Dickson Street is a ghost town early in the morning, after all the night zombies make their exodus. I love the experience of seeing and hearing things when the world is silent. It’s a little warmer this morning but the wind puffs and reminds me that it’s still cold. The crescent moon hangs in the southern sky.
At one point in my walk, the thunder of distant sirens wailed for a bit. It was a strained metaphor for the wild and uncertain world spanning out around me. Beauty and horror are constant companions.
We’re all visitors here, no matter where we call home. Just because we have decades to call a place our home, it doesn’t conceal or deny the fact that impermanency is our master. Yet we keep arguing and fighting, as if our efforts are more than personally significant milestones.
I can’t walk around deserted towns without being introspective. It feels like there’s an elusive revelation just around the corner each time I do it.
While crossing the parking lot at Harps, I thought I heard someone calling my name. Either that or they were reciting the alphabet. You can’t quite be sure in Fayetteville.
It was my cousin Diane. She said she had a surprise for me and asked me to drop by her apartment.
She gave me this brooch. It’s either a beetle or a butterfly from her mom. The wings are spring-mounted, much like my feet when I spot an unattended coffee bar.
I woke up the roosters and was out of the hotel room within 10 minutes, after dressing in the mostly dark room. For reasons I can’t remember, it seemed important to get dressed before going out.
Magee, Mississippi gave me the opportunity to be a stranger in a strange land. It’s one of my favorite things. To wander the dark roads and streets of places I’ve never been and will likely never be again.
With luck, the ocean will be in sight later today. I don’t think I’ve returned since my last visit somewhere around 25 years ago. I’ve lived a couple of lifetimes since. I love the big moments and the epic sights. Who wouldn’t? I still feel like the stolen moments and carved out spontaneous experiences make up the bulk of our lives.
With the exception of the main highway, I owned all the streets this morning. Not a single car passed me. The main highway of course is dotted with people in a hurry to get somewhere else, even at 4:00 in the morning.
I’ll be one of them later.
I grabbed a cup of coffee on the way out of the hotel lobby prior to my long walk. I’ll bet a million dollars that the cup I get when I go back in will taste immeasurably better.
It will be the same coffee. But I’ll be a little different.
I left Señor Conejo on Michael’s car. Michael returned to the job he left recently at the inconvenience store, so it seemed appropriate to leave him a head-scratcher of a surprise.
Señor Conejo has adorned the inside corner of my landing post for a couple of years. It came to me because a friend had ordered it from a Temuesque online store. (Where expectations seldom intersect with reality.) I took some time to fix it, paint it, and adorn it with a wild assortment of a doodads. Chris P. Bacon and Redactyl, my personal weather dinosaur, both still stand guard along the banister rail.
Señor Conejo undoubtedly was growing concerned with some of the wild neighborhood shenanigans he has witnessed from his perch above the parking lot.
In one way, I hated to part with Señor Conejo. But it’s time for a renewal. Giving away these personal things capriciously gives me a little pause.
Then I look up into the early morning sky and realize that one day ownership and sentimentality must ceed their claim to whatever comes next.
The greater our reluctance to step aside, to yield, or to change, the higher the probability of dissatisfaction and unhappiness becomes.
I of course was awake when the clocks flipped back an hour. When I went outside I was greeted with strong wind gusts and the clattering echo of someone’s wind chimes lodging their complaint about the unusually warm weather. The clouds above me raced across the sky.
It was hard for me to go inside. I wanted to watch and listen to the symphony of rustles, chimes, and clouds. Every few minutes, the wind whistled between the wooden fence slats. Unlike most mornings, there wasn’t much traffic, nor were the usual cast of characters mumbling or coming in and out of nearby apartments.
I went to the inconvenience store for a soda. My trip was mostly a pretext to see if anything unusual would pop up.
Y’all might have witnessed people going to the store in pajamas. I can go one better. I had to laugh as I watched a woman approach the store wearing her bedspread. That’s either a demonstration of liberation or I-don’t-give-an-eff.
Joy. The same day I discovered the abandoned trunk in the trees and brush, I had a joyous moment. Near where I work is a nexus of creek, trails, and wildlife. For whatever reason, this year brought a few squirrels not intimidated by people. If I’m still, a couple of these will approach me, sit near me, or cling to the bark of a tree near eye level. If I lean against one of the box transformers nearby, it might put its paws on the small of my back. Every so often, they let me pet them. Earlier in the week, one of these trusting squirrels approached me excitedly and sat at my feet, twitching and raising its head. I reached down, gave him neck scrunches, and ran my fingers along its back like a cat. The squirrel chattered in response. (It’s one of the squirrels that recently engaged in a squirrel war with a fellow tree dweller and fell on me.) I don’t know what it was telling me as I made contact. When I was done petting it, it picked up an acorn and busily chewed on it at my feet. I suppose it wanted company – and I was glad to have it. It flew me away from the job, the day, and the relentless stupidity we call busyness.
I don’t know what called me to walk along the back spur of the trail. I haven’t been near there in weeks due to the drought and the low creek.
To the right of the path, I saw what initially looked to be a barrel. As I neared it, I realized it was an antique trunk. The lid was carelessly thrown open and a couple of drawers sat haphazardly on top of the trunk’s opening.
Slightly uphill and to the right were the remnants of someone’s memories. Photos, cards, tickets for rock music venues from the 1970s, and personal keepsakes.
Someone had to have taken great effort to get the trunk out there amidst the trees.
I have a lot of questions about how the trunk got there, and of the stranger whose belongings are still carelessly staged and thrown out for display to those adventurous enough to walk through.
Of course I can’t resist the call to do my thing and find out about the woman whose storage trunk of memories are discarded out here.
I’m glad I listened to the call that prompted me to go out among the trees.
But I am also a little disheartened to have found someone’s trunk of memories out here.
The park crew was clearing brush and trees from the creekside end of Bluff Cemetery. We’ve been weeks without substantive rain.
Because the amount of dust reminded me of an empty field before and after the crops of my youth, I told him, “A little grit in the heat never hurt anyone.”
Because of the elevation of the cemetery and the exposed expanses of ground at the cemetery, the effect of the high wind carrying and eddying the dust and leaves was quite beautiful despite it covering me as I walked through it.
It was shortly after noon during my visit. The sky looked like a summer sky even though the browning trees frowned at me for such a thought.
I can’t visit a cemetery without viscerally feeling the irony of loving cemeteries for their history and emotional anchors, yet having always disliked the ritual of burial.
I have several family members at Bluff. Several contemporaries and people I’ve known also dot the landscape.
After meandering, I took a photo of a random grave. Someday soon, I’ll use the information to find out more about the person using my research skills. It may seem foolish to some for me to do this. But every time I do it, I learn something. I like to think that a random stranger’s attention might float up into the after and ether and hit a hidden chord of memory in the universe.
Before exiting the property, I pulled my car over and parked. I chose a tree along the periphery and did my best to climb it. My pocket was loaded with a length of wire and a beautiful prism. I left it hanging up there. In the days to come it will become more exposed as the tree gives way to November.
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust.
The prism is a reminder that sunlight is not only the source of all life here on Earth, but also provides the only way we can experience beauty with our eyes.
No matter what your views are of the afterlife, many forget that we are supposed to squeeze life while we’re here. Some of us produce lemon juice and others nectar.
We all breathe the same air and for different lengths of time.
PS I hope some of you got to enjoy the leaf tornadoes that seemed to be everywhere today.
It’s all perspective. The custom painting in my kitchen alcove expresses it well: “Black Hole Sun-The same sun, yet filtered by negligent eyes, renders darkly all that shines.”
I can worry about the moronic changes in my professional life or look at the parking lot below and consider all the recent ill-advised shenanigans from those who traverse it. I can also turn and look through my large screenless windows into the living room and watch my cat shoot across the uneven levels of the massive cat castle like a feline projectile. Güino doesn’t concern himself with the outside world. His perspective is limited. Given the massive amount of information and bustle I experience on a given day, I think he’s winning in a way that I can’t.
I had infinite energy this morning. So I burned it off like useless gas derivatives being lit at the top of oil refineries.
A lot of our lives are like the burned gasses. We spend so much time and energy wanting to control or direct the world around us. We’d be better off focusing on the immediacy of things and people around us.
This post is partially personal and also a metaphor. Or analogy. Although I know the difference, I don’t care about grammatical accuracy. If this post is all over the place, you can thank me later for taking you around the world with my shotgun storytelling.
In 2005, I visited my brother north of Chicago. He brought out a giant bag of tortilla chips, one suited for his appetite. Then, he brought out high-quality horseradish and made a two-ingredient dip. Although I’m laughing when I write this, my brother Mike might have held me down with one of his giant paws of a hand and inserted a horseradish-laden tortilla chip into my mouth had I persisted in refusing to try it. I grabbed a chip and loaded it. My brother’s eyes widened, and he laughed like a hyena because he knew I would eat the whole bite. Though it burned, it was delicious!
“See, you dumb bastard? I told you you would like it. This ain’t the horseradish Aunt Ardith kept hidden in a side shelf.”
Although my brother was one of those people who thought he was always right, I had to give him credit for insisting I at least try horseradish. The worst that could have happened is that I still would have hated it.
All these years later, I think about that. He did the same thing with guacamole after I refused to have some freshly made guacamole at what used to be my favorite Mexican restaurant in Springdale. Guacamole was the equivalent of turkish delight from C.S. Lewis’ Narnia tales.
I am now a world class aficionado of pico de gallo. For too many years, I assumed I wouldn’t like it because my mom made me automatically distrust onions. Onions were the second component of her one-two punch of seasoning, which consisted of onions and cigarette ash. It was a story of culinary violence in the South, never knowing if the potato salad or mashed potatoes would have fantasy-level chunks of onions.
The above anecdotes hint at much of our problem. Because I was naive and poor, I was rarely exposed to a wide swath of food, much less quality. My cousin Jimmy’s house was the crucible of exposure to many foods. Because of my dad, Bobby Dean, almost literally making me eat food at gunpoint, some of my first exposures to some things were less than ideal. That’s putting it mildly. Some of the food at my house was the equivalent of the discarded version of what you would find behind a dollar store grocery aisle. That explained my aversion to morel mushrooms.
And also horseradish.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first tried horseradish. I remember the time that soured me on it. It turned out to be old and nasty by any standard. So, it’s no wonder my first exposure was the equivalent of eating a goose-poop-filled donut. I was lucky to have Aunt Ardith and Uncle Buck. Without them, my life would have been much worse in several ways. Visiting my cousin Jimmy always guaranteed that I’d be well-fed and get to try a variety of things. I like to joke about the horseradish because it was one of the few times that Aunt Ardith convinced me to try something exotic (to me). She had the best intentions, unlike my dad. If he got a hint of an idea that I didn’t like something, you can be sure that I’d be eating a bucket of it. Aunt Ardith and Uncle Buck did their best to tell Dad to jump off a cliff when he behaved that way around them.
We have parallel aversions to many things resulting from our initial exposure. Look at most relationships, and you can see that it’s true. You had your heart broken. You repay your future self by carrying the mistake and believing that all relationships will turn sour. Or you think most people grew up without the love and caring everyone needs. You carry your words into the future, and all the potential people you meet indirectly pay for the wound. You either avoid deep relationships or insist the system is rigged and broken. The concept of relationships isn’t the problem; it’s us. You’re letting your version of horseradish tarnish your future with other people.
Life is horseradish and guacamole.
Be open to new things.
Be aware that you may have blinded yourself or made truth from experiences that should not be extrapolated into cynicism or isolation.
Although it is true that people rarely fundamentally change, it is possible both in outlook and preference.
Changing is, in part, acknowledging that the things, habits, and ideas that once defined you no longer do.
Only healthy people change their minds and their lives.
PS During this crazy election, I’ve had a few laughs because of my brother. He’s been gone for four years. In his later life, one of his proclivities was to be a blowhard, much in the ilk of Bill O’Reilly. My job was to be the liberal and sentimental brother that drove him crazy. And as I was fond of telling him, the person left standing gets the last word. Since I bought gallon by the ink, he didn’t have the temperament to keep up with me. If he were still alive, he’d be pissed off at me constantly. But I miss it. Not the anger of the last few years; that period owes its shadows to alcohol and unresolved trauma. I miss the undeniable intelligence of my brother, even when he used it to wither my well-intentioned arguments. I absorb a lot of the election craziness and play a dialog in my head, one in which my brother is the one repeating conspiracy theories and horrible rhetoric. My brother taught me that if you can’t argue the facts, you pound the table. If that fails, flip the table.
PSS I chose a different picture for this post instead of one of my brother. Both pictures are of joy and of family time. Even though there was a backdrop of unease during both visits, each of the pictures reveals both youth and connection. In one, my niece Brittany charges toward me as I stand by a pond outside a cabin on King’s River. I got deathly ill from food poisoning on that visit, and Mike’s police K-9 got violently snakebit while we were all swimming in the river. Behind Brittany, as she runs, my deceased wife watches happily. The other picture from another visit is of my nephew Quinlan kicking my ass as the three of us wrestle like savages. I’d forgotten that their dog was watching from the doorway. The third picture is of me and my brother. Mike had his wife bought me a plane to ticket to visit them in Illinois. I love the picture despite the goofy look on my face. It documents my brother’s vibrancy in the “before” part of his life. Mike bought me tickets for two such trips, and his doing so proved that he loved me and also missed me. It was before the branching of his life; the picture captures what could have been the case for the rest of his life had he made that choice. My niece is a mother now, and when I think about the fleeting speed of life, I get a glimpse of the idea that nothing stands alone in our lives and that each moment unfolds from the previous one. We don’t see its unfolding or interconnectedness until later.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 