I unwrapped a day today, like I have thousands of times. Each morning, the gift of the hours is at my feet. One of my wishes? To remember what it’s like to go under and wonder if I’d see the light on the other side. To stop focusing on nonsense and drama that carries no weight. To appreciate the people, food, places, and things in my life. Why is it so easy to bring shadows to sunrise? To question the point, motive, and meaning of just being alive? As if it’s not enough. Anyone squinting their eyes will see only shadow and narrowness. Wide-eyed appreciation for the rhythm of breath and oxygen is the most basic miracle possible. If you start with that, the ephemeral idiocy of wanting anything else dissipates like the first wisp of steam from your morning coffee. I want this ability now more than ever.
I waited day after day for the perfect moment. When the declining sun aligned perfectly against the ordinary tree by the road. There are only a couple of days of the year when it’s possible to capture this fleeting alchemy of orange at sunset. Which proves that even the most ordinary thing or person can shine with brilliance when someone is looking for it with patient eyes.
The picture is of my Dad, Bobby Dean, standing on a horse. Of course. I poorly colorized it a few years ago.
One day, I’ll abandon safety and climb my last tree- but I won’t know it’s the last time I’ll do it. I’ll laugh as I look down at the people passing below me. I’ll feel the wind blow over me among the branches. A squirrel might chatter at me for being too close to its nest.
Well-meaning people sometimes chastise me for my avocation of ascending trees. They are right. There is a risk. But I don’t know of any other adults who take the time to climb trees. It’s unlike skydiving, where the risk is primarily virtual and unlikely. Those who cluck at me for enjoying it don’t understand the sublime moments of being in the trees.
I might fall and break an arm. I might fall and crack my neck.
One day, though, I will look back on my last time in the trees and want to trade an arm for the chance to be there again.
And that’s true for so many things in life. Whether it’s being barefoot in the cold creeks, walking through the grass where unseen reptiles slither, or ordering a bitterly acrid cup of coffee, one so rich that my teeth will blacken momentarily. I’ll have my last kiss. Enjoy my last walk.
So, if you see me in the trees, take a moment to quell the urge to remind me that gravity could pull me out of it. Traffic might be my demise. My arteries might invisibly pass a clot and knock me silent to the ground. An unlikely second plane might find me unexpectedly as it spirals. A shadow in the dark early morning might demand my wallet.
The last tree I’ll climb started growing decades ago. It all started with the pine tree and gnarled other trees along the drainage ditch in front and behind my grandparents’ modest house in Monroe County. Grandpa didn’t care if I climbed trees – or even found my way to the tin roof. To him, boys climbed things, and sometimes, a working man lost fingers in the long cutting belts of the dangerous lumberyards.
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.
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 