Is the picture a snapshot of dirty concrete or dappled moonlight? Mottled moonbeams is another way of describing it. The Japanese call it Komorezuki.
The shimmering effect results from moonlight or light creating pinhole cameras between the leaves.
Several times this week, I’ve stopped in the dark and watched huge expanses of this effect. It’s almost like two superimposing realities are trying to click into the same space.
I can take a picture of it, but I can’t really capture it, no more than I can descriptively recall why some moments are more vivid than others.
This is just another variation of my Septembers, when the light jumps and slides across the memory markers I’m accustomed to.
I’m 59 and still waiting for the click. When you get older and look back, it’s astonishing how many of the important moments feel like they’re not?
Because I got up even earlier than should be possible, I walked the dead man hill route and cut south. When I made it to North Street, the number of young people out around 1:30 was ridiculous.
By the time I looped back around and walked a short stretch of Leverett, three different cars had driven by with young men screaming from the windows in an attempt to startle me. It happens a lot. I wish I could tell all these young guys who have obviously been drinking that riding around with the back passenger window open while wearing a backward baseball cap is tantamount to catnip for police.
After I turned on Leverett again, a little white Hondaesque car drove by me slowly. Can you guess? Yet another inebriated young guy leaned out the window and screamed. “Wooooo!”
Even though I was expecting it, I jumped and laughed. The young guy leaned further out the window and waved, laughing.
The car turned on the very next left onto Hazel Street. It’s very close to Leverett. For no reason at all, I walked around the same corner. The Hondaesque car had stopped at the intersection of Hazel and Storer. The brake lights were lit, so I knew somebody was in the car.
I’m pretty sure one of the occupants was either stopping to confirm his membership in the chess club or securing more alcohol. I’ll let you decide which is more likely.
It was at that moment that I realized that Bobby Dean was calling. I walked quickly across the grass and against the trees just in case one of the car’s occupants might see me. When I was about ten feet away, I darted over to the passenger side. Keep in mind it’s about 2:00 a.m.
At the top of my lungs (two feet from the car), I screamed: “WHAT’S UP C*******ERS!”
(You have to use the terminology that young university men are prone to use, not to mention a nod to my dad.)
It turns out that two of the occupants had exited the vehicle when they arrived. Both passengers in the back seat screamed like elementary school girls.
It was as if they moved in slow motion as they overreacted. It didn’t occur to me to run off.
Both of the young guys fortunately thought it was hilarious.
“Be safe and watch out for the Watermelon Man,” I said before walking away, still grinning like an idiot.
PS The Watermelon Man is a fable invented by my dad, Bobby Dean. He’s always out at night and you never see him coming until he wants you to.
.*The picture is of beautiful new buildings recently constructed on the corner of Sycamore and Leverett. I had what should have been beautiful shots of the university skyline, but both turned out to be Mr. McGoo shots.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 