In Memory of the Lad Charlie B.

The tree isn’t much to look at. Spindly, bare, pushing up from mud at the bottom of a swale. Spindly due to its location. Bare due to an exhausting combination of highway wind and oncoming autumn. These are unavoidable facts of existence.

Humor resides in this tree. After all, who willingly decides to sink its roots to grow up bracketed by galvanized guard rails, in the middle of a nondescript median? That is a black sense of humor or bad luck for the seeds, depending on the lens that receives the image.

Admire the tenacity of the leaves as the cars rush by, flailing in the watery light of a dying sun. The leaves work for it. They hang on. Soon they will probably fall. That is life.

Addendum to the Road Not Taken (Ghosts)

The road was embraced with melancholy and longing, getting back to another version of home. Freshly scrubbed sky of Virginia blue tinging everything in sight under the watery sun. A split between heart and head throbbed heavily under a breastbone shielding lungs that struggled to draw enough air. Leaving, arriving, restless.

I picked the bigger road partly because it was faster. More impersonal. I could find a place of branded anonymity in which to eat. A place to be in the crowd but not of the crowd. In short, I could avoid interaction without being alone.

Craving company to fight off the loneliness but lacking energy to be a good companion: this will be my doom.

Saltwater flows in my veins alongside the blood. Riverine tides with estuary ebb and flow pull on my heart wherever I go. Yet that in part prompted me to avoid the scenic route. It ran too close to the water. Earlier that morning, I had shivered awake from unsettling dreams of the ocean and the night. Whimpering turning into a sharp intake of breath.

I had fallen or was pushed from a ship, the bulk of which I spied receding in the distance. The blood-tinged orange sun was nearly down. Stars were coming out and cool wind ruffled the water. I trod water while contemplating a death by drowning.

I knew for certain, under that deep indigo sky, that the ship was not coming back. My unsettled mind swore it heard laughter floating over the water. It saddened me to no end that this laughter might be the last human sound I ever heard. A hard scrubbing in a hot shower eradicated the uneasiness.

I pushed some breakfast down on a jittery stomach. It refused to hold still. Sheer willpower kept it in place, which braced me for the drive. Lunch would be somewhere on the road for sure.

So it was that the car brought me to the decision point. Highway or byway? My heart already knew the answer. My head had abdicated responsibility a long time ago. It was to be the highway, and not only for the reasons set forth earlier in this ramble.

A bigger, more poignant reason was I just could not bear the thought that the quieter scenic road would bring to my eyes a lone boat on a river, or a solitary duck winging through a November sky filled with the whispers of all the losses I endured in the past year. Those avatars of loneliness would have broken me down in tears, and I did not want to besmirch with such emissions a landscape so beholden to my heart. 

Fall and winter in the tidewater holds a bittersweet beauty of its own. One best contemplated without a heavy heart and weary psyche. That Sunday drive would be on the fast road, the anonymous road, where I could eat surrounded by cacophonous isolation and be grateful for a crowd that would help me pull the curtains on the road not taken.

I did not take that road on the return. The usual route back to Maryland, small towns and browning leaves by the rivers crossed in the light of a sun in repose. Ghosts were whispering to me to visit them. I confess that on this trip, I was a coward. There would be no conclave with the undead.

It was no fault of the season. Nor fault of the rivers. I adore fall upon the estuaries. Water has its own magnetism. The pull is strong upon my heart, no matter what time of year. The promise of sunlight on rippled wavelets, geese creating flying V's in the November air, or even the culinary tug of fried oysters in a small town family restaurant, these are all grand things.

But when pewter skies and soul weariness grip the eye and the heart, the barrier between sighs and tears thins too much.

Hawk Don't Eat Squash

Field notes, March 5th, 2014. Driving home, meditating on the belly.

It was astonishing, that flash of rusty red. All the more so at sixty-five miles an hour. I was privileged to see a hawk fulfilling its hawk-ness. I suppose it was good that it was feathers not blood. Pity that the prey had no chance to object. If not for the glass and road noise I suspect I may have heard it cry out at the fatal moment.

I was just outside a small town called Lone Jack, on my way back from a photo excursion in cow country. Quite a coincidence that I turned my head to the side, looking at the driver's side mirror as I hustled down Highway 50. It was at that moment the hawk decide to strike at some small, gray, furry things in the median. I still have no idea what the hapless prey was, but it looked vaguely like a rabbit or a rat.

The shock made me gasp. It is not that I had no idea that animals prey on other animals, it is that I was not expecting to see it on a major roadway. Especially not so close to my car. The attack happened fast, almost in the blink of an eye. There was also the awe of having witnessed something sublime. It was a peek into the workings of the world. A truth acknowledged, perhaps, or the revelation of a mystery.

I would think back to the symmetry of that incident, the relationship of eater to eaten, as I puttered in the kitchen while preparing my own dinner. Mine was nothing so dramatic as pouncing on something creature who had no idea I was coming. No, mine was less intense, involving the roasting of a spaghetti squash, the pureeing of tomatoes. If there was any drama it was in the cutting of onions and mincing garlic with parsley; there was speed and precision involved and I am pushing myself to become more professional with my knife skills.

The closest I came to emulating the hawk was to open two cans of oil-packed tuna, which I added to then marinara I was making. Certainly no talons flashing, beak parted in anticipation of a killing stroke. There was a momentary sense of dislocation, though, as I meditated on the notions of what we do to feed ourselves, to survive. It was weird.

As I shredded the squash with a fork, prior to anointing with sauce, I was struck again by the mysteries of food and eating in this life. Spaghetti squash fascinates me, watching it transform from this hard blocky thing I strained to cut, into long twirly strands that eat like noodles. Earlier, I had marveled at the fibrous net inside the squash that held the seeds. While fishing the seeds out, I felt wonder that such a thing could just grow. The seeds, too, I would later season and roast for a snack.

I know it was child-like of me, maybe even slightly naive, to be so amazed at the mysteries right in front of me. I know much can be explained by basic biology and chemistry and technical investigation. But at the moment I saw the hawk strike and the squash strands part, I was filled with the warmth of belonging, of being inside the world rather than apart from it. The hawk doesn't eat squash, and I don't prey on hawks, but for some few moments, we shared a mystery that has little to do with explanation and everything to do with simply being.

Cloud Life

"Sometimes the clouds don't even look real."

She said it with a mix of wonder and disbelief, one that seems peculiar to children. The statement hung in the air while I considered my answer. The remark had come out of nowhere. I looked up from the road, through the windshield, peering up at the luminous billows perched seemingly overhead. The cloud-mountains marched off in all directions in a radiant matrix. The sky expanded before my eyes.

She was right, I knew.The proof was there, in all its divinely white glory limned out against a blue so beautiful it was to make one weep. Even with the near horizon of trees and man-made distractions the sky seemed like it was about to overwhelm our immediate surroundings. The edges of the clouds were so white, so sharp in places one could not shake the impression they had been painted on.The light in those edges could make one lose ones' bearings.

"They look like paint!" Another declaration from the back seat.

I felt weightless. The car could have been floating, hovering, swirling up and into those unreal clouds. I felt dizzy at her words. Everything seemed unreal, lost on the contemplation of those clouds. My heart contracted around the realization that we, my daughter and I, were gifted only so many moments together. Moments that are precious even when they seem contrived or unlikely. They were hard to comprehend, sometimes, in the mad chatter and hum of life. But occasionally the moments spring forth, luminous and true, like cloud-mountains in an impossible sky. I swallowed my adult doubts so I could answer.

"You're right, sweet pea. They do look like paint." In the rear view mirror, I could see her watching me. I smiled. "They may not look real, but they are. And they are beautiful."

She smiled, and looked out the window. I heard her singing a few bars of a kid's song I did not recognize. I smiled, too, and felt the gentle bump as the car came back down to earth. The sun dappled the ground as it shone between the clouds, lighting up our real life.

Discovering Light in the Flint Hills, with Ghosts (Sunday Meditation #29)

"What do you know of love?" whispered the voice in my head, ricocheting off the warp and weft of my mind to burst forth through my eyes and shatter on the back of my sunglasses. I was turning off the road, much to my relief. The arched gate of the cemetery beckoned, the orangey-tan dirt track leading me on. Beyond lay a sparse grove of monuments, blushed with moss and gleaming dull white in the soft sunlight of a Kansas spring. In a final burst of crunching gravel the car rolled to a stop. I briefly leaned my head on the steering wheel. I answered to no one present.

"I don't know."

I opened the door. The cool air of the Flint Hills rolled in to caress my face with feathery hands smelling faintly of stone, sod and ghosts. It was quiet out there, broken only by the subtle hissing of wind through the grass and a whirr of sparse traffic along the distant road. I stood up while taking a deep breath. My hand gripped the door frame. Thinking of love, or of what I did not know of it, made me dizzy.

Love slipped away from me again, a salmon evading the paws of a starving bear haunch deep in the stream. I thought I knew love but somewhere on this short road trip it came to me that it may be impossible to truly know something so much bigger than myself. So much more mysterious, arcane. Why this happened to me in broad daylight I cannot tell you. Perhaps the birds calling from the nearby trees knew the answer.

I asked them, nicely, and not too loud so as to avoid seeming rude. There was a burst of musical chatter, but nothing I could decipher. They gave me no counsel. The sun had moved a degree of arc, reminding of why I stopped here in the first place. I pulled my camera gear from the car and set off into the cemetery.

(It took little time to find a vantage point worth considering. There was a serendipitous line of sight threading through a cross, more markers, the cemetery gate, up a hill across the road and ending in a silo. I was surprised and delighted.)

The memorials were a curious mix from antique to new. Pillars, crosses, and slabs of marble and granite. In their own way all testaments to love. At least, I hoped it was love. I was seized by the notion that it would be tragic to carve all that stone for the sake of appearances.

I wondered, then, who would love me when I was gone. Who would care enough to erect a stele, provide a plaque and urn in honor of my memory. Staring past the large marble cross up to the silo on the far hill, a wan smile crept over my face. It did not quite reach my eyes. I wondered if pity made me feel this way.

(I set up the tripod with the pinhole camera secured to the top. My first go at it. This day would be full of accidents and revelations, I smiled to think.)

No, it was not pity. It was acknowledgement of a fact of my existence. Someone would almost certainly provide stones to ballast my remains, maybe even a cross. A Celtic one, I hope, or perhaps a megalith of bluestone with my name inscribed in Ogham runes.

"Do you think so, sir? Do you really believe that?" whispers again in my head. I looked up into the sky. I shook my head. "Yes." My voice sounded odd in the boneyard air. The funny thing was, I really did believe it. Perhaps for the first time in my life, certainly as an adult, I did.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting. Open the shutter. Seven seconds. Good.)

Over a thousand miles and 47 years removed from the soil of my birth, I found myself standing in this alien graveyard with other old souls celebrating the knowledge that I would live as long as there were those who still remembered me. If I had thought to bring a flask, I would have raised a toast to our bones, mine clothed in flesh and those embraced by the sod around me.

(Advance the film. Check the level. Adjust the sighting after having nudged the tripod by accident, startled as I was by screech of what may have been a crow behind me. A lone truck downshifts over on the road, low growl bringing back memories of a long-ago road trip where I see the silhouette of my maternal grandmother against the side window. I wipe sudden moisture from the corner of my eye, and press the shutter release. Click like bones. Nine seconds. Click.)

Standing there waiting for the time to be up on the exposure, I decided that I did know something of love. Imperfect and incomplete, perhaps, but mine own knowledge. I know that I am loved. But the true test for me, the gauge and bellwether to guide me, is not so much the love I receive as it is the love I can give. This exhilarated and frightened me.

"How much can you give?" The voice, disguised as the murmur of wind-blown grass mixed with the songs of birds, asked me.

I let go of the shutter release. Images irreversibly burned into the film, to be taken on faith and unearthed later. The opening of that which seems tightly closed, to let in the light which provides form and depth to the shapeless darkness we far too often hold to close. We open, we illuminate, we develop.

We become, in the presence of light. We are formed, in light...in love.

"How much can I give?" I whispered to the bones and the prairie earth. A score of heartbeats passed. There was no answer, it seemed. I gathered my equipment and headed back to the car. The clunk of the door shutting nearly made me miss the reply when it came.

"More than you believe possible. Open your heart."

I gasped. That was it. I will open my heart, letting in others, forming myself in love. By such poetic measures we all become light. We all become love.

Travelling Riverside (Un)Blues: Meditation

"God expects spiritual fruit, not religious nuts."
-Church sign, Highway 17, somewhere near Tappahannock, Virginia

Heading north on Highway 17, through the Middle Neck region of the state of my birth.  It is a gray day, fog and mist making the world seem like the inside of a back lit oyster shell.  The Wee Lass and I are on our way back to my adopted state of Maryland after a long weekend visiting with her grandparents in the southeast part of Virginia.  She was sleeping when I drove past the sign with that quote on it.  My chuckle didn't wake her up.

I was dreaming, too, but wide awake and on matters entirely different from hers.

The gray gauze that wrapped the countryside made it a day fit for dreaming.  The road was sparsely populated, and the car seemed a cocoon and not a machine.  Long stretches of nacreous light with trees fading into view like ents or spirits. The quiet in the car led me to a long meditation on blood ties, family, God and what it means.  We seemed less on the road than in space somewhere between the stars.

The road out there plays a bit of a sine wave with the Rappahannock River.  It veers away, then close, but for a while you can always tell it is there. There are subtle shifts in light and vegetation that let you know the river exists.  There is a presence of this long silver rope that has touched so many, given some a way of life, and many sustenance.  The river exists and we flow along with it.

In my mind the river and my family were merging, becoming blurry, as I glanced in the rear view at my daughter sleeping; this visit was particularly important because my blessed mother has been ailing quite a bit in the past couple of months.  There was scary episode (scary because it was life-threatening) last month, and there are complications because it happened on the heels of another serious condition which is still causing trouble.  It has been the sort of trying times that would make anyone reach out and want to have close as much love as possible, because love is what keeps us afloat, sometimes, on this river we call life.

In that gray blanket of fog and humming tires I recalled the laughter of my daughter and my mother as they played together in the living room of the home of my youth.  That laughter, and the banter, I could hear it as I was in the kitchen on Sunday making dinner for us.  That laughter was a tonic, a salve to make a sore heart a soaring heart.  It pushed back the great gray wall of melancholy that hovered just outside the limits of direct perception.  I could hear the life that was flooding back into my mother's weary voice, see the smile on her face and know that the life I helped bring into this world would not have been possible without the life that brought me into this world.

The tires hummed.  The mist swirled.  My daughter slept, her angel face pressed up against the side of the booster seat. She may not have known, maybe did not understand the vitality she brought to her grandmother.  But I did. I saw my future and my past come together in a brilliant Now, one that made my heart sing and throb to know that my family was blessed to be together, right then.

The gray sky and dripping trees passed by in a dreamy blur.  I swallowed some tears and smiled.  I had looked at my daughter and my mother, seeing joy on the faces of youth and wisdom.  The taste of bittersweet candy rolled around in my mouth. There was a lightening of the sky as I came to understand that stories begin and stories end, but we are blessed to have stories to tell.  This is a story, written in joy with the ink of Love upon our hearts. I looked out the window at the river just through the trees. I was convinced then that the world is not so gray a place as had I let myself believe, by the mighty silver river of love flowing through my heart.

New for 2012: The 2-Door (Hatch) Back Spasm!

Maybe its just me.  Whenever I see the little car known as the Fit (by a car maker whose name rhymes with "Rhonda"), I cannot help but laugh.

You see, when I read the word Fit, I don't think of it in the senses of "appropriate for the circumstances" or "suiting the dimensions and shape of something".  I mean, I do, but not when I see that word applied to car.  When I see it capitalized and in a logo, my mind automatically leaps to the definition of fit as in "having a tantrum" or "a state of being characterized by involuntary spasms, tics or outbursts, and usually associated with extreme emotional upset".

So when I see the Fit on the roadways?  I laugh, and I hope there won't be a fit.  What about you?

Church Yards

Flashing by, red orange blurs
that taste of heaven
and damnation, soul sheds and
bone markers reminding us of
our time on a mortal trip
and we roll on down the highway
filling up with questions
or purging our spleen,
but quietly, quietly, innocents
are within earshot, and their
questions we may not be
ready, if we are ever ready,
to answer, because there is
(trust us on this)
there is no real way to answer
the unanswerable,
to a mind that thinks
there is an answer to all,
believes there is answer to all
Which perhaps, is grace.
But is not like us,
who have grown up and
wonder if the fall was was worth it.

He Will Not Leave

On my travels to and from Virginia, I am always interested by the number of churches I pass on the route I usually take.  There are many, of different stripes of Christianity (I have yet to see any synagogues or mosques) in many buildings ranging from modest structures to authentic Colonial-era churches made of brick and slate.  One thing that is common is the number of signs I see, sporting religious messages or homilies, announcing intent or proclaiming an aspect of faith.  Most are relatively benign, but this past weekend I saw one that gave me pause and made me wonder.  It read:

God will not leave those that trust Him.

 The first thing that occurred to me was the implication:  That means that God might leave those that do not trust Him.  Which seems to me to be a repudiation of what I have been told is true about God.

God loves us all, right?  He will take care of us, right?  So what do you do when you experience things that seem to be evidence that God has left you?  Why would anyone trust a god that proclaims unconditional love for you, yet lets life abuse us at times?

Why would I trust a god like that?  Especially knowing that even though He proclaims to love me no matter what, He would leave me because I have reasons to mistrust Him.  If mistrust is a human trait, one that God created (because He created us, according to some beliefs), why would He leave us for expressing our humanity?  Especially when grounded in very real feelings of anxiety and fear?

I shook my head to clear it, and accelerated down the highway to put some distance between me and doubt.  Resolving that conflict would have to wait for another day.

Death Becomes The Grasshopper

Road Trip, Part Deux...

Yesterday, I related some highlights of my road trip down to Virginia to attend a wedding, with my daughter in tow.  Today, I'd like to relate a lowlight of that same trip, courtesy of a grasshopper who just couldn't get out of the way.  I shall call him "Puck", as in 'hockey puck'.  As in something that gets hit hard and caroms crazily all over the place when struck at the right angle.

It happened shortly after the air conditioner crapped out on my car.  The windows were down, and I was praying for some open road to pick up speed, get some air (hot as it was) in motion in the car.  I was leaning forward in the seat, anticipating that the cars in front of us were going to move, opening up some space.  which they did, to my relief.

The car in front of us had opened up about two car lengths of road, and I accelerated to take advantage of it.  I was watching the car carefully when I noticed this bright tan-colored blur strike the leading edge of the car's roof, bouncing high in the air.  I determined that it was an insect of some sort, and I watched it dive gracefully in a smooth parabola, heading downward...

It was then that we made the acquaintance of Puck.

Right into my windshield, with an audible thwack, did the grasshopper greet us.  It left a greenish smudge on the glass, and at first I thought the speed and wind would carry it up the windshield and over the car.  It carried it up the windshield, alright.

Then the poor bastard got lodged in the arm of the driver's side wiper blade.  Just our luck, trajectory and physics smashes Puck, then wedges his ass in tight in a notch in the metal.  And he wouldn't come out!

I drove as fast as prudent, hoping the wind would blow him out.  No dice.  I then turned on the wipers, hoping the centrifugal force would toss him out.  No such luck.  In fact, I think that wedged it in tighter.  I tried squirting the wiper fluid, and that didn't work.

Not wanting to pull over for a bug, I kept on driving.  The Wee Lass chimed in from the back, with helpful comments like "Ewwwww..." and "Daddy, that grasshopper is freaking me out!".  I tried to put it out of my mind, but it was too much in my field of vision.

So I drove the next three plus hours with a dead grasshopper's butt pointing right at me, frizzled wings vibrating in the laminar air flow over the windshield like some sort of bizarre totem designed to ward evil spirits away from unwary travelers.  Puck seemed to be saying to me "I'm coming for you in your dreams..."

I felt I should appease the grasshopper spirit when we arrived at our destination, so my plan was to gently extract the carcass and place it in a nearby flowerbed.  No such luck.  The wind and the heat had baked poor Puck, and when I when to pull it from the wiper blade, the dry carcass exploded like a puffball mushroom in a cloud of dust and exoskeleton fragments.

Alas, poor Puck, we didn't know ye well, but please know we tried.  Please don't haunt my dreams.

Adventures in Sub-Saharan Virginia: A Wedding Story

Ah, summer.  Long days. Hit nights. Vacations. Travel. Hit nights. And hot days.  Chillaxin'.  And hot days and nights.  We all love summer, right?  What better time than to load up the car, throw the chillun in the back, and road trip out of state for family visit and a wedding!  Woot!  That is precisely what I did this past weekend.

Well, I'll tell you what would be a better time:  a road trip that doesn't start in the afternoon of one of the hottest, if not THE hottest day so far this year around these parts.  A road trip on said hot day during which the car air conditioner stops working about a half-hour into a 4-1/2 hour road trip (excluding dinner break and hopefully not getting any speeding tickets).  A road trip on which I have a nearly 7-year old daughter in the back with nothing but a Leapster to keep her occupied.

It. was. hot.  Like, hell hot.  "Hotter than the Devil's hatband" as my dad often says.  Temperatures were in the triple digits and humidity was near or at 100%.  Not to put too fine a point on it, it sucked donkeys.

I had left straight from work and in an effort to save time skipped going back home to change into shorts.  I ended up driving down the highway with my pants legs pulled all the way up to my knees, and leaning forward in my seat so I wouldn't sweat out my kidneys.  The Wee Lass usually complains about wind in her face but this time she had her window down all the way, face into the breeze blasting through the opening.  From time to time I would glance in the rear view mirror and see Her Royal Cuteness lolling around like a boneless Weeble, slumped in her booster seat with tongue hanging out.  Fortunately, I did have some water on hand, and we topped of big cups of iced tea at our dinner stop.

The drive through Virginia was, to my relief, not as bad as it could have been.  Traffic cooperated, and to her credit the Wee Lass complained almost nil.  We sang songs and looked for traffic signs.  Amazingly, we arrived at the ancestral Gumbo homestead with sanity intact, if a little soggy and wrung out.

The next day was wedding day, for my nephew (Son of Big Bro) and his fiancee.  They had planned an outdoor wedding, on the water, and the show was going to go on.  Poor things, there was no way for them to know that on their wedding day, the temperature was going to be over 100 degrees.

Did mention it was hot?  Like hell hot?

But in the end, it really wasn't that bad.  The wedding party held up well, no one fainted or threw up and the ceremony was beautiful.  My nephew is quite a handsome lad in a tux (and taller than I am!), and the bride...well...the bride was in a word, gorgeous.  Watching the two of them exchange vows, and the emotions that crossed their faces, reminded me of just how precious love is, and what we as human beings can mean to one another.  For a few minutes, the heat and the discomfort and the fatigue of travel disappeared, and we all basked in the radiance of love.

It was wonderful.  I know my Big Bro was watching from somewhere, with pride, at the joy that is his son and my nephew.  He was there, too, I think, because we carry him in our hearts.  

Later, as the newlyweds were leaving, we blew bubbles and wished them well.  Their road trip is just beginning, and it is my dearest wish that it be a long and fruitful one.

Sometimes a little adventure is what we need, to appreciate the quiet beauty of life all around us.

Oratoire

As the plane drifted toward the taxiway, Lonnie Houlihan became aware of two things: he was exhausted and there were voices in his head.  He suspected the voices were the symptom of the exhaustion.  At least, he told himself that was the case.  He wasn't so sure that they weren't always there.  This time, they spoke clearly rather than in the whispers to which he was accustomed.

Lonnie leaned back as far as he could in the seat.  The upright position reminded him of the monstrous ladderback chairs owned by his maternal grandparents, set in the "parlor" as they called it.  To this day the thought of that made Lonnie smile.  It also made him uneasy.  His grandma and grandpa, a pair of devout Catholics, as stiff and rigid in their devotions as the chairs were in their uncomfortable verticality.

That unbending devotion had transferred itself imperfectly to his mother, like a misaligned coin die striking a flawed but beautiful silver dollar.  Lonnie knew that devotion had erratic balance, something his mother had attributed to the death of Lonnie's father, when Lonnie was only six years old.  As a boy and a young man, he had watched his mother struggle with raising him alone and trying to be the good daughter to people who allowed for no imperfection.

He closed his eyes, the plane rocking gently as it trundled over the concrete.  A sigh escaped his lips as he thought of how much he wished to be home.  This trip had dragged on, longer than he expected.  The constant client meetings, sessions with the money men, the designers who constantly changed their minds and expected him to know that without being told.  It was driving him crazy.

In the gaps between the meetings and breakout sessions, he took to walking the city.  He had never been here before, which Lonnie discovered astonished him, considering how much of the world he had flown over or driven on in his life out of a suitcase.  It made him wonder again, seeing things with a fresh, if tired, set of eyes.  Sometimes he remembered to take his camera, reminding him again of a cherished hobby he had all but abandoned in the race up the ladder.

He walked the city.  He breathed in air thick with scents familiar and intriguingly new.  There were languages on the wind that he swore he had never heard before.  During the walks he noticed an abundance of churches, most decades if not hundreds of years old.  He found himself fascinated with them.  He took more and more photos, as many as he could fit on the memory cards.  He found himself thinking more and more of the churches, and less and less about the reasons he was in the city in the first place.

It was during one sun-infused walk past a worn-looking church of indeterminate Christian pedigree, his fourth day on the ground, that he first heard the voices.  They whispered, they laughed.  They asked him if his heart was in the right place.  Lonnie was so startled he nearly dropped his camera.  He felt nauseous.  A passing stranger asked him if he was okay.  A slow nod of the head, a feeble "Yes", and Lonnie staggered off to his next meeting, not sure if he could remember what he was supposed to talk about.

Meetings. Conferences.  Hurried lunches of second-rate catered sandwiches.  Lonnie maintained his facade, but all the while the voices were there.  He began to doubt his confidence.  Half-asleep in his hotel bed, for three nights he dreamed.  He was walking, arguing with himself, calling into question everything he had worked for in life, every path he had taken, and if it was all for the wrong reasons.  His dreams always ended the same way:  he had walked the city until he stood before one of the most breathtaking churches he had ever seen.  Its massive dome towered over the hillside on which it perched, stairways bedecked with pilgrims on their knees on their way up.  He stopped, frozen, as a woman carrying a rosary brushed his elbow.  She was praying in a soft voice.  The contact startled them both, and he gasped as she turned to him with luminous eyes, saying "Father Saint Joseph, pray for us."  She smiled a Mona Lisa smile, turning to go, and Lonnie awoke sweating and gasping in his bed.  The image of the dome burned in the afterglow fading into his retinas.

In his spare time over the next three days, Lonnie frantically searched the city for the church he had seen in his dreams.  In the end it proved fruitless.  He ran out of time, the pressures of the project and investment capital were too much to hold off.  He boarded the plane for home worn out and frustrated that he had been unable to find the church, and ask that woman her name.

The plane lurched, wobbling around a turn in the taxiway.  Lonnie snapped his eyes open, realizing he had dozed off again.  He was glad the adjacent seat was empty, that no one witnessed his look of panic at not knowing where he was at first.  He leaned forward to look out the window, trying to see why the plane had momentarily stopped moving.  He saw that from this vantage point he could see part of the city and the hills that overlooked it.  Through a gap in the airport buildings, shimmering in the heat off the concrete and jet exhaust haze, he spied a rounded building far off in the distance.  With a start, he realized it was a dome.

A dome just like the one in his dream.  Lonnie pressed his forehead against the window.  The hard surface made him wince and sharpened his focus as he strained to see the dome better.  There it was, big as day: the dome he had stood before, watching that woman walk away.  His pulse raced, and he felt faint.  The voices in his head told him to get up, run, get off the plane, but it was too late.  The aircraft began to crawl forward, the voice of the pilot buzzing over the intercom to tell them they were next in line for takeoff.  Lonnie began to weep silently, and slowly, as the dome disappeared from view.

As the plane rumbled into the sky, a hard crystalline sunlight poured through the windows on the opposite side of the cabin.  Lonnie felt the warmth on the backs of his hands, his face buried in them as he choked back sobs.  He knew now, it was a city of conversations, and it had been speaking to him the entire time, if not a lifetime.  The voices had told him of his true heart, and how it was a long way from home.

Lonnie knew this, as the plane rose into the sky.  He was coming back to the city, someday, the one home to his true heart.  He would walk the cracked and profane streets, her voice leading him to the stairs, which he would climb on his knees and offer thanks from a heart full to brimming with knowing now where it lived.

Shingle

Every year he came to sit by the sea, facing the Atlantic, at the far end of the island.  Every year he told himself it would be the last year.  The cycle had gone on far too long, but old habits, like the sea itself, are hard to quit.

The hat on his head, the battered blue windbreaker, the salt-stained deck shoes: all had seen the sun rise many times over the breakers beyond 'Sconset.  The clothes had become partners with the wind curling in off the ocean.  The mineral tang of salt water mixed with undertones of stone and decay as he drew slow, deep breaths.  Except for the languid motion of his chest and the occasional blink of rimed eyes behind the obsidian-colored sunglasses wrapping his face, he gave the appearance of being a statue.

The statue sat very still.  He amused himself with the thought that he had become one of those stone Buddhas he admired in Japanese gardens.  For  a few moments, he smiled, serene and and unflappable.

The waves smashed liquidly along the shingle, tinged with the salmon and peach of the newly rising sun.  A necklace of seaweed knitted a fish-scale edge along the sand.  Two seagulls pecked enthusiastically at one pile, and he could see the remains of a fish woven into the tangled mass of dying vegetation.  The sight made him sad, and he turned his attention back to the sun.

It oozed over the horizon, its royal face striped by three thin clouds.  The rich luminescence intensified as more of the disk rose above the water.  The blue-green mirror of the sea flared into a hammered sheet of rosy gold, and the man drew a sharp breath.  The aureate air surrounded him and he felt himself as weightless, rising slowly above the cool sand, yet rooted to the ground.  Small tears formed in the corners of his eyes, the sun and the sky diffracting into tiny rainbows.  His heart swelling, and for the first time in nearly a decade, he smiled.

Next year,  he said to no one, I'll be back next year.

Below him on the shingle, the gulls flapped and bickered.  The sun continued its low arc up the sky, and the beauty of the world engulfed him.

Travelling Medicine Show

Road into my heart
Coyote grins, "Follow me!"
Crow laughs in my ear

Echoes of the Madness

As I had a window of opportunity this morning, I set aside some chores in favor of a combination walk and photo safari through an abandoned factory building down by the Patapsco River.  The occasion was to experiment with a roll of very fast film (3200 speed for you photogeeks out there), black and white, which I could not resist purchasing yesterday while at the film lab.  The weather was warm, but decent sun, and to paraphrase, no one ever dies wishing they had weedwhacked a little more.

It was the call of the camera, and an intense need for some stress management.  It would not be denied.

I had my backpack, my digital camera, and my film camera.  Plus a flashlight and a hard hat.  Contrary to what my Ma and Da might tell you, my head isn't so hard it could resist a falling brick or shard of metal.  I'm getting smarter about that stuff these days.

So I am in the abandoned building, trying a different route than the one I have taken in the past.  There are some places in there I had not seen yet, and I was getting tantalizing glimpses through broken windows, of graffiti and industrial decay.  I was alone, or at least I thought so.  

I went down a flight of rusty metal stairs (very "Half-Life" in appearance) and was standing in a pool of light streaming through a large opening in the concrete slab overhead.  The path on both sides led into gloominess punctuated by shafts of light and the spectral outlines of ruined tanks, pipes and decaying machines.

It was while standing there adjusting the camera, that I heard it.  A voice, drifting from somewhere in the darkness of the warehouse beyond.  I had been about to walk in that direction, but the voice made me freeze.  It was garbled, muffled, but occasionally I could make out individual words.  Then, quite clearly it said "Oh, why, why, why!" followed by a faint sigh or groan that trailed off into nothingness.

At that moment, I felt the Fear.  An icy trickle in my gut.  I didn't start running, but I changed my mind about which way I was going to go.  I knew very well that this particular set of buildings is frequented by all sorts of people, hikers, photographers, homeless folks and those with less than noble intentions.  It was probably just someone hanging out or looking for scrap.

But I went the other way.  The hair on my neck was up, and I wasn't sure I really wanted to run the risk of finding out why the voice was asking "why, why, why".

I did get some good pictures, though, without needing a change of underwear.

Pushing Back The Sea

In between bursts of song, from some unseen source down the block, the night is blissfully silent.  Traffic sounds, of course, with the occasional airplane.  None of them especially bothersome, and all a quiet carnival for the ear.  Earlier the night was torn by the melancholic sounds of a lovers' quarrel drifting through open windows.  Curses and tears, a chanson of blue notes wafting on the late evening air, leaving pity in their wake.

Cool caresses of indigo silk, zephyrs curl through the windows as balm for the weary body.  These tiny currents possessed of Herculean strength that transform the bones and skin into a kite.  Floating off the couch, diffused through the window screen into human mist feathering off into the sky...

Soaring, gliding, escaping the "surly bonds of earth" in this fleshly wing, seeking relief and knowing this path, this rarefied road through the forest will carry one to the dim shore of an invisible life.  It is there the animate simulacrum called Yourself will dance naked on the sand, spinning tales in glee, to push back the Sea.

Lookin' At The World Through a Windshield

Only one trucker song came up on the iTunes today on my drive back home ("Little Liza Jane" by Dave Carter & Tracy Grammer), and a what a doozy.  I think it is a good thing that my drive did not have the same level of excitement, much more than I or my darling Wee Lass need in real life.

It set me to thinking about the life of a road dog, however.  I don't kid myself that I'll ever be able to sell everything, buy an RV or a motorcycle, and spend my days just cruising all over the continent; that remains a dream deferred.  It did occur to me that long drives are not as tiresome to me as they used to be.  Impatience to get to Point B from Point A always colored my perceptions of time and space, always leaving me totally exhausted and irritated by the time I arrived at my destination. 

That went hand in hand with a near complete lack of acknowledgment of the places I had been or sights I had seen along the way.  And that is a minor shame.

Now I seem to enjoy the process more.  I take better note of the buildings and terrain and am starting to see a timeline and changes in the landscape.  I am starting to care more about the Between in relation to the Here and There.

This is a good thing.  I believe that, for perhaps the first time in my personal history, I have learned to treasure the process rather than shortchange it.  One of my architecture professors tried to get that through my thick head, many years ago in Big Gumbo On Campus days.

Pity it took me so long to learn.  I can tell you this:  It's about time, and to borrow from the great sage Dr. Seuss, "Oh! The places I'll go!".  I'm dreaming of some road trips, and of the places and people I'll see.

Compass Rose

I'm writing this ahead of time, I'll be on the road later this day.  The Gumbomobile will be loaded up with the essentials and my Wee Lass and we are headed for the Gumbo ancestral lands in southeastern Virginia.  Its a trip I'm looking forward to, for some much needed R & R, and much needed face time with the family.

The compass of the heart ever points to Home.

New Boomtown

Handsome Kevin got a little off track

The hotel radio murmured, filling his head with ideas.  Ice rattled in the glass as he set it down on the windowsill.  The clinking sounded like the lights through the window looked.  Far off and cold.  The last of the scotch burned its way down his throat.  Contrasted against the chill he felt, it was just what he needed.  He never could seem to stay warm when he was so far from home.

Took a year off from college and he never went back

The streetlights in the valley below lay out in geometric skeins of flickering jewels.  Given the recent weirdness surrounding himself, the travelling man fantasized the grids were an order imposed by an alien consciousness, and he had been granted understanding because of his self-imposed outsider lifestyle.  That, and having found the hotel on the hillside by sheer luck.  He laughed, a grinning death mask reflecting back at him in the glass just inches from his face.  "No one ever accused me of higher understanding", he said to the window.

Now he smokes much too much, got a permanent hack

A pulsing flash of red streaked its way down the wide avenue that curved gently through the valley.  Simultaneously, the police scanner on the dresser behind the traveller flared into life, its little red lights mimicking the car speeding away.  The man jumped, heart pounding.  He listened intently to the squawking voice buzzing from the scanner, finally relaxing.  The report had nothing to do with him.  He looked down at the cigarette smoldering between his fingers, then took a slow drag.  He wondered again why he still smoked.  Ever since the operation last year in Bangkok, and whatever the techs had really done to him, nicotine and many other things had no effect on his system.

deals dope out of Denny's, keeps a table in the back

"One more", he said softly, "one more, and I'm out."  His bloodshot eyes rolled up slightly as he watched the lights of the police car fading up the street.  He leaned on the chilly glass, resting his head against his forearm. 

He always listens to the ground

Absentmindedly, lost in his head, his right hand caressed the silenced pistol that hung at his hip.  The nylon holster and black metal seemed to drink up every scrap of light that fell on it.  His index finger came to rest on the trigger, curling around the viperish feel of the metal.

So I say, I say, welcome to the boomtown

All that money makes a succulent sound

He let go of the trigger, sucked in air between his gritted teeth.  One more, and he was out.

Welcome to the Boomtown.

---

Italicized passage above are lyrics from "Welcome to the Boomtown" by David & David.  A fantastic short story set to music.

Spring Poetry Slam #2: Traffic

Surprisingly cool,
traffic sound on wet pavement.
Heart follows the cars.