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.
September is the calcium of my bones.
X
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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.
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.
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.
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.
Because the early morning was unusually quiet, I could hear the faint meow. It sounded like it came from everywhere. Stopping, I waited. I knew the cat had surreptitiously slipped up behind me before I turned around.
When I bent over to pet it, it arched its back and emitted a soulful sound. The cat permitted me to run my fingers in its fur for at least a minute. I walked away and stopped to see if it had followed.
It was still perched in the middle of the street, watching me. That its shadow seemed disproportionately large didn’t surprise me.
Later on my walk, I passed the back courtyard portion of the church. A flash of movement caught my attention. I would have sworn it looked like a cape or veil streaming to the right. Even though the hallucination made the hair on the back of my neck stand up, I stood and let the camera adjust to the dark.
“Knock, knock,” I said, a little caught off guard by how dead my voice sounded in the quiet.
No one answered. I was certain a strange voice would respond. The certainty was so intense that I used the angled shadows and light to carefully watch for any movement.
As I walked away, I heard the faintest scrape of movement. I didn’t turn around to look. Not out of apprehension. I’d rather imagine that whatever had flickered in the corner of my vision would remain a mystery.
I walked over to Garland/112 in the unseasonably cool dark early morning. The plan was to watch the panoramic dark sky for meteors. It’s one of the best nearby places because I can walk down the middle of the road without so much concern that a sidewalk will trip me up.
As I approached the last side street, Ernie Jacks Blvd., I heard somebody driving fast heading north. But I wasn’t seeing the flickering shadowy lights ahead of me caused by headlights. A white vehicle roared past, traveling at about 90 mph. No headlights. No interior lights of any kind. Cannonball Run came to mind.
Almost simultaneously, blue lights flickered against the white fence along the west side of the road. For a second, I thought an unseen police vehicle fired up its lights as the occupant watched the vehicle roar passed.
It wasn’t. Instead, several police vehicles were at the apartments on the right side. I took a right and walked down the side dead end street to see what kind of excitement might be going on. The voices were clear but for some reason I couldn’t understand a word.
The flashing lights and backlit effect created another illusion. I took a couple of pictures because the boundaries of the trees and the contradicting lights made it look like there was a cloud floating about 20 feet in front of me. It’s not real. The canopy of the trees created The strange optical illusion.
It was a beautiful and quiet walk. Almost no breeze, with the temperature actually falling as I wound my way through the dark neighborhoods. Just the insects and occasional voices from unseen people who had refused to give up the night and go to bed.
For some reason, the movie Backrooms kept coming to mind. If there were such magical places, this would have been the morning where I would not have been surprised to find one. Like magical Narnia wardrobes, except scattered in shadowy liminal spaces.
I’m definitely going to have to bring out my blue tape and put up some hidden doorways one of these mornings. As a prank, but also as a way to identify people who are either strange enough or magical enough to want to walk up and touch them. Just in case. Those are my people.
By the time I reluctantly surrendered, there was a breeze to accompany me and the temperature had dropped to 70. That was magical enough.
“The past is gone.”
That’s a lie. The past superimposes like a template. It overrides, echoes, and grooves an outline on our present.
Were we able to rise with a blank slate, maybe our sense of wonder and appreciation would flourish.
Age brings wisdom. But it also brings the uninvited companion of certainty. Certainty murders creativity and whimsy.
Memories and nostalgia are our constant companions. They are both comfort and curse. You cannot remember the earthy smell of wood smoke from your childhood without the pang of knowing the people that dwelled in that place with you are no longer here.
The timespace theory of our timelines being a book is true. The past is still there and some of us live in it. Our experiences both enhance and discolor the world we’re in right now. The future is always a burden on us too. We live with worry, as if worry is a real action and makes any difference. The future can no more be controlled than a feral cat.
I watch people getting older. One of the worst things about the human condition is that we lock in as we accumulate experiences. Instead of being magical, we become static, finished, and rigid.
I think back to 19 years ago when the universe slapped me out of certainty. And when that feeling of surrender started seeping back out of me. That knowledge is not tangible, but I feel its absence.
Even though it’s early for peak meteor season, I adjusted my long, meandering walk so that I could hit more of the dark spots along the streets. Wandering down the middle, I walked for minutes at a time with my head tilted up toward the south, watching. Using my Starwalk app, it was easy to stay locked in to Aquarius. That’s where the Southern Delta Aquarius would be most visible.
Sidenote, the debris from the comet that forms these meteors is moving at 25 miles per second. That’s only slightly faster than Xander at work when he hears there are free donuts.
If you’re into meteors, this shower will peak around the 29th. The alleged best time to view them will be starting at 2:00 a.m. We’ll probably get 10 to 20 per hour.
I sweated more than the president at a perjury hearing. But the streets were mine and the insects kept me company.
Returning to my apartment, I realized that I had missed the message my neighbor had left me. I strategically left a piece of chalk on my railing, somehow knowing she would not be able to resist leaving me some kind of scrawled message.
Kellogg wasn’t the first to make crisped rice cereal. They won the cereal race solely because of the sounds their cereal made when milk was added. “Snap, Crackle, and Pop” was not only one of the most famous advertising campaigns ever, but it still confounds people when they find out that the three creatures on the box were named Snap, Crackle, and Pop.
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P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 