In the Quiet Box

Silence expands to fill the available volume regardless of the total. This is knowledge gained as a collateral effect of living. It could take decades before one notices what is happening. Different cities, different containers, different boxes all experiencing the same result. The silence is loudest in the night, in those moments before another bedtime. Silence haunts.

Amusingly enough the silence is not without a soundtrack. The noises heard tend to be generated in places other than the throat or head. The click of a kitchen light switch morphs into a rifle shot. An air conditioner fan takes on a near corporeal presence, a machine-age analogue of a waterfall coursing over a brim of rocks. Low hum punctuated by the pouring of rain outside the windows that surges in when the conditioner unit cuts off. The abrupt absence of a sound like that tricks the mind into thinking it is losing its balance. Living in a quiet box it is an easily acquired habit of leaning into sound because it offers support.

Support in the form of distractions from the vacuum of a life unrealized. Absences. Connections not formed, or frayed to the point of unviability. Projects uncompleted, or worse, never started because the attention was absorbed by some other thing in life and the mind failed to grasp the threads it should have followed. Funny how the hollow clattering of a butter knife into a sink (which was cleaned earlier in a fit of anxiety-induced housekeeping) can knock the mind from one track into another. A metallic thud serving as an accidental rin chime signaling the beginning of involuntary meditation in the temple of the head.

The knife lies still in the sink. Stillness broken by the hum and whirr of domestic machineries within, wind and rain without. The body reacts by pacing around the quiet box of its apartment. It cannot be helped that the mind is flooded with memories and regrets and the helplessness wrought by the realization that not enough has been done to find security in an unstable universe. In the stream of silences the head and the heart cannot escape the notion that so much potential appears to have been wasted or unrealized. Picture the tap on the barrel of water that was supposed to have enabled the successful crossing of a desert. Unbeknownst to all this tap was not secured before embarking. Miles of trudging through the heat and sand engendering thirst beyond measure, not to be slaked because the water dripped away.

Desperate discoveries occur in the silences of the quiet box. The stomach knows because it drops. No amount of pacing truly eradicates the gnawing sensation, but the motion can ease some of the discomfort. Discomfort? Do we really mean fear? Fear of having missed out on a cosmic scale and now not understanding how to get something back? Ah, this is it. Of course it is fear. A nipping at the heels brought about by a late-night revelation that you may not know what you are doing. Ever.

But you should know this by now. If you do not, surely that would be irrefutable evidence of the ineffectuality that you believe to be your shackles. It is this ineffectuality that howls the loudest in the midnight of the quiet box. Ineffectuality is the diamond-eyed beast that prowls the undergrowth just outside the dying circle of light. Growl and moan, rustle and snort, the impression is one of power that does not care how bright the fire you build. It will get what it wants. It will feed.

Living a life of balance is draining, in the face of knowing the universe does not need an excuse to eat you alive. The prime directive of that life is to find something, or better yet, someone with whom to share the quiet box of life. By such good fortune the beast will be kept at bay.

On Not Being Able to Tie a Bowtie (Sunday Meditation #38)

Field notes, April 4th, 2014 at around 6:30 PM. Department store blues.

It was a jacket for which I was searching, not a blow to the heart. Then again, it was a department store and they are supposed to have everything you need along with a lot for which you have no use. Who knew that a bowtie could hurt so much, cut so deep.

The table was strewn with brightly colored swatches of fabric that glowed like jewels and cut like diamonds. Bowties! I have little to do with regular neckties, much less with old fashioned (yet cool) neckwear that requires a different approach to tie right and wear well.

That I do not know how to properly tie a bowtie was much less upsetting than the realization that followed: the chances that I will teach my legacy how to tie a bowtie are slim to none. It is true that I have a daughter, and it is not outside the realm of possibilities that someday she will want or need to know how to tie such a thing. Yes, my head gets it.

But. There are always conditions to most things in life. The condition in this case of an accidental encounter with bowties is that I will not teach my son how to tie them. It is a ritual I most likely will not experience, this handing down of traditionally masculine knowledge and experience. 

It is not their fault, those bright scraps adorning the table, that as my eye was caught so was my heart, knowing that I don't know how to tie a bowtie. And I had not much incentive to learn since the death of my son so long ago.

Truly it has been over ten years since he slipped away from us, which may not be long in the scheme of things. Yet time and ties have ways to bind, even in an innocuous aisle of an ordinary store, when we realize what we miss.

Heart In A Box

August 18th, 4:36 PM. A few clouds, silvery light limns me as I write. I quite like it.

"Ten thousand words swarm around my head
Ten million more in books written beneath my bed
I wrote or read them all when searchin' in the swarms
Still can't find out how to hold my hands"

The music player surprised me with the Avett Brothers somehow knowing my heart ahead of time, they could foresee the future years ago, they must have. How else could they have known I would be delving into a box full of memories, heartaches and love this silvery-gray afternoon? My heart contracted and my throat tightened around a bolus of emotions, rough but not entirely unwelcome.

I was searching for photos. More specifically, CD's with photo files or a flash drive containing the same. I've been thinking about my twins lately, and I wanted to find the pictures I had taken when they were still in the NICU. Scoured my computer, the external drive, no luck so far. I thought that perhaps I had copied them off. I hope I did.

So it was a riffling through my desk, ransacking my briefcase, checking some shelves. I was avoiding the large box of mementos I had packed in my last move, but with no luck finding the right discs I knew I would have to open it.

It was among the very last boxes I sealed before moving. As I cleaned up my old house, I kept discovering the odd bit of physical memory, things I didn't want to discard, or couldn't discard. You know how it is when you move things that have been in the same place for long periods of time. Layers and strata develop. Chunks of memory form under the compaction of more stuff and time. Photos. Kids' drawings. Notes and cards and letters. Knick-knacks and curios. I had more than I remembered.

They all went in the box so I wouldn't lose them. The box itself had been set aside in a corner, resting there in the months since I moved. It was with some hesitation that I slid the knife through the tape holding the box shut. There was pressure, in my head and heart. I was hoping it wouldn't explode.

The Avett Brothers began to croon, the box opens, and into my hands fell shards of memory and love. I clutched to my chest artifacts from two pasts, one that will only be a future in my mind, and one of a future still developing. A small blanket, a picture or two of my son and daughter in the isolettes, drawings by my lovely Wee Lass, small crayon pictures scrawled with "I Love You Dad" in letters etched deep in the stone of my heart. Bits and pieces of my past youth and my Big Bro, all tucked away into 1.5 cubic feet.

The pressure in the box blew these fragile papers and relics up in a cloud, the words and images swarming around my head as I frantically scooped them up to contain them all. The world swam and blurred, liquid diamonds diffracting in my eyes. The papers, the pages, these miniature stelae forming the library of my history. Books beneath my bed? Jesus H., how did they know that? 

I never did find the discs for which I was looking. As I placed the things back in the box, they came to me as more books on the shelf. Books I am reading and still writing, because I know no other path to follow.

The box filled, I closed the flaps and pushed it away to another corner. Sitting there in the chair, I looked down at my trembling fingers. I clenched them, feeling small and sad knowing that, in some sense, I still can't find out how to hold my hands.

--
Lyrics from "Ten Thousand Words", by the Avett Brothers.

Divided by Zero (Pt. 2)

A man always falls back 
on what he knows best in a crisis
What happens when the crisis is all he knows?
A fresh Hell doubled, black and molten
washed away my feeble claims to knowledge

This time there was warning of sorts
raven morning shattered by phone calls
to wake the mummies we had become
suffocating sleepwalk into our clothes
through a wormhole into actinic pain

A swallows' breath of time we believed
this golden sun might attain perfect fusion
So wrong, its core burned out, air frozen,
I awoke staggering on a trail of tears
falling back into a box containing the sun

~In memoriam of him, half of my first light
August 8, 2012

---
The line in bold is from Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner. It makes one wonder what do we really know best?

Anniversarequiem

Sunrise as always
for millenia of an Earth
in ceaseless spinning
cosmic mirror of a heart
sore from pounding
beating, pushing thin blood
through weary veins
writing the meaning
of sorrow, of grief
on the palimpsest soul
with a story writing
and rewriting itself

Gilded children playing
in the Eden of the heart
Wondering who they would
have been had they lived,
What they would have said;
And watching that sunrise
on just another day
that means nothing to many
but everything to eyes
of the beholder, the heart
who holds them dear
and will never let them go.

---

In honor of my two children, who left this world in a summer so bright, and me in a fall hard upon a winter that began in August 2003.  The sun is out now, but my bones will never forget the meaning of cold.  It never ceases to amaze me that two creatures so small and so brief in time could teach me just about everything I needed to know about fatherhood.

Light Reading

A tribunal of candles sits atop the dresser, pale golden dancers washing the plaster walls with delicate light.  Their warmth, even in summer, a welcome addition and delight for the mind's palate.  Behind them to the left, tucked in the corner sits a small stack of books.  Journals, the handwritten relics excavated from a mind in search of its anchors.  The books glow in the light.

Shadows cling to the journals.  Profiles writ large on the wall behind them.  The pages themselves are orderly, but sport encrustations of tabs and sticky notes like bibliographic barnacles on bookish pilings.  The notes are but placeholders marking words, sentences, paragraphs that at some point in the past were deemed significant enough to warrant commemoration.  But in the now, they fringe of notes seems a reminder of thoughts unfinished, of tasks incomplete.  They have their own nostalgia.

The candle flames waver subtly in near undetectable currents in the close air of the room.  For a split-second it may have created the impression that ghosts walk in this room.  The notion does not seem so far-fetched.  After all, the journals tell true stories about bearing witness to spirits that were not for this world.  The tomes contain passages describing what it is like to have traveled out of the body and brought back sights and sounds and memories of love and pain from the other side of the astral glass.

The shadows dance gracefully around the journals.  They shimmy with a sensuality all their own.  Contemplating them thusly it is not outside of the realm of possibility that the shadows themselves are their own stories.  New tales from the heart whispered softly and with deep respect for the past from which they grew.  It is the candles that have brought out this quality, this idea of stories as entities existing in light.  The eye watches the flames move.  The mind considers the physics and optics involved.  The heart follows the shadows and calls out for a new epic of love, to be written in the edges between light and dark

The Poles of Life and Death

It is probably my favorite jacket, dark blue cotton with a leather collar.  I've had it for ten (?) years at least, I think.  It is a little threadbare on the cuffs, but has the look of something well-made and wearing well.  I had this jacket when my twins were born so long ago; it carries memories just as I do.

On the left lapel of the jacket there are two ribbons.  It is a duo of small satin curios, each one made of pink and blue fabric intertwined.  A small safety pin in each assumes the fastening duties.  Each ribbon is also getting frayed, the result of years of me wearing them.  I picked them up at an annual memorial walk, given each year in honor of children who have died.  It is a way for the parents and families to remember the little ones.  Each year they have ribbons available, and I have yet to take mine off.

A co-worker of mine asked me about them today.  This is the first time anyone has asked in months, if not a couple of years.  My co-worker didn't know my story yet, and I think it was deeper than he was expecting.  It is a testament to how far I have come that I can now answer that question evenly and with peace instead of grief.  I find it less draining to tell the story, and I am grateful for the chance to share.  It was also a perfect segue into talking about my lovely daughter, too, and she is a welcome topic of conversation.

On the drive home, I was musing on all that had transpired.  It occurred to me that I don't need a ribbon for my daughter, because obviously I have her, in the world here and now.  For the twins, the ribbons are what I have, at least in a form I can easily carry around with me.  I have a person and I have symbols: all to be treasured for all the hours of my days.

Rolling down the highway, under a hammered-pewter sky,  I felt myself in a delicate state of tension.  It wasn't a stressful feeling wrought with anxiety.  I fancied it to be that which a finely-tuned piano wire feels as it is stretched out in the instrument.  Taut, sleek and brimming with potential.  I found myself in a new, bright country of the soul.

I was caught between the poles of Life and Death, balancing ever so carefully in anticipation of that decisive moment when I am struck just so, to vibrate with Beauty.

Love Breaks Stone

what cracked open in you when you began (as) a father? 

The question was asked of me back in January, by a reader (hi, TaraDharma!) and it wasn't until earlier this week that I came close to having an answer.  It was a more complex question than appearances would lead one to believe.  Combine that with my propensity to ponder, and you have a response time that makes glaciers look like race cars.

Before I answer it, I have to get historical.  This is really a story of two halves.  The first half involves my twins, whom many of you know passed away shortly after birth back in 2003.  The second half involves the entrance into this world of my beautiful Wee Lass not long after.  These events are the sides of the coin.

When the twins were born I suddenly thought I knew everything there was to know of love, and I was certain it was profoundly different than everything I had experienced up to that point in life.  Such small, lovely beings, frail and imperfect yet beautiful and I wanted nothing more than to hold them and know they were mine.  Life had other designs, and I had to bury two children in less than a month.

To say I was shattered is an understatement.  Death obliterates Love in the figurative blink of an eye, and I'm left wondering what the hell it was all about.  Love made my heart swell; Grief burst it.  I had no time to think about cracking, it happened too fast.  I was broken without understanding.

Pain is a harsh teacher, but learn you will, and I was a keen student.  This explains what happened when my daughter was born, this time on time and under much better circumstances.  I was holding back up until the very last minute.  By that, I mean up until she was safely in the warmer and I was standing there about to cut the cord.  Some of you may recall I wrote about that in this post some time ago.

I realized that I still had so much to learn about love.  I felt myself filling up, a surge of primal energy flooding into every corner of my soul.  I felt it spilling over my borders, soaking the floor, rising to my knees, my neck and over my head.  I was swept away.

This led to further revelations.  I had a deeper understanding of myself and my capacity to love beyond myself.  I knew what it meant to want more for someone else than you want for yourself.  I understood that I was much more capable of love than I ever knew, and I could be again if I just let myself.

The irony of this is that it wasn't enough to save some things, while at the same time opening up other doors.

The further irony is that those doors I couldn't keep open, leaving me with memories and another broken heart.  Sometimes, I think it is more scar than heart.  Broken?  Vaporized is more like it.

So...what cracked open in me when I began as a father? 

I think the hammer against the stone, in this case, was Love.  It broke my heart wide open, scattered it in quantam bits across the universe, and then hinted that those bits would slowly find their way back to one another.  Slowly, that is, against the flood tide of love unleashed from the reservoir I never knew I had.

The river is running free, and a bit wild, but eventually all rivers want to know into what ocean they will flow...the dam is broken, and I don't want to drain away.

The Brighter Side We Also May View

Reading over my previous post, it struck me straight up that it was not the post I meant to write.  I don't know quite how that happened, other than to say that I sat down to write what I thought was in my head, and that story is what came out instead.

I have mentioned recently some episodes of unbloggableness.  Or unbloggability.  Or something like it.  I have been dealing with more of it lately than I care for.  Any amount is bad, really, but it has been piling up.  Events like the shootings in Tucson only serve to make it worse, external stressors added to an already high-temperature internal environment.

Something that happened Saturday afternoon was the trigger for what I was going to write about.  When I say 'write about' what I really mean is an attempt to deal with the triggers, not a description of the triggers themselves.  The ways I have been attempting to deal with stuff lately is through writing and photography.  Listening to music is a big part of it, too, but listening is passive in comparison to the other two.

So this is what was going on that afternoon.  I had woken up that morning in a bit of a funk, felt the walls closing in and the beasts stirring in my mind.  I have been writing every day now for a long time, but it had been some time since I had gone on a photo safari, so I reckoned the antidote to the Funk was an excursion with my digital and film cameras.  After breakfast, I bundled up in some warm layers, loaded the cameras and tripod into the car, and headed out the door.  I went to a favorite photography spot of mine, and set to.

My intuition was correct.  A few hours traipsing around outside, chasing trains and cool shadows, did wonders for my mental outlook.  Didn't make everything disappear or bloggable, but it eased the pressure.  At home, while listening to some Uncle Tupelo on the stereo, I happened to look in the mirror at my plaid-shirted, scruffy bearded self, and it hit me:  Things have changed tremendously for me in the recent past, more so than I have been able to handle gracefully...and things are still in flux.  I don't do well with flux.

Of the many things in my aching headbone, two in particular stand out, primarily because they are proof that things aren't all heavy.

First, a cousin of mine is due to have a baby real soon.  Second, my nephew is getting married later this year.  Out of all the 'rocks in the pond' of my mind, these two have created the biggest ripples, and I'm sort of at a loss to explain why.  They both have affected me more than I expected, and mostly to the good.

There is a bit of the "Well, how did I get here?" to all of this.  Both my cousin and nephew are young (ha! They are 20-somethings, yet I'm thinking 'kids'...yikes!) which has left me wondering here did the time go.  I think that is because the calamities of my own life, losing my twin babies and the disintegration of my marriage, have made me cautious and cynical about new lives and new beginnings.  Achieving grace is the exception rather than the rule, and the risk of heartbreak is tremendous, as I so well know.  When I think about my cousin and her baby, and my nephew and his bride-to-be, I do get scared.  So many things rush to my lips, things I don't say, because they are grounded in my own harsh experiences.

But, then, I see there pictures and read their messages and hear their voices...and something melts.  Something finally penetrates that lump of stone I call a heart, and I understand that good things do happen in this universe.

So I stared at that jaded fellow in the mirror while Jeff Tweedy warbled life lessons in the background.  My mind was clear and bright, in a stolen moment when I contemplated that brightness remains, and there are few things more optimistic and joyful than creating a new life, or uniting two existing ones.  Especially when those lives are your kin; no sweeter music than blood music, than love.

---

"So open up those curtains
And drink up the daylight
Just by the brightness
Open your doors wide
'Cause things don't get better
but some people do

There's darkness in this life,
but the brighter side we also may view
There's darkness in this life,
but the brighter side we also may view."

---

Lyrics quoted from "Flatness", on the Album No Depression, by Uncle Tupelo

Aleutian Heart

Linguists argue about Inuits
and Yupiks and Aleuts,
their sophistication on snow
become legend
to non-aboriginal minds

They claim 30, 40, even 70
or more words for snow.
Scientists say they must
because knowing snow
is a survival imperative

You will die easily in the white
when eyes can't tell between
soft and deep, packed and solid,
step in and plunge to the waist
eyes rimed in frost, crystal tears

Its a wonder that arguments occur
about snow and ice, the subtle shifts
between 'aput' and 'pukak'
'mauja' and 'massak'
'mangokpok' and 'massalerauvok'

Because snow, in short, is snow
Like grief, in short, is grief.
Minds see the trees
while hearts see the forest
Truths obscured by language


Numbers of words only matter
to connoisseurs, and professionals;
the broken heart will ever understand
thirty words or none: in the end,
cold pain melts in the heat of love

The Dropoff

There's that scene in Finding Nemo where Marlin and Coral find themselves face-to-face with a huge badmutha of a barracuda.  The barracuda is hovering there in open water like a demon.  This image hasn't left my head since I saw it for the first time years ago.  I tell myself its only a movie, but my subconscious says otherwise.  This time of year, the demons hang close, reaching out to pull me into the deep.

As many long-time readers already know, it was in August seven years ago that my preemie infant son died, about 2-1/2 weeks after his twin sister had passed away.  The road out of the badlands of grief has been long and difficult.  The heart of summer has never been easy for me since that time, although I had begun to achieve some balance.  It had been a delicate balance with constant adjustment.  This balance was lost and any peace of mind was lost last year.

Also as many readers already know,  my Big Bro suddenly passed away last August just one day after my son's date.  So the dog days of summer began then, and continued this year, with a horrific 1-2 punch to the heart and soul of me and others.  Suffice to say it is understatement to call August a 'difficult' month, emotionally. This August has been particularly bad.  Well, this summer in general has been bad. I've been brittle and melancholy and snappish and exhausted and out of it.  Now I know why, although I'm always surprised now at how I'm surprised by these feelings.

I feel as if the road out of the badlands has been a steep climb up with a sudden plunge into the abyss.  I find myself clinging to the precipice as tightly as I can, but my legs are dangling out over depths that fade from violet to purple to black.  Over my shoulder, I can see that barracuda hovering above the inky black, eyes and teeth aglitter in the pale light from above.  He darts in now and again to test my defenses but hasn't gone in for the kill.  I flail and swing, hoping to fend it off for another day.

I'm not sure how long this state of affairs will last.  Part of me keeps fighting, and that part is exhausted.  Another part just wants to let go and get it over with.  All of me wants to get away from the dropoff.  It is mighty cold and lonely when you miss your blood, so much.

Moons of Jupiter, So Close...

It was G-maw that made me want to be an astronaut. Not a "Going to the moon" type astronaut, mind you, I mean a full on balls-to-the-wall (or balls-to-the-bulkhead) strapped to God's own bottle rocket, out past the orbit of the Earth around the Sun kind of astronaut. I wanted to fly to Jupiter and poke it in the Great Red Spot. All because G-maw had a telescope...

I have a telescope myself. A new one, it was a gift. I asked for it because I used to have one when I was a younger Gumbo, but that one didn't survive my jaunt to college and subsequent moves from the nest to apartments to a house. My old one was a refractor, my new one is a reflector. Appropriate, because mainly that what it does and makes me do: reflect.

Which I do. A lot. It was about two weeks ago that I came home from work under a clear sky the color of bruises and wine, to notice a big, bright dot hanging out on the southerly side. I watched it as I sidled up the sidewalk to my back door. It didn't blink and neither did I. I recalled that it must be Jupiter, and that unlocked a flood of memories. I stood on the patio, hand on the doorknob, for a good ten minutes watching that golden speck. All the while images cascaded in sheets across my mind: National Geographic, G-maw and me, freezing nights outside all mixed up with blinking lights, dim lit rooms at night and the faint beep of machines keeping my hearts alive while I frantically scribbled in a notebook.

The Voyager probes flew past Jupiter in 1979, and the pictures they sent back were mental manna to an astronomy geek like me. G-maw had a subscription to National Geographic, which had some awesome spreads of Jupiter and a few of the moons. I remember seeing the Great Red Spot (and feeling awe) and volcanoes on Io (and being freaked out: sulfur dioxide "lava"!) and thinking Man, it would be awesome to go there. I had this fantasy of flying in a space capsule, me the Heroic Traveler, and planting a flag on Io under the glare of the Red Spot. I suppose the far-away alienness of the place seemed perfect for the shy loner that I was: better with things than with people. The cold, the dark and the distance didn't bother me. It only made me want to go there even more, to see awesome beauty and wondrous things never before touched by man, maybe only by the hands of God.

I shook my head and went inside. The telescope is just inside the door. I kept glancing at as I ate dinner, and decided to take it outside and try to see the moons of Jupiter. It was while trying to focus on the little bright dot, that the mystery crept in again. I looked up to see with my eyes and not the lens, and found myself on the frozen face of Io, staring into the glare of the angry red spot while tears streamed down my face. Epithets and insults rang deafeningly inside suit helmet as I violently waved my arms and screamed that this wasn't fair and no, you can't do this, no, no, no you can't bring me this far and show me so much great beauty and tell me its mineminemine only to take it away in a violent storm of desperate nights. NONONO it can't be not after all the blood and the tears and the needles and machines, constantly pricked in the heels and tubes shoved down their throats with diapers the size of a cocktail napkin and you even let me touch them, caress their fragile skin crinkling under the glare of the jaundice lamp you let me say daddy is here, my babies and he thinks you are the most beautiful things in the Universe...

...and the bubble popped, I came back to earth with a lump in my throat and images of tiny moons in my hands, fading with a burn as the cold black well of Night drained them of their lives. I had endured a long, hard trek to a place of indescribable pain and exquisite beauty. Seeing my son and daughter there in the NICU, I planted my flag on frozen ground and watched them fade into howling wilderness of an indifferent Universe. 

Watching the little golden light slowly descend to the horizon, I could not help but think that I had indeed been to the moons of Jupiter. It was a shock and a gift, to travel so far expecting rock and ice, and instead finding flesh and blood...and my heart.

On The Ocean Voracious, Epilogue

It was the screech of a seagull, perhaps, that awoke me. A high, thin keening that set my nerves on edge and had me gritting my teeth.

Grit was in my mouth. The banalities of everyday life intruding in the form of phone calls, bathing, eating. All the simple actions we take for granted when there is no crisis to confront. Simple they may be, but akin to mountain climbing while schlepping a sixty-pound backpack. Scuba diving in gelatin. Pushing frozen molasses with a snow shovel.

Blackstrap molasses, at that, so it fails to even offer the warm comfort of an oatmeal cookie.

My eyes fluttered open into the stinging kiss of a stiff salt breeze. Sand crusted my face, which was mashed into the cold shingle of the beach. A few feet away stood a feathery blur which slowly resolved itself as an enormous glaucous gull, standing guard over the beat-up carcass of a codfish. The gull shifted from one foot to the other as I slowly raised myself up on my trembling arms. The pungent reek of the deliquescing fish assaulted my nostrils. My aching belly heaved, and I vomited memories, hot, bitter, acid.

Days, months, years of anger and sadness spilled out onto the bright sand. The sun sparkled on the slick of sickness like filthy rubies and emeralds; gems made obscene by years buried in the muck and slime of my ravaged psyche. The stench was unbearable and triggered another torrent of spew which seemed to last for days. I feebly scrabbled backwards to get away from the toxic waste lying on the beach. The sand rasped my hands and knees, growing damp as I neared the tide line, toes tangling in the clammy rubber of decaying seaweed. The heavy seas of my heaving insides slowly settled down as if sprayed with crude oil. I leaned back on my heels and spat to rid my mouth of the taste of steel wool and quinine. The world was condensing into a familiar shape as I closed my eyes, rocking gently in the saline breeze.

Days later, tears seeping down my salt-crusted cheeks, I opened my eyes. The seagull was still there. peering at me with what could only be termed professional disinterest. A cock of the head, and it casually bent down to peck at the codfish melting into the sand. The sulfur-colored bill held something red and stringy, which quickly disappeared into the bird’s gullet. The gull screeched at me, a glasscutter blade on a cosmic windowpane. I shivered.

It was cold in the wind, but the sun behind scudding clouds offered some small warmth. My body and my mind ached with the fading pain of having run beyond my limits. Gingerly I flexed my arms and hands, rolled my head about my neck, and made to stand.

A fortnight later and I was on my feet. Now that the pain had faded somewhat, I took stock of my surroundings. The gull was gone, leaving the pathetic outline of codfish bones under a thin layer of sand. I averted my eyes from the evidence of my illness, focusing instead on the granite boulders that marched themselves up the beach to melt into a dense forest of slatey-green trees. Pine, fir or cedar I could not tell but the herbal sweetness of conifer sap coiled into my flaring nostrils as the wind blew gently offshore. I breathed deep and relaxed, ever so little. Gazing into the forest, unblinking for what seemed days, I realized that the only way out of the prison of my tragedies was to venture inland. There could be no going back to the sea. Not now.

Tragedy notwithstanding, I felt I could not truly abandon the waters that brought me here. Survival so hard fought, I had come to respect that which used to be a mortal enemy. I turned to face the liquid jade vastness that had spat me upon this not so alien shore.

There was no trace of the vessel I had once sailed upon this troubled ocean, and I was not so foolish as to expect it. The sky overhead was shocking cerulean, pocked by clouds of icy white and steely grey. Their etherealness congealed into a dense grey smear that seemed little different from the water, out on the far horizon. The sea and sky along the curve of the earth stirred slowly, a darkly grey serpent portending storms and heartache to come. Perhaps they would find me, perhaps not; for now I was on dry ground with little reserve to fight against that which had not yet come to pass. I turned on my heels, trudging slowly but steadily up to the trees.

Behind me, the glass shards and tumbled gravel of a million heartbreaks rolls back and forth in the ceaseless play of surf. Water mutters and hisses over the shingle, the voices of my beloved urge me forward into the balsam green breeze, and my chest grows warm as the splintered remains of my heart begin to stitch themselves anew.

On The Ocean Voracious, Part Three

For a few degrees of arc, I thought my back was broken.

The pressure of the waves had driven me backwards, hard into the mast. The water was cold liquid lead, filling my lungs as I struggled to free myself from its grip. The howl of the wind was now lost to the gurgling shouts of the ocean. I was drowning and there was nothing, nothing I could do about it.

My limbs were cold and numb. I lay in the dark, freezing and unmoving. Unmoving of any impulse from me, mind you. The matrix in which I was embedded refused to stay still. Any motion of my limbs was purely the result of external forces. I was unsure if I had been caught in an explosion or an implosion; the net result was devastation. My eyes did not want to stay open. It hurt to look and see a tiny person-shaped void where my daughter had lain.

Nurses, family, and my son…the constellations by which I managed to navigate once I could keep my eyes open. I could see the stars occasionally through gaps in the clouds as I clung unsteadily to the mast, rocked violently by the heaving seas. Having a fixed point is of great comfort to those racked by seasickness; so it was with me. My eyes clung to this human horizon as it was the only source of strength for miles around on this desert ocean.

Her funeral another violent tempest.

If not for my journals, I’d likely not recall much of the experience. A small, precious life is gone and we are discussing music. And how to write a eulogy for a life of six days? I sat down to write, and got up from the table when I was done; the thing itself I only know from having saved a copy.

If tears had been rain, the desert of my soul would have been covered in green. The door to the hearse opened, and I wrapped my arms around her spirit resting in a box much too small to contain it. The walk to the gravesite was a long trip between points side by side. How could my arms ache so much from a burden so slight? I knelt to set my daughter down and tumbled over the gunwale into a sea the color of molten coal. Blind and unthinking, I clung to my son the life raft. He was all we had, on this violent waterscape. The source of life, light and heat. I wrapped myself around him and prayed in a fever that he, that we would free ourselves from this maelstrom. Every minute, every hour that passed was another step closer to shore. I nurtured the hope, like a tea candle in a hurricane lamp, that our son would come home with us.

I was swimming as hard as I could, pushing clawing my way to the light and the entire time I didn’t see the walls of the whirlpool growing higher and reaching deeper. A claw reached out of the gelatinous dark and sank into my heaving chest: phone calls in the sodden hours of the early morning. The first to tell us that something serious was going on, the second to tell us to come to the hospital.

If the hours of the dark and the dawn are cruel to you, how can you ever sleep again?

We dressed hurriedly and surfed to the hospital on a syrupy wave of nausea and dread. It was almost impossible to conceive that the same things were happening again. Sailing the same sea, foundering on the same rocks, sinking into the same depths. The only difference was this time it was by the light of day. Horrors do not lessen under the glare of the sun. They only become easier to see. The staff gave us the terrible, terrible news: our son was in a very bad state.

Pitchpoling. The nautical term for causing to flip end over end. The bow gets buried in the back of the wave in front of it, and over it goes the stern. Pitchpoled. We sat there on the couch in the NICU as they told us that our son was not going to make it, and I could not stop tumbling. The lights swirled over and around and I heard someone saying “No, no, no, this can’t be” and I realized with a start that it was me. My stern was in the air and I was choking on the water. I clung to the hope that they were wrong, but to no avail. The waves got higher, the wind howled faster. I walked to the phone to call my parents with the bad news. Another long walk into a bottomless pit, and the sun was not yet over the horizon. We waited, we prayed, but the ocean refused to listen. At about half past noon, on an otherwise ordinary day, the sun went out as if flicked by a switch: we had to turn off the machines.

The life raft disappeared as if it had never been. I felt myself lifted up high by a cold upwelling from the sludge at the bottom of the sea. My head barely above the waterline, I found myself at the top of a tsunami and looking down at a rapidly approaching shoreline of broken stone. My son breathed his last; the tsunami broke and I smashed headlong into the rocks, not caring if I awoke.

St. Brendan was willing to risk his life sailing into the unknown, for the sake of the Promised Land, so I suppose for him dealing with monsters and other horrors was the cost of doing business. For me, the accidental sailor, it was a price I was most unwilling to pay. I didn’t want the Promised Land, I wanted a family. I can only hope that Brendan found it worthwhile for what he learned.

But for me, if this is the price of wisdom, I prefer to remain an idiot.

No, Lonesome, No Cry

“… I remember when we used to sit
In the government yard in Trenchtown,
Oba - obaserving the 'ypocrites
As they would mingle with the good people we meet…”
Good friends we have, oh, good friends we've lost
Along the way.
In this great future, you can't forget your past;
So dry your tears, I seh…”

The storm has passed, leaving the sidewalks a muddy gray, and he felt something stir sluggishly in the hollow stone of his chest. His heart, the color and density of the concrete. Off to the west, the sky was beginning to clear, patches of azure silk amongst the dirty cotton of the clouds. It’s too bad, he muttered, that the rain doesn’t make clouds look cleaner. He wondered what could really wash it all away. What base to neutralize the acid of sorrow?

“…Good friends we have, oh, good friends we've lost
Along the way.
In this great future, you can't forget your past;
So dry your tears, I seh…”

The blinds were open halfway, thin bars on the soft prison he called his new home. They rattled whenever the door opened. But he just couldn’t bring himself to ask the maintenance guys for some replacement clips. Funny, that sort of routine repair seemed so uninteresting to him now. A small thing to be ignored, like many small things of tiny import. The sun glowed brighter like a flashlight wrapped in tissue paper. The watery rays gave a pearly sheen to his face and the walls that bounded it. His eyes closed slowly, a sleepy jaguar twitching its ears at the noise buzzing from the radio. Bob Marley unknowingly drives needles into an aching heart.

“...And then Georgie would make the fire lights,
As it was logwood burnin' through the nights.
Then we would cook cornmeal porridge,
Of which I'll share with you;
My feet is my only carriage,
So I've got to push on through…”

Either the world heaved under his feet, or he grew faint, sagging against the door. There was a sharp crack, as the glass in his hand hit the trim along the frame. The dull report sounding as a gunshot in a living room suddenly become anechoic. The walls, the carpet, swallowing up the rasp of his breath and the beats of his heart. He wondered why those noises disappeared, yet he could hear every dog barking, plane flying and bad muffler out in the parking lot. Ah, he thought, it’s all internal.

“…But while I'm gone, I mean:
Everything's gonna be all right!
Everything's gonna be all right!
Everything's gonna be all right!
Everything's gonna be all right!...”

Anything self-generated, he said softly, is bound to disappear. The tree in the forest with no one around. Not even myself to hear it. The glass grew heavy, dragging his arm down as if he were holding a cold, wet cannonball. His thirst increased as wetness gathered at the corners of his eyes. He smiled at the thought that maybe he did not have to raise the glass after all. The cold liquid travelling by stealth through the capillaries of his hand and arm. On the way, something alchemical occurred. The drops from the glass no longer ice-cold and bracing, they emerged hot and molten. Liquid salt slag from the furnace of his heart rolled down his fevered cheeks. The glass he raised to his lips and took a swallow, oddly dainty in his motions. A marriage of quinine and lime coated his mouth and lips with sublime bitterness.

He laughed again, at the thought of tonic. A good thing, he told himself, I need to protect myself from the fever. The grin faded, knowing the fever, this emotional malaria he carried within, would return. The radio droned on, and he found he had no strength to turn it off. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, staring out the window into the silvery bowl of the sky.

“…I said, everything's gonna be all right-a!
Everything's gonna be all right!
Everything's gonna be all right, now!
Everything's gonna be all right!...”

He said to no one, I know you mean well, Bob, but…gimme some time to believe you.

Lyrics from “No, Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley

Dream of Salt and Bread

I opened the door that evening, to make my daily schlep to the mail box, to get my daily dose of coupon flyers and junk, and there was a thunk at my feet. Looking down, there was a small cardboard box lying on the threshold. The wrapping tape said “Food Network” and it weirded me out. I was not expecting any packages, and I could not remember having ordered anything from the Food Network. Especially small kitchenwares, which is what the mystery package turned out to be.

I brought it inside and turned it over to read the packing slip. Aha, mystery solved! No, I hadn’t ordered something while sleep walking or after a couple of gin and tonics. It was from my Ma and Da, and they sent me a salt dish for my dining table. Just what I needed, and a nice surprise.

Later in the week I arrived home in no mood to cook. Tired and ragged out, with the walls closing in just a bit, I made a spot decision to go on a picnic at my favorite local lake. So I grabbed my cooler and backpack, filled them up with bread, olives, cheese, pickles, and threw in a jar of salt and my pepper grinder. A bottle of olive oil topped it up, and off I went.

Good on me for finding the perfect spot to conduct my noshing adventures. It was at a picnic table situated under a tree and in just enough shade for me to relax and enjoy the setting sun. A gentle breeze and, strangely for a Baltimore summer, almost no humidity, meant a most pleasant evening to dine outside.


While sitting there, chewing slowly and ruminating like an upright cow, I began to feel dizzy and weak. At first, I thought I was coming down with something. The working of my jaws slowed even further, my breathing loud and languid in my ears. I swallowed. I became hyperaware of the birdsongs among the trees, the shouts and laughter of the extended family picnicking across the way. I heard the giggles of children, the wind in the grass, stirring the leaves over my head.

Leaning back and closing my eyes, I felt a sense of peace wash over me. The tensions of the day truly melted away. Realizing I was not going to be sick, I resumed chewing. The savory bite of the salt and the unctuous embrace of olive oil grabbed my tongue and lips, each working of the jaw a deeper exploration of flavor. Breathing deep into my belly created a deeper sense of comfort. And the laughter and voices I heard were that of my loved ones, sitting around the table with me.

We sat there at the table, laughing and joking and reveling in the joy of each other’s presence. I smiled, dipped my bread into the oil, and we shared salt and bread on a lovely summer evening.


Dedicated to the roots of my tree, those of this world and those who have gone on to the next. May love find you, whichever world you grace with your presence.

On The Ocean Voracious, Part Two

Deluge. The wave thunders over the bow to take my breath away. Gasping and spluttering in a frantic attempt to draw air into my lungs, I rushed down the hall to the delivery room. Or was it really an operating room? The distinction perhaps matters not at all. What did matter is that there was pain and blood and panic and a claustrophobic smothering of life out of control. Control for us, not the doctors and nurses doing their best to keep three lives in this world.

As I entered the room, my head full of whitecaps and howling wind, I was led to a chair set next to the head of the table. This was no captain’s chair, commanding the bridge on a clipper ship racing over the open ocean. Instead it had the feel of a life ring or a rescue dinghy. In other words, small, frail and to my overheated mind, distressingly inadequate for the task of keeping me afloat.

I had no choice. I sank into the chair with a prayer to keep me from drowning.

The mother of our twins lay there, dazed by fatigue, medications and anesthesia. She was awake though, and my heart broke to see the look of fear on her face. There is little so emasculating as facing a total inability to help someone you love out of their own extreme distress. What could I do sit by her side, murmuring what words of support that I could muster? To this day, I cannot recall if I held her hand, do not remember if anything I said truly helped. After all, what does the master of the ship say to the crew when they are staring up at a wall of water ten times the size of their own puny craft?

Not much, I suppose. But better to say something, better to acknowledge the human connection, than to completely surrender to the blind brutalities of nature.

I did what I could do, the best I could under the circumstances. The room was filled with choreographed chaos. It had the air of a bizarre religious ceremony, masked acolytes attending to the mysterious commands of high priestesses gathered around a strange and terrible altar. Machines beeped and hummed in the background. Hands were raised, blood was drawn. There seemed a never ending stream of small emergencies to defuse; all the while I sat there trying not to faint. If I felt possessed of manhood at all, I watched it slowly seeping away in a slowly growing pile of surgical gauze colored a shocking crimson. I fought to keep my eyes open.

The doctor spoke. I looked up to see that our son had been delivered. My eyes registered a pinkish blur the size and shape of a doll as he was whisked over to a waiting isolette. Another terse utterance from the doctor as our first daughter was delivered shortly thereafter. Again, I saw a doll-shaped blur. A shout withered in my throat as I learned that the babies were alive, the mother serious but stable.

There were no cries. The silence haunts me still.

St. Brendan was either a madman or possessed of supernatural courage. I, who am not destined to be a saint, certainly doubted my sanity. There were no bronze stars pinned to my shirt. The blur of the delivery faded into the gray-green roar of the sea pummeling my miniscule craft. I stood before the mast soaked and shivering in fear of opening my eyes. As I waited, I felt the motion of the boat began to slow. The wind dropped from a howl to a loud conversation. A dim silvery light seeped through my eyelids. Feeling no courage at all, I opened them to see a break in the clouds on the far horizon. The waters were restless, heavy, and the craft was still tossed. Still, it seemed we had survived the worst. I began to bail the boat.

Bend. Scoop. Stand. Pour. Repeat. A script of long hours, little sleep and constant worry. My wife in the ICU, my babies in the NICU. A seemingly diabolical arrangement designed to stretch and break the body and the soul. You really cannot be two places at once, the errant cruelty of which was ground into my mind. Things began to look up, as the twins stabilized and my wife improved enough to get out of the ICU and visit the babies. The meeting between the babies and the mother was a transcendent moment, a glimpse into the presence of the Divine in the fabric of the Universe. We began to hope, began to breathe more. Mother and father were able to go home. The sea relaxed, ever so slightly.

But on the sixth day, God created Pain.

A white-hot lance of agony delivered in the form of a late evening phone call. The daughter was in distress. We were told to get back to the hospital. I looked up from the bilge, pail in hand, to see the sky and the sea melding into one. A deep gray-green smudge of darkness. The wind began to race.

The drive to the hospital and the trip up to the NICU is a smear of panic and horror. My jaws at war with my guts, as they sought to escape through my lips. We made into the NICU, and the faces of the staff told us what we did not want to know, even before we saw the isolette. We rounded the corner, and the lance twisted hard between the ribs. Our daughter, not breathing, the machines turned off.

On board the boat, a tiny flame is extinguished by a hurricane. The ocean peels itself away from the horizon and wraps the boat; the coils of a ghastly Ouroboros come to crush it to end the world. I howl in despair and fury, unbelieving of such tragedy. As the wave rolls over the boat, the only thing I can think to do is hurl the bucket into its face and damn it to hell. The wave in its uncaring majesty ignores this puny attempt at defiance, and breaks.

On The Ocean Voracious, Part One

Six years I have roamed the ocean, seeking to escape its ravenous maw. Six years I have mourned the loss of the vessel in which I had set sail on the waters of life.

Was I St. Brendan, setting out in my wood and leather coracle in search of Paradise? Not exactly, as I would never confuse myself with a dyed-in-the-wool true believer. And I certainly never founded any monasteries. What I did do, akin to Brendan, was to believe in something so deeply, want something so badly I was willing to journey far through dangerous seas in an improbably small vessel to find it.

So it came to pass that I found myself on the verge of fatherhood, a wife pregnant with twins and a head full of naïve ideas about what fatherhood really meant. The early days were filled with joy and anxiety, but mostly joy. Against some steep odds I was the father of twins, where I had been hoping and praying for at least one child to call ours. I still remember the day we found out. The evidence was right there on the sonogram screen. A fine pair, indeed.

I was so happy I thought I would faint. Or throw up. Fortunately, I did neither. Instead, I started laughing and crying a bit, it was so beautiful and overwhelming. Wishes and dreams coming true in a most unexpected fashion.

Twins. Time to put on my big boy pants.

In the days and weeks following our discovery, I was growing anxious and overjoyed in equal measures. One child would have been a lot to take on, so two…! I was able to put aside the anxiety, mostly, and concentrate on the joy, the excitement. I could see the evidence there, every day, in a swelling tummy and the radiance that only a mother could have. Natural beauty on par with anything Nature could offer.

Plans were made, thinking of life with not one, but two babies in the world. Clothes bought, thoughts of a nursery, scrapbooks to document the growth and arrival of strange and lovely fruit in our little garden. Birthing classes and doctor’s visits: all served to put us on notice, and we did learn the many dangers, the pitfalls, the awful things lying in wait for the unwary traveler. Even all that terrible knowledge, in this era of information overload and access to good medical care, did not sap the enthusiasm and happiness I had begun to allow myself to feel. Breaking new ground, I told myself, when I realized I was slipping the bonds of a lifelong pessimism about the world, and about life. It was absolutely wonderful.

Amidst that burgeoning optimism, I fancied myself setting sail on a vast and glorious ocean, in a fine boat of my own construction. This is easy enough to do under sunny skies and calm seas, of which we had aplenty. Once out on the water, not even a quickening wind and darkening horizon could dampen my optimism, so I sailed on into the storm, instead of away from it.

Of course, we had no choice. Hindsight is perfect…

The day we entered the hospital was surreal, and scary, but almost as if scary through a thick filter. My wife sick, severely so, only we had no idea at first just how severe. She in bed, hooked to devices and tubes and wires, monitored around the clock. Me, parked on the rollout couch-bed, disheveled, worried and not really comprehending the violence of the storm about to break.

Three days in a hospital room is no forty days in the wilderness, but it sure felt like it. All the testing and monitoring and alarms and constant checking of things. Very hard for everyone, especially the mother, and to this day I am still astonished at my blithe ignorance. Almost up to the last hour or two, I was still thinking that we would be home shortly, problem solved and that we would still be taking our planned vacation that summer. My god, I was so wrong. Towards the end of that third day, with a solemn look on her face, the doctor brought us face to face with the awful truth: our babies must be born now if we wanted the best hope of mother and children surviving. That sixteenth day of the month…

Imagine being at the top of mountainous wave, looking down on the green, glassy trough below. The mind reels, the mouth gapes and the knowledge sinks in that little boats aren’t meant to sail mighty oceans. For one small slice of eternity, I was standing in that boat looking down on the water and I could feel the bottom dropping out. Too scared to scream, to move, I gripped the gunwales as the water below came rushing up to meet my little vessel. On that warm summer day, I stood in the grip of dread while sliding down the foam-spattered face of Neptune.

My son and daughter, brought into the world through controlled violence. I stood helplessly by, cursing the roiling sea and screaming to God “I don’t know how to sail…” as the first of many towering waves broke over the bow.

Lake Of Souls, Morning

The shrine is there, visible through open spaces between the trees, splendidly refulgent in shades of emerald, azure or silver depending on the mood of its cousins the sky and sun. The quicksilver surface is occasionally distorted by the splashing of waterfowl and fish, sensual ripples in a watery sheet.

The shrine is there, diffracted through the a million pinhole cameras created by the canopy of leaves and branches. A living shroud, perhaps, a green curtain concealing the mysteries within. The mysteries can be had, by those willing and patient enough to lift the edges of the shroud. Only in this way can one step through to the inner sanctum.

It was not always this way. Before, the lake was just a hole in the ground filled with water.

That was years ago and a persona away. Time has passed and the perceptions, the investments of feelings are different. The focus has changed. It used to be the lake was a pleasant novelty. A green loop to walk around, counting dogs and squirrels and marveling at the geese. Every so often a bike ride was in order, a welcome diversion on a comfortable spring weekend. At this lake, a pair of swans once lived, but the duet faded as one voice succumbed to the ravages of time and the other ceased singing, perhaps due to a broken heart.

The water was just water, green, wet, dotted with feathers, leaves and lily pads. Sometimes, in winter it acquired a crust of ice. Tempting to skaters, which are not allowed, and providing entertainment to onlookers watching ducks flop and skid on the slick surface. This ice was never majestic in an arctic sense, and never gave the impression that it covered anything more than a shallow lake, home to fish and frogs.

And later, souls.

The transformation was slow and subtle, from utilitarian feature of the landscape to a holy vessel akin to those containing the finger bones of saints or the teeth of prophets. It took years to happen, almost unnoticed on many hours of walks and quiet contemplation. The transformation may never have taken hold, too, if not for the beautiful and terrible pressures of time and life bearing down on the walker.

Awe inspiring joy and unspeakable tragedy. The psychic equivalent of plate tectonics acting on the soul and molding it into forms previously unknown and unseen. The walker talked to himself on his many trips around the lake. The lake began to listen to the prayers, the angry screeds, the quiet questions and simple joys discovered in the interior of the mind. There was transference of energy, and the lake stirred from a long, cold slumber.

And one day, the lake spoke back.

The walker realized this, one day in early summer. It was unusually cool and cloudy as he ambled down the path in the green stillness. The lake was there as always, waiting. Passing an opening in the trees and undergrowth, he could not escape the feeling that someone was waiting for him, watching, and whispering to him. There a path draped down a hill, leading into the trees. In the background, glints of silver and grey, almost as voices.

They were there, all of them, and had been for quite some time. Son, daughter, grandmother, family long passed and still of this earth: In his thoughts, in his words, his actions. All this walking and thinking and talking. It was no longer with him exclusively. It was with the lake.

The water now precious, bearing souls. They were with him, now and evermore. The walker climbed the hill, spreading his arms wide to embrace the water.

You are here, he said to the wind, come to me…I am home.

Language of Loving the Language

“Even at this early stage of their development, the Irish were intoxicated by the power of words.”
-from How the Irish Saved Civilization, by Thomas Cahill

Aha. That explains why I feel so dizzy and lightheaded so much of the time. I am not native born Irish, just of Irish ancestry, but…words. Words. Words. I love them. I cannot get enough of them. It pains me that there are far more words that I don’t know, than ones that I do. And that there are many that I do not know how to pronounce properly, but would love to use. And lots that I do know how to pronounce, but have yet to work into daily conversation.

Like saltire. Heehee. Not much call for that in most of the meetings I attend.

Words. I read the dictionary, just for fun. Sometimes, I’ll go to look up a particular word but get so distracted by all the other lovely ones I see that I forget what it was I went to look up in the first place. Occasionally my daughter and I will sit down on the floor or the couch and leaf through the dictionary together. She is usually looking for the “animal” pictures (I have a dictionary that has small illustrations for some words, usually animals) but now and again I’ll pick out a word and tell her what it is and what it means. Someday, I’m going to scrape together enough cash to buy a full set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Just because I want it.

Words and language fascinate me. I think about them all the time. Or should I say, cogitate? Or perhaps ruminate? Ponder? Meditate?

See? I told you! I cannot think of one word without thinking of others like it or riffing on a particular word for minutes, hours, days. Once, after an all-nighter back in college, I had the word lachrymose looping in my head for hours until I finally went and looked it up. That it meant “given to tears or weeping” or something like that only befuddled me. It was only because I had seen the word in a book I glanced at in the library that I even knew it existed.

But I’ve been that way since I was a kid. Who was it that said the dictionary is like a poem about everything?

“What are words for, when no one listens anymore…what are words for when no one listens, it’s no use talkin’ at all…”
-from What Are Words For, by Missing Persons

Even if no one was listening, I would still be fascinated by words, by language. Precise and fuzzy, slippery and ironclad, words and language strung together like pearls for the mind. I like reading them, deciphering them, learning them. I love writing them.

Which brings me to the true subject for today: writing and writing paper and writing utensils. I know that hardly anyone actually writes anymore, with pen or pencil and paper. I thoroughly understand the value and utility of computerized word processing. Ironically enough, it was the computer that rekindled my love of writing. The ability to cut and paste, to edit, to make writing so plastic takes away some of the drudgery associated with actually putting words to paper (or pixels to screen).

In doing so, though, it helped me see how much I enjoyed the physical act of writing. And it really took fire when I started keeping journals back in 2003, upon the birth (and subsequent brief lives) of my twins. The act of putting pen on paper soothed me, slowed down my racing mind and made it possible for me to rein in my thoughts. Putting the brakes on a runaway train, so to speak.

There is something hypnotic and meditative about filling a blank sheet of paper with words. The best times, when I get a good idea, or need to spill the contents of my fevered brain, are when I can take my notebook or a fresh sheet of toothy writing paper and just write, write, write in the light of a lamp on the table or the nightstand. Just write. In silence, when the ideas are particularly strong or numerous. Just me, the pen and the paper. That little scratchy noise as the pen drags over the paper? One of my favorite sounds in the world. I especially like it when I can get into a groove, the words flowing, pen skritching over the page…and I hit the Zone. Time flies and I get lost in the act of writing and the sheer beauty of creation…

This was all triggered by a sudden impulse of mine, to get a fountain pen to replace the one I used to have, years ago. I had inherited an honest-to-jayzus stainless steel fountain pen from my maternal grandmother. I loved it. I wrote with it. I sketched with it.

And I lost it. Over twenty years gone, now.

It is quiet now, Wee Lass having gone to bed hours ago. I found myself this warm summer evening, sitting at the table with my laptop in the light of a banker’s lamp. It has a green shade, glowing with an emerald refulgence (heehee) and giving me great comfort as I stir the gumbo pot of words swirling around in my head. On the computer screen is the website for a manufacturer of fine writing papers. I am staring open-mouthed, agape at the myriad possibilities of paper, of envelopes…and pens.

There it is, right in front of me: a fountain pen, blue with a stainless steel nib. I want it. I don’t know that I can resist it. I see that pen, and I hear my daughter telling me a story, while my grandmother takes my hand in hers, and together we fill the page.

With words, and love.