was the breakfast of my youth or some variant of it.

Walking out of the packed store (man those Wawas are busy first thing in the morning) I adjusted my purchase, cookie in pocket and paper under my arm. Standing just off the concrete steps that led to the entrance I was trying to make that decision, do I walk up to the boardwalk and eat this or do I instead walk back to the house and sit on the breezy deck to enjoy it? Pondering this I noticed a gentleman about 10 years older than me riding his bicycle up to the store. He was puffing a little bit.

“Good morning,” says I as he begins to dismount. Do all us older men look alike? Is there a handbook we read somewhere we read inadvertently absorbing the information but forgetting the source? The gent was wearing the outfit of virtually all the men of my age, nondescript tan shorts, sneakers, a knit off white shirt with two (maybe three) buttons at the top and a ball cap from an event five years ago.

He looked at me as he got off the bike and said, “I am too old for this shit.” He was panting from the bike ride because it has gotten quite humid this morning. I smiled and looked at him and said, “We do this shit so we don’t feel any older than we have to.” He laughed. “Yeah,” he said “We don’t get to be any younger but we don’t have to fall to pieces.” I responded with an, “Absolutely, look at me, two of the three things I am doing are in complete accordance with my cardiologist’s directions. I am walking and this coffee is decaf. The cookie in my pocket well not so much.” He responded, “I am here for my chocolate dipped double donut. I am not supposed to have it either. You know what pal, we have to eat ‘em here and eat ‘em now because we are going to be dead a long, long time and I doubt we’ll get donuts then” Point taken.

After we talked about where his was from (Montgomery County) I shared where I was from (East Lansing Michigan home of the Spartans). He asked me why I was back and I told him to see an old friend and to go to my 40th high school class reunion. The second round of where are your really from began Salem County in my case and South Philly somewhere down Broad Street in his. By this time he had stopped panting. As we both turned to go our separate ways we laughed, waved and wished each other a good day. My choice was made I was headed up to the boardwalk.

Why the boardwalk? Like the man said I doubt when you are dead there are many sunrises to appreciate. I placed my folded paper up under my arm and sipped my hot brown dirty water and made my way to the beach’s edge. I walked down the beach entry pathway mat to a point where I could see across the strand. The sun was a few degrees above the horizon and was cutting a silver swath across the water’s surface. One family with their balloon tired beach cart was making its way to the water’s edge.

I could hear joggers and bicycles behind me on the boardwalk going to and fro. I could also hear the sounds of the gulls spinning in the sky above looking for that tidbit that morsel. Pulling out my phone I took a few shots of what lay out there in front of me. What was I looking at well God’s great Atlantic Ocean and all of eternity as far as I am concerned. I stood there for a moment just soaking it in. As Paul Bowles said and I am paraphrasing there are moments, events if you would, that happen at places that you cannot imagine your life being without. But those seminal moments don’t come very often and then they are gone forever.

Staring out across a nearly empty swath of sand was and remains one of those seminal moments for me. It was with a little regret that I turned and walked back up the path to the boardwalk to find a bench so as to allow me to eat that cookie and read the news of this irrelevant day conveniently. My coffee was cooler and the cookie wasn’t as crisp as it might have been. But I could hear the waves and feel the sun beginning to warm another beach day. Carpe diem, not really. Rather let the day wash over me with sun and sand and humid air and squalling children and screeching birds and sand between my toes. I may never be back again but I am here now and today is a day to be savored.

Summer's Glory

Summer's glory arrives at days end. It is an admixture, a concoction or maybe a distillation of so many wonderful things.

You can start with sleeping in on a comfortable bed and soft sheets. Breakfast with coffee from a nearby shop and fried ham on Italian rolls adds to the growing joy.

A cloudless day with warm temperatures and a sea breeze adds more to the sense of delight. Reading leisurely a yellowed and brittle  little paperback novel just adds so much more. 

And then clams, flounder and fries. And conversation with good people about things that matter to us. There may be better days somewhere but I really want to savor this one.

Tinny Speaker *

Mosquitos are out in force tonight. Blood is being shed as I try to focus and get something down. At the end of my blood splotched arm sits my cell phone. Lying there on the glass table top the black rounded rectangle is playing the Lucy Kaplansky station on Pandora.  Of course I could play the very same station on the tiny stereo speakers on my laptop but that would be too complicated right now.  Far enough away from the house the Wi-Fi gets kind of dicey. I still have unlimited data so I am going to use the 4G. I want to make sure I get uninterrupted sound right now.  Buffering is a mood breaker.

Hearing the monaural mix playing out of the tiny iPhone speaker brings me back to a different time.  If I close my eyes I am in such a different place.  Suddenly eight year old myopic me is heading down south to visit my grandmother.  With that car nearly flying we were headed to Horry County. Bouncing in shorts in the front of an old American boat of a car I am listening to the radio. Funny the delivery of sound then and at this moment have certain similarities.

Sometimes I remember riding in the middle of the front seat of a Ford Galaxy 500 travelling down U.S. 301.  Some distance south of the Mason-Dixon Line the telephone poles with their faint green glass insulators fly by.  The old man might be talking about safety, he hated old three lane highways and railroad crossing without warning lights. My brother and sister might be squabbling.  It might have been 1963, the car might have been a Galaxie and I might have been seven but we were rolling.  One thing was sure my brother was longing for some serious southern fireworks.

But I am not really remembering anyone else in the car. Also it not so much the sights of the green world flying by I remember.  What I have pulled from storage because this little speaker is playing beside me is a dashboard image. I am looking at the chrome knobs and buttons of that a.m. radio that sat dead ahead of me when I rode in the center spot.

Through a tiny speaker on the dash came my favorite songs, the sing along tunes that would be played repeatedly on Top 40 stations until we got down below Richmond.  Songs like Puff the Magic Dragon and I’m Henry the VIII would come on. At the first strum I would know the song and then I got to sing at the top of my lungs much to the chagrin of my much older siblings in the car.  Sometimes Barry McGuire’s Eve of Destruction would come on and the old man would twist the dial and change the station. Damn commie music. There are some other phrases that might have flown out right then but I shall opt not to remember those now.

It was important to get as much of this music as I could early on in the trip. Once you got south of Richmond all you got were farm reports, the price of tobacco and the like or serious twang. Today that hard old country twang, think George Jones singing White Lightning or anything in the Jim Reeves catalog would be music to my ears, not so much then. Sometimes on that tinny speaker the further down you went there were trading shows.  In a thick old time North Carolina accent can’t you just hear Bob in Wilson (home of Parker’s Barbeque) who has a set of barely used white walls asking if anybody would want to trade for a full sized bed and a chest of drawers?

But what I remember is the music or the news came out of that centered little speaker. No matter what else happened in that car we all had one ear open and focused on what the radio waves were bringing us. The windows were down and the air was hot.  In 1964 the old man wasn’t ready to pop for air conditioning even if it might have been an option. The people in the back seat wanted the sound turned up because of the roar of the air going by on that old U.S. highway drowned out the radio if it was set too low.  The people in the front seat, the more senior members in the car were not of like mind. 

,

Was it there my radio ear was created? I spent the next several decades listening for the next cool song, the next thing that would spark my aural imagination.  I don’t know but I remember begging whoever was sitting next to me in the passenger seat to turn the knob to see if we could catch one of those songs I loved before it was too late.

The Reflection Isn’t Real or Is It?

Walking upon the face of this earth we see many things. But that verb “See” is a tricky word. See’s primary definition in my word processor’s dictionary is “to perceive with the eye”. Eyes are fallible but most people give them great credit and trust. On a good day my eyes are at 20/40 or 20/50. On a bad day who knows. Anyone who works in the criminal justice system will tell you that eyewitness testimony in very unreliable over time. See’s second definition is to understand. Why do we see things the way we do?

Right now the news of the day is filled with tales of an airliner brought down by a missile. Everything I see tells me Russian soldiers carried out the horrific act. A rocket traveling a mile a second killed some of the preeminent virologists in the world. The dead were people who knew the ins and outs of AIDS and its genesis. Crowded in what would become their aluminum airborne coffin were the people who were working with passion to defeat the plague. Enroute to a conference on the health crisis their talented lives were abruptly brought to an end. In a flash of light and a horrific explosion their chance for future contributions at ending the disease were ended.

What I see when I watch the television are talking heads who say the Russians have moved the weaponry that perpetrated this dastardly act back into their own country. What I see are images of “rebels” trying to remove any evidence from the scene that might actually prove who shot the plane down. What I see are nations fighting over spheres of influence who in the end will shrug and do nothing. In the end does it matter what valuable knowledge we have lost because Russia wants to be the Russia of old and we on the other hand want cheap labor and goods?

On another channel I see a war with people dying in a land considered by three faiths to be holy. It is an unholy war that has been waged in many forms for centuries or even millennia. Dead is dead be it from a land mine or a head severed and then mounted on a pike. Barbarism in the name of God old style or new style is what I see. And nobody is to blame and everybody is to blame.

But what I see of this gruesome battle is fed to me by people with bias. My eyes see what other eyes have seen and then have edited. There is a narrative that gets created and whether it is reality is something else is a different question altogether. It is not just the current flare up that gets distilled and edited it is also the fate of the plane and if any turmoil or insurgency or assassination. It is all open to question as to what has been seen.

Buddhist though on seeing the ultimate nature vary:

Enlightenment is like the moon reflected on the water. The moon does not get wet, nor is the water broken. Although its light is wide and great, The moon is reflected even in a puddle an inch wide. The whole moon and the entire sky Are reflected in one dewdrop on the grass. Dogen

It is as though you have an eye That sees all forms But does not see itself. This is how your mind is. Its light penetrates everywhere And engulfs everything, So why does it not know itself? Foyan

I distrust the narrative in these events of conflict. I distrust my interpretations of these events because what I get to see is something tainted by human predilections. Human being want things, power and they want to render others subservient. In order to legitimize our claims of right (whatever that really means) we look at an event through the lenses of our desires. This is not seeing. I distrust the narratives of our hearts; we want things to be a certain way the tendrils of that desire wrap themselves around how we see and then warp it.

See and realize what you are seeing and why you are seeing it. The Moon and the universe is there in the dewdrop if you can find it. The eye is what shares the world with us but it is limited. Let our hearts see what is really going on.

The Magic Box

On Facebook yesterday I spewed out pieces of my life.  Four years of high school IDs, an article on my mother’s retirement after years of teaching, some graduation cars and more got captured in images and spread across the web for internet vermin and NSA techs to tease apart to either steal from me who I am or determine if I am a threat.

To accomplish this I spent an hour yesterday looking through a box of old letters.  Well, it was not just a box of old letters it was a box of addresses.  Really my friends it was a just a box of stuff.  

A folded newspaper resided in the box. A poster from the Attic Theatre in downtown Detroit from 1981 is there. A jar with sand and a seashell is in there.  A self-developed photograph of a cat named Mao is in there. The big waxed former produce bulk shipment box probably contains a roach or two.  Most likely the ticket stubs I was looking for are in there too.  I wanted to see if I still had the 1974 CSN&Y ticket stub from the Atlantic City Raceway.  Next time I look maybe I will find them. 

Over the years I have left that box alone.  For one reason or another I didn’t want to open it up.  But when I wrote the piece on stuff I still have to talk about I decided it might be the time.  Within that rectangle well might be some of the aqua vita remaining from the days of yore.  It does and it doesn’t. Yesterday as I went through that box I did it in only in a cursory manner. 

What I found was that I have always wanted to write albeit I foundered about a great deal when I was younger.  Having come through the American system of schooling I knew I was abysmal at grammar. My biggest fear was that what I put down on paper would be ridiculed.  

As years have passed software has helped with some of the issues.  Commas, periods and other faux pas now correct themselves.  Spelling too.  However you have to at least have some sense of the word you are trying to use for that function to work well.

In the quick scan of that box I have one regret.  Oh how I rue that there isn’t more in that box.  So many chances I have wasted it life through trepidation and a timid nature.  I wish there were unused stamps from the orient in there.  God if only I had a visa or two for studies in Australia or England.  Maybe a soundboard tape from some obscure band I was following.  I am not ashamed of what is in that box I am saddened by what is not in the box.

When I first sat down to write this I wanted an idyll away from the house, the TV, the bass practice and the chores.  But what I found was a fountain that needed cleaning.  Now it is gurgling and the birds are singing.  I took a road to get this place and I am not sad to be here.  I am sad I didn’t take a few more hairpin curves.

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. –R. Siken

Often I go out to Brainy Quote or Good Reads and look for a quote to match the feeling I am trying to convey.  Most of the time if it isn’t some Buddhist thing I don’t quite find any adroit turn of phrase that fully captures what I am trying to say.  This one about sums it up.

Fireflies flash in the green canopy.  A fountain flows.  Birds call back and forth. The night folds in up the remaining batter of day’s blend. Of all the things that I have and of all the things I have not the thing that I wish I would have spent more wisely was the moment when time was endless and hangovers were cured with aspirin and STDs were cured with penicillin. 

What Time Has Wrought