Some moments remind me that people often find themselves on the razor’s edge. Wherein one more callous word or capricious movement of the universe can have them seeking the tallest building. I won’t reveal the moment from a little bit ago. But I saw the most authentic face of gratitude I’ve seen in quite a while. I heard the clerk tell a man, “I’m so sorry your day’s been terrible.” The man in question radiated defeat and bone-weary tiredness. He was much too young to stand with a posture like the upper part of a question mark. When we both left, he reached out his hand to introduce himself. I showed him my badge so that he could see my name as I said it. I didn’t mean for the words that exited my mouth to sound so meta or cryptic: “Things might not get better, but you will be.” We talked for a minute. As I drove away, I saw him walking. His pants were still askew across the top of his boots; his back was not as arched. Is it optimism to think the synchronicity of our collision in the same time and space was no accident? Pure selfishness tells me that it was more of a benefit to me by far than to him.
I drove away and then stopped to walk over to the creek. The tornado test siren filled the air. “This is a test,” the siren blared. Indeed it is.
It’s lovely that the goats recognize me now. I brought them both healthy and trashy treats. And this time I remembered that there would be a tumult of birds. All of us were happy. When I left, I heard the distant roar of the tourist train approaching, so I stopped at the corner and got out and leaned on the hood of my car. A small silver car passed driving erratically. The driver was angry and screaming at the passenger. The kind of anger that easily results in danger. That guy needs more goats in his life.
Stupid delights. The fortuitous alignment of location and timing. A strong gust of wind precisely when I passed under the tree. Surrounded by a cyclone of beautifully colored leaves making their escape to the ground. It felt like dozens of butterflies. X .
After working a bit very early this morning, I drove to the flattest open space that was convenient. Sleeping less sometimes has its rewards. I parked near the railroad tracks and access road by Meeks and sat on the hood of my car. It didn’t take long for the meteor showers that peak this weekend night to dazzle me. Though there was more light interference than I liked, the wide view of the night sky provided more than enough vantage for me to watch several brilliant transitory flashes burn across the sky. I’m sure anyone driving by might have looked twice at that hour because I decided to lay flat on the road several feet away from my car, and my eyes turned to the sky. As I lay there, the mass of traffic snarls from yesterday evening seemed like a week ago. The hardness of the ground didn’t bother me. After a few more flashes, I went back to my apartment. The first time I went back out on the landing, I wasn’t thinking about more meteors. But the sky gifted me with a couple as I stood there.
These meteorites are debris related to Haley’s Comet. It staggers me that about 50 tons of this debris hit the Earth’s atmosphere daily.
Though my Grandpa knew nothing about the night sky, some of the sporadic memories I have of him are of him pointing at the Big Dipper, or asking me if I could see the man in the moon. He spent most of his life surrounded by fields and immense night sky views. I spent more than a few seconds thinking about what the meteorites might look like in the fields of Monroe County.
For a brief few moments, the night made me wonder how objects that could be 4.5 billion years old were racing toward their demise only for me, a solitary human being, to witness. And that each of us, in our own way, flies through time exactly like they are.
If you could swoop up above yourself, rise above the surface of the earth and look doown, would everything carry the same weight of importance and drama? I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I have moments where I walk out of the mess of activity in commerce. In less than two minutes, I can descend and immerse myself into a place that makes much of it seem foolish. You don’t need a special place to recognize the sheer wastefulness of much of what preoccupies our minds. But the familiarity and routine of what we expect to see and experience comes with the uninvited guest of blindness. What we fail to experience and see is often the consequence of not expecting anything beyond the ordinary.
My cousin gave me a leather jacket that belonged to her brother Barry. Normally, I don’t wear such nice things because, well, I’m me and I often don’t know whether I’ll end up in a branchy tree or a creek.
As I was paying at the inconvenience store, a woman behind me told me that she loved the leather jacket and missed seeing them. Her husband loved leather jackets. He passed away a few years ago. I asked her what kind of cigarettes he smoked and she brightened up with a smile. She asked me how I knew he smoked. So I told her that it was almost a federal law that such nice leather jackets required the wearer to emulate James Dean or the icons of the past, all of whom smoked.
As she laughed, I asked her to tell me a funny story about her husband. Her smile grew even wider and I knew my personal question had opened a memory doorway in her head.
She didn’t hesitate:
“He often said that he couldn’t go out without a leather jacket. Whether it was church, a family dinner, or a quick trip to the store, he would often forget his keys or wallet, but never his leather jacket. When one of our nephews got married, the bride-to-be asked him to remove it for a photo after the reception. The nephew laughed and told his new wife that this wasn’t how we do things in the family. The leather jacket was an official member of the family. Luckily, she agreed and said as long as my husband bought her a leather jacket, it was okay with her. She forgot all about it. But a year later, he bought her and his nephew both leather jackets. It became a running joke.”
She told the story with more detail and definitely with more humor.
When she saw me in the leather jacket, she was not simply looking at a jacket. To her, it was a nostalgic reminder of her one love in life. She was still smiling when I left. I attempted to act cool as I popped up the collar. It made me smile too.
I’m not the supernatural sort most of the time. Getting to my new place in the creek, I deviated and went through the place I used to live in Johnson. Somehow, it slipped my mind for a while that two of the biggest events in my life took place less than 40 ft apart. Totally unconnected except by location. Both involving death. It’s strange how my mind blurs the mountain of coincidences that resulted from both. When I drove by on my way to the creek, none of that was on my mind. Then the cascade of simultaneous memories and coincidences cloaked me. I’ve mentioned before that I experience odd cycles of coincidences. At times it feels like it was another person living through them. Someone shared a video earlier of a woman who had a particularly bizarre string of coincidences. I know that we all unintentionally string together connections where there aren’t any. But for any of you who have run into a matrix of events, people, and places, maybe you know what I’m talking about. If you do, please share with me what I’m trying to say. (That last part made me laugh.) When I first arrived here, a dad and his young son were fishing upstream. To give them quiet, I went way too far down the road and then cut through the foliage. Even Chuck Norris would have winced at the terrain and the infinite number of sharp, unexpected stones. Even for my tough feet, I let out more than one curse. Sitting on a high bank in the middle of the river with my feet immersed in the cold water and inundated with the loud bubble and sounds of the creek makes me feel like I’m suspended in time. Because I probably am subconsciously. It’s still early enough in fall for there to be butterflies and dragonflies darting about. Every couple of minutes, a random bird will fly over me and below the overhang canopy of trees; if I sit motionless, some of them are within two feet of my head as they pass. I guess my wildly colored dashiki shirt looks natural in the clear water. X
A while back, my cousin met me briefly on the way to somewhere else and she gave me a box full cassette tapes, most of which I had made for her decades ago. I took them out several times and looked at the titles and the colored labels that I made back in the day. It brought back a tremendous number of memories for me. Both for the music and the way I had shared it with people. Making cassettes and VCR tapes was one of the ways I helped my mom keep her sanity. Even when she was being argumentative and impossible, the movies, music, and music videos I shared with her kept us connected.
It had been my intention to take them to work and listen to them using an old stereo with a cassette deck. I still have most of the music digitally. Except for perhaps the Looney Toons Christmas music. I put the box in my trunk yesterday.
I’m glad I forgot to take them inside.
When I went to wade the creek today, I followed yesterday’s pattern and went somewhere different. I parked in the apartments near the Agri perimeter. I walked across the wide expanse of lawn, crossed the trail, and walked a different section of the creek. On the way out, I climbed the beautiful tree near the apartments. Most people passing through that section of the trail have noticed the huge trunks that extend horizontally to the ground before pushing back upward. I climbed higher than I should, but I just muttered to myself, “Time is short,” and went up anyway. It was beautiful and the breeze was refreshing.
When I got out of the tree, though I was barefoot, I walked along the protective cyclone fence next to the apartments. A man was sitting outside his apartment listening to music. I don’t know why I approached him. The offer of the box of cassettes in my trunk passed from my lips. He laughed. He said, “Yes, of course! I will give anything a listen.” We talked for a minute and I asked him to wait so that I could walk back to my car and retrieve the box. When I returned, he flipped open the box and smiled. He noted that I had individually decorated and indexed each cassette.
Luckily, he did not pull out very many cassettes. When I went to the car, I put a $20 bill under the cassettes. I also wrote a very short note on one of my infamous index cards: “Thanks for appreciating a returned piece of my past.” I don’t know what he might make of it. But I could tell by the look on his face from just seeing how I had decorated the tapes that he knew it had been a huge part of my life at one point.
It took a long series of coincidences for me to have the box at the perfect time and place. And to find someone who was obviously interested in giving them new life. I owe it in part to deciding to visit new places along the creek. And to my cousin for returning them to me.
I parked my car and walked barefoot down the trail. I knew I needed an unfamiliar spot today. So I walked much longer than I intended, passing people who took second glances at my bare feet and rolled up pants. It seemed as if they looked more frequently than they had yesterday when I had a billowing (but wet) blue cape on my back. I encountered a dirt path mostly hidden in the trees. Not knowing where it led and not caring either way, I followed it. It led down to the creek and I followed the stones and sat on one of the protruding ledges, sticking my feet deep into the rocks and mud under the water.
The cascade and babble of the water combined with the cloud cover and bird song had to have been aligned and created just for me at this moment.
Three years later and I still wrestle with whether the bell which sounded in my head on an October morning was correlation or causation regarding my brother’s death. My ex-wife would roll her eyes and attribute it to sheer craziness. No matter what the cause or how much my brother’s death affected me subconsciously, something in me broke. The breaking left me with a profound certainty of several things. And most of it was the realization that excuses and rationalizations are easy. The bell in my head brought both joy and pain. My new confidence brought consequences I hadn’t expected. Part of which had to be arrogance. It taught me the definition of limerence and of the meaninglessness of intentions compared to consequences. But it also taught me that most of my limitations are self-imposed. All I need is an idea, even more than motivation. Motivation and willpower are for procrastinators. If you get in motion or set things in motion, it is amazing what simple routine consistency will give you.
Since I was not familiar with this part of the creek, I walked carefully, even through the deeper pockets of clearwater. Countless lightning fast crawdads faced me as I approached, only to flutter backwards so quickly that it was impossible to see them move. There’s always a chance for snakes, but none made their appearance.
The weather is going to shift soon. The days will be colder and likely result in the pads of my feet softening again. I’ll continue to come out here for a while no matter how cold the air or water is. It’s impossible to argue with nature.
The brother of my youth would have loved to be here. It’s true that he probably would have picked me up over his head and thrown me into one of the deep pockets of water. Or we might have even had a rock fight, him promising to not pelt me in the head. Given his size advantage, had he been careless in his aim, there’s not much I could have done about it. We used to spend a lot of time out in the fields having dirt clod fights. It sounds archaic and crazy to anyone who didn’t experience the agony and ecstasy from both ends of a nicely sized dirt-clod bashing someone unexpectedly in the neck or chest. We didn’t invent the rules. They’ve been handed down for generations among kids growing up and playing with the things at their disposal.
Having said the above, if my brother were here today, there is no question that he would look me dead in the eye and ask, “When are you going to stop being so damn fruity?” I would reply, “Probably about the same time you smarten up and stop being an old conservative hag!” No matter how such a conversation played out, I would lose. Because if my brother couldn’t win through words, he would achieve victory by throwing either me or a table. That’s what happens when the universe mistakenly combines debate-level intelligence with a hulk of a person.
Somehow in the crucible of our shared DNA, I luckily inherited the introspective yet expressive gene. He inherited the introspective part, but all too often trapped himself in his own head. That’s the worst place for anyone of such intelligence to be.
Mike was right. Maybe I am a bit too fruity. But whether through alchemy or luck, I’m the one standing in the creek getting the last word.
Since I’m long-winded exactly like my brother, I’ll loop back to my initial causation versus correlation comment. It’s obvious to me now that the bell that rang in my head three years ago would have remained silent were it not for my brother having consequences catch up to him. Which ironically likely would have led to me having a major health setback myself.
The good and the bad may not be best friends, but they definitely sleep in the same bed.
I was wading through Scull Creek, standing in the natural sluices created by falls and narrowing rocks. The water moved with such speed that the resulting splashes against my legs created a spray that hit my face. Though it was lightly raining when I started, the rain faded, leaving an odd, somber pallor in the air. Walking barefoot in such water where I couldn’t see the stone under the water was hilariously precarious. At some point, I heard chattering above me. It took me a minute to find the source: a squirrel about six feet above me, leaning down and watching me. I talked back to it a few times as I made my way back and forth and up and down the creek. It dawned on me that the squirrel was moving in a pattern following me. When I was done in the creek, I carefully climbed the rocks back up onto the bank and picked up my sandals. The squirrel came down out of the trees and scampered ahead of me as I walked on the greenway trail. I walked past it as it sat about ten feet from the trails edge. When I turned off the trail to head to my car, I looked back to see that the squirrel had moved to be relatively close to me. By the time I made it to the parking lot edge, the squirrel ascended a tree and watched me through the corner of its eye. I chattered back at it. There was no doubt It had followed me from the creek. As I opened my car door, I looked back one more time to see that the squirrel was sitting facing me. An unusual squirrel, one probably wanting to have a polite conversation.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 