Lemon Moment, Personal

Saturday

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I had a couple of more great moments. Spending the morning watching the multiple hummingbirds jet around was definitely worth it. I have one I nicknamed “Machine Gun” for obvious reasons. It is non-stop LOUD.

I waited until later to take Güino for a walk. As soon as we got around to the back of the building, a squirrel announced his disapproval from on top of my barbecue grill back there. I don’t speak squirrel, but he called my cat every dirty name in the book.

It started sprinkling big heavy drops. Güino danced around and darted back and forth because evidently he decided that he could evade the drops if he just acted crazy enough. He led me on a fast march down the alleyway. And then decided to borrow into the deep pile of leaves close to Gregg. I had to dig him out.

He must have learned a bad lesson from the squirrel because he spent the trip up the stairs onto my landing complaining about the utter disrespect of being made to go back inside.

Lemon Moment, Personal

Orion In The Trees

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Orion through the gap in the top of the old post oak tree. The Lepus constellation was visible too, even though it doesn’t show well in this picture. I earned this picture. Post oak trees don’t get massively vertical. Instead, they get broader, much like genX as supper at 5p.m. becomes the norm. That’s why these trees have huge thick branches that extend perpendicularly close to the ground. 

It was easy to get into the tree. Quite another thing to get past the middle of it in the dark. Once I was up there, I defied gravity by not wanting to come down. 

I already knew it would be the memorable moment for the day. Coming down felt like defeat.

Lemon Moment, Personal

McGreasy

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On a whim, I went to McDonald’s for a McGreasy a little after 5:00 a.m. I walked up the hill to Gregory Park. I had this weird feeling someone was in the dark, unseen. The 19+ acres is a spectacular place to sleep.

Because of the season slipping, it didn’t occur to me that I was there too early to walk up the steep hill to watch the sunrise. You wouldn’t think so, but it’s a beautiful spot up on top.

I sat on the outside perimeter with my feet hanging off, stuffing the McGreasy into my mouth.

“Hey, do you have an extra sandwich?”

The skin on the back of my neck crawled. I couldn’t see him and wasn’t sure how far away he was.

“No, but I’ll get one and leave it here for you. Give me 10 minutes.”

I walked back down to McDonald’s and got a sandwich and drink. Trudging back up the hill again, I was just about to place the food and drink on the outer edge.

It was time for my second startle. A short man wearing an absurdly large white hat came out of the woods on the side closer to Sycamore. He had a backpack on, so he probably got up early from wherever he was sleeping. I said good morning but he didn’t answer. He cut through the parking lot entrance and went down through the McDonald’s parking lot.

I left the food and drink on the ledge for the unseen person in the woods.

I took two pictures, both of them long exposures, even though it was totally dark where I was.

Deanne, Family, Personal

September 4, Forever

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Both of them are gone now. But for that moment at the Omaha Zoo, the ridiculous side was out. She struggled with the long walk. We didn’t know why at the time.

The other picture was after a great meal. She and Steve clearly gave their opinions of my constant picture taking.

Strange, because other than memories, that’s what I have.

Hundreds of pictures. I was lucky enough to have in-laws who saw the value of letting me scan a couple thousand pictures of her and her family. It was difficult to even try to sort them and decide which ones to share.

I had to include one of her with at least one animal. I have a trove of them. If she had her way, I would have been living in a menagerie. As evidenced by the picture, even fake animals.

Time.

It is the unrelenting bastard that guards the door.

Time.

.

I don’t post pictures of her very often. I demarcated my life into before and after. Life became a demonstration of quantum theory; her absence erased what could have and should have been.

.

I could only separate my life into before and after because somebody accepted my wounds afterward.

Despite all my lessons of appreciation, I fumbled that opportunity. I can’t blame it on the universe or an unseen illness.

Fayetteville, Lemon Moment

Surprise Oasis

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I thought I knew this area completely, almost down to the square foot. I saw what I was sure was a brilliant orange Oriole and looked at an angle through the trees. It was a canopied oasis sloping down into a little valley that I didn’t even know existed. Dozens of birds in there, singing and chirping and flying around.

Personal

September

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In this month, many have come and gone and the impossible perpetually falls from the sky.

I can’t explain it. The suspended anticipation of an unneeded repeat for a lesson I learned long ago hits me every year.

I dread the calendar page falling from eight to nine.

It is me at my most irrational.

I don’t want September to wake me up when it ends. I hope for a month of silence and ceaseless nonsurprise.

Because the sun and shadows speed their dance in this month, I think of a moment when I looked at the seat next to me and saw an entire life wrapped and concealed in a binder. As I drove under the trees, those mercurial shadows danced for me, like one’s life flashing before your eyes. It warped me and I embraced it.

I see it floating in the blue sky, high above its owner. Perfect training and a foolish mistake combined to create an unwelcome greeting for me on the ground. It came to the ground as all things do.

It’s not personal.

It’s just September.

It forces me unwillingly to remember.

I don’t trust myself until it ends. The angry faces, the wasted time, and the seemingly stupid focus on mundane and trivial things.

Part of what I miss is the visceral nod to moving and acting as if it is all farce. In farce, nothing is ever lost and you can never waste a moment.

Everything is always lost and all moments are one. It’s that we can’t experience it from a wide enough angle to see the blur of it all.

For every answer, there’s a question.

For every frown, a smile.

I’ll look up a lot this month, as I always do.

In this month, many have come and gone and the impossible perpetually falls from the sky.

September is the calcium of my bones.

X
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Fayetteville, Personal

They Always Come Back

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Each year, I forget about the difference in Fayetteville at 2:00 a.m. in the morning once the U of A students return. There were troves of young people walking along the hot, humid streets at 2:00. It’s nice hearing them chirp and overlap each other’s conversations. I do wonder what magical ability they possess. I can’t imagine staying up and drinking like that, followed by a sweaty walk home.

I stopped at one of the “reputable” inconvenience stores for a diet soda. There was so much exposed skin in that store that I thought I had walked into the dermatologist’s. The U of A students are great barometers to determine which stores are safe and clean. Even though there are other stores nearby, you will not see students at those.

As for people who shouldn’t be driving, it’s a good thing there’s not an officer at every intersection. I saw at least a dozen drivers who probably need to spend the night in a concrete bedroom.

If you look at the middle of my picture, you can see someone on a moped. As I walked down Sycamore to turn onto Leverett, this guy was going way too fast. I didn’t see it when his handlebars clipped one of the poles. But I heard the bell sound when he did. I watched him come off the moped. Shockingly, he got up and stumbled around. He got back on his moped and headed back in the other direction. Probably from disorientation, if not inebriation. I watched just to see if he was going to keep it upright. He did a fast turn and then roared back past me. The picture’s blurry because I thought I hit the video button. I was 100% convinced I was going to film him careening into something.

Had he hit something at that speed, he would have become Jason (Re)Bourne.

Lemon Moment, Personal

Meteors

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Not sleeping a lot sometimes has its advantages. Although the spot wasn’t perfect, I went to the wide spot near the railroad tracks where I can see the panorama of the entire sky. 

I didn’t get to see an enormous fireball cutting across, but I did get to see a couple of dozen meteors making hyphens across the sky. 

These things travel at 37 miles a second. Some of the debris is 4.6 billion years old. 

It was much darker than my picture lives on. I took a long exposure picture. 

Was it worth it? I stood in the silence of the night, feeling the breeze and listening to the insects as I sipped my coffee. My imagination surpassed the speed of those brief meteors. 

Behavior, Lemon Moment, Nostalgia, Opinion

Ordinary World

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Today was someone’s last day at work after a total of 40-plus years. Such lengths of service have become increasingly unlikely given how much the world has changed and how differently companies operate. 

I’ve been at my job well over 21 years. The succession of new faces renders as a blur. When an anchor person such as the woman retiring today departs, you know things will be different. 

Someone who retired almost 5 years ago after an impressive run showed up for the retirement celebration. The gap between the years collapsed to such a degree that I felt like it was merely a month ago. At her party, I remember quoting Andy from The Office: “I wish there was a way to know you’re in ‘the good old days,’ before you’ve actually left them.”  Everyone knew when she left that something fundamental was shifting. 

It’s likely that only older people can feel the sublime emotion that signals recognition that, in some ways, regardless of our current reality, we’ll likely look back on just about every definable era as worthy of remembering. 

I should have known better than to turn on the radio in the sweltering heat of my car as I left today. There was one second of silence before the next song started playing. “Ordinary World” by Duran Duran. I’m not particularly fond of the group, but this song always touches emotions that go beyond the alleged subject matter.

“…What has happened to it all?

Crazy, some’d say

Where is the life that I recognize? (Gone away)

But I won’t cry for yesterday, there’s an ordinary world

Somehow I have to find…”

Strange that tears would come to my eyes. It’s almost as if these moments remind me that on some secret level, we know we are not chasers of things. And yet, we are more defined by possessions, routine, and obligation than we will ever be by the wild creative potential lurking inside of us. 

Hell is truly other people. But stop to imagine how much more hellish life would be without the people spanning the decades with us. 

Ancestry, Fayetteville, History, Lemon Moment

Heebie-Jeebies History

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The Heebie-Jeebies Index

There’s no question that the stretch of Oakland Ave. between Sycamore and Mt. Comfort is among the weirdest and most heebie-jeebies-prone streets in Fayetteville. This is doubly true once August arrives. 

The street is unusual for several reasons. It is a chaotic mix of old houses, modern townhouses, sporadic street lights, and one side of the road lacking a sidewalk while simultaneously having a drainage ditch that is a literal hazard to both drivers and pedestrians. 

It was probably during my 100th late-night/early-morning walk on Oakland that it occurred to me just how many weird things I had seen and heard.

The stretch of street I’m referring to is 2,250 feet. One of the fascinating things about part of this area is that Mt. Comfort Road was once a major “highway” for its time. It was cut off when Highway 112 was put in, leaving this little forgotten stub of a highway. Almost no one alive today knows that this strange fragment of road is very, very old, or how many people once passed through Fayetteville east to west (or vice versa) this way. If you are so inclined, you can do as I did and find old aerial photography from before the interstate was built and before the Hwy 112 project cut off Mt. Comfort Road. We forget that “progress” is a seemingly slow, constant march until we scan through and see that even our familiar topography is really a slow-motion, never-ending process.