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.
Earlier today, though I was more tired than usual after work, I graced the grocery store with my presence. I remembered that an ATM had been placed on the other side of Domino’s. Placing my bags in the car, I had the sudden urge to run. There were no Trump supporters nearby, nor a rabid animal to flee from. I sprinted across the grocery store parking lot and then up the hill and across the parking lot of Domino’s. After using the ATM, I walked back across. An employee of the grocery store hollered across at me. He had watched me take off running from the side of my car and was convinced that I was being threatened or chased. It seems that he was tempted to call for help. After a few seconds, he was convinced someone was filming it as a prank. He asked me why I took off running. Because I’m inscrutable, I told him that just because he did not see someone chasing me doesn’t mean that there wasn’t. He looked at me like I was crazy. I finally laughed. He seemed relieved. And confused. I have a feeling he’s telling the story of the crazy man running for no reason. The next time I see him, I’m basically obligated to take off running in the opposite direction again. X . PS The picture is unrelated to my story! .
On the heel of using some of my lottery winnings to replace the windshield of my car, today I went in for an oil change. For my car, I mean. My oil seems to be fresh. A young tech entered the waiting area where I was busy doing shenanigans. He told me he thought I had a chipmunk problem. When he came in, I expected odd news about my car. To hear the word “chipmunk” was near the bottom of the list for expectations. He went on to say that when he pulled my air filter assembly apart, he ran into a problem. I figured I was going to have to replace the air filter. Or worse. He told me that there were 50 plus acorns in there and that he used a special vacuum nozzle to get them all out. It was at that point I realized he was referring to squirrels! The lady in the waiting room with me looked up in surprise. Because the conversation was probably one of the weirdest and most rapid-fire ones she’s heard in a long time. I thanked him, after noting that whichever squirrel that was using my air assembly as a nut hoarding place was going to be plenty pissed when he returns to find his stash missing.
I’ll keep an eye out for an angry squirrel for the next few days.
My windshield had more cracks than a plumber’s convention. So today Safelite came and exchanged a new windshield for money. The tech had it done start to finish in 30 minutes. He told me my car would run faster if I gave the engine squirrels more protein.
I also experimented with acrylic inside my light bottles. One was a complete failure. But in doing it wrong, the light bulb went off in my head. This one has a keepsake bracelet embedded in it.
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.
Because I was asked to frame my life as an outsider, here’s something I wrote:
“Half of my family beat the gong of appearances, even though the shadows and secrets would inevitably be revealed by anyone dedicated to discovering them. My other half, possessed by similar other demons, revealed their flaws visibly. I came to understand that behavior not concealed by appearances has its own bitter yet revelatory honesty. And that I would choose openly displaying my demons over the betrayal of the insistence of family honor. There is no honor in secrecy or turning one’s head away from the past. A family cannot put to rest its emotional inheritance by denying that it happened.” X
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
P.S. Parenthetically Speaking 