Magic Deer

If I take you out in the sun one morning, we might meet a deer or a dog or both, but just stand still, because I don't know which is worse, too much or not enough.

Fake Forest

I hope you understand:

“Nature hit you in the eye so plainly and grabbed you so fiercely and so tangibly by the scruff of the neck that perhaps it really was still full of gods.” 

-from Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak

Nightmare Walk/Bagel Run

Well it's not exactly where credit is due, but  

it's been another month without a nightmare walk.

I am not sure what to tell you about all of that, except this morning I accidentally retraced my steps (on a bagel run) and nothing really happened. 

That has got to count for something.

For Mrs. F.O. Stanley, Again

Today will be a mud-boots day. Please recall: 

"I said in my heart, 'I am sick of four walls

and a ceiling.

I have need of the sky.

I have business with the grass.

I will up and get me away where the hawk

is wheeling,
 Lone and high,

And the slow clouds go by."

-From Spring by Richard Hovey, 1907

Well that's all.

Untangling

Don't worry. I am just right behind you, untangling myself from these pricker-bushes.

Viable Alternatives II

Suddenly all I want is to be riding trains, as though that speed and percussion is the only thing that could possibly calm the nervous compulsions.


Instead I have been walking to the bagel shop.

Lately

I've been real busy trompin' around outside and looking at plants and doing spring things.

Not PA

I'm back from a week in Ohio.

I'm scraping the mud off my boots.

Pity

I guess it's too cold for the hoodlums.

Aim High in Steering

You are probably one of those people who likes to say "Look up! You might miss something!" when you see somebody walking with their head tilted downward. When things are good, they are glorious! The sun is radiant; the darkness is vast! I can just tell. You are one of those sorts.

I took your advice, you know. It wasn't just because of the scolicephobia, either. If anything, those worms are a reason to look down. No, I stopped staring at the sidewalk because you convinced me I was missing something. The sky. You convinced me that I must be sad, walking around like that, and that I was bound to bump into somebody. The implications were that it would be the wrong somebody, too. You pointed at the most shriveled, lonely people, hunched over and closed off. You told me I'd turn out just like them.

It wasn't just you, though. It was everybody. In Driver's Ed., which was mandatory for graduation even though I wasn't learning to drive, they made a point of telling me, every day for three months, everywhere I should be looking instead of the ground in front of me. Mostly I looked at a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, but sometimes I looked at the chalkboard, at dotted lines of sight and bold letters that said "AIM HIGH IN STEERING", and I listened to a man that I suspected was illiterate list off ten thousand mirrors and dials a driver was supposed to be looking at when they were driving down the highway, maintaing a speed of sixty-five miles per hour, aiming high, pointing their vehicle towards far-off horizons.

You probably like road trip stories, because people are always aiming high and steering for the West Coast, where there is Sky with a capitol "S" and giant sequoias reaching up to it. I cannot drive, of course, and I went to California when I was seven years old, and mostly I remember watching college students draw pictures in the sand after dark at Santa Cruz and watching Elena's Barbie Jeep almost drift to sea at Treasure Island. I remember sand in our Oreos. I do not recall, though there are photographs depicting it, the dim sequoia forest and my smallness in the face of its immensity. I did not have your taste for grand juxtapositions.

You told me that I was remembering it wrong, and that there were impressive, jagged stretches of coast that I once stood overlooking, and all the while I was preoccupied with little sea anemone in tide pools. You shamed me. You convinced me that detachment was only acceptable when it looked dreamy and faced upward and sunned its face. I think somebody once told you to get your own head out of the clouds, and you refused to listen, and it made this very charming story. I must have liked it, or I wouldn't have started looking up.

The problem was just that I kept stubbing my toes, and tripping over uneven pavement, and once last year I was hurrying through the rain to a lecture and stepped on a little worm. I felt it. Under my shoe, in that split-second, I felt it. I glanced to the ground, where I hadn't been looking, and at the sight of what I'd done I was immediately sick all over the muddy ground. With shaking hands and a churning stomach, I watched the flooded sidewalk and felt the consequences of your crummy advice until arriving, soaking wet, at the lecture hall.

I wonder if you remember the last time your shadow kept you company, and followed you around on a sunny day. It was probably a long time ago. You've probably been busy basking in the glorious warmth of that great celestial sphere. I'm sure that is a nice way to spend the afternoon. So is looking at moss, if you're interested. So is dipping your foot in a cool river on a hot day, and watching your footprints evaporate on the dusty, practically sizzling granite slabs of the shore. So is watching minnows in the reedy lake shallows, where they dart between ancient, twisted tree roots. So is wearing down a piece of sidewalk chalk until one section of driveway, pebbles and all, is vivid pink. Of course, you are right. I am probably missing something. For the life of me, I cannot find Orion's belt.

Photographs taken by my sister, who knows a thing or two about a thing or two.

Irony/History/Cookery/Anniversary

For your fifty-first birthday, may we suggest that you reenact the Battle of Antietam, and march your daughters along Bloody Lane Trail until things get literal? May we suggest a late lunch in Frederick, another Civil War town, another cemetery town, also a college town and a church-spire town? How about a kitten left on the porch for you to find later? May we suggest you name the kitten after Vice-Admiral William Fitzwilliam Owen, charter of Great Lakes, explorer of African coasts? We frequently recommend, and wonder how you'd feel about: a boozey espresso gâteau de crêpes with chocolate ganache, homemade, improvised, because your daughter meant to make a chiffon cake but the eggs just wouldn't beat, no matter what she did? May we suggest you eat the cake cold the next morning, when it will probably taste better, because it is still as hot outside it was on the battlefield yesterday? May we suggest you bring some water next time? Some gauze?

Unsolicited Advice

While a natural setting is generally recommended for the ease of tensions physical and mental (by myself and a great many others), there are certain states that seem desperate for pavement and glass, and do not ask much of the architecture. There are states, I think, of anxiety and restlessness that maybe you can sweat out, if you walk in circles long enough around a half-dozen city blocks. Even if it isn't late July in Baltimore, if you walk long enough, you will at some point open a door and go inside somewhere, or get on a train, and then you will peel off every sweaty layer that you piled on that February morning-- taking the frenzy with it.

If you do that, in a city where you don't live, and then you rinse it all off and go to bed and wake up the next morning and cut your hair and eat a doughnut (but probably only if you do all of that), you might have a chance of getting rid of whatever mania swelled inside of you, and possessed you to skip town in the first place. If you do those things, you can expect another year and a half to two years before you start feeling that way again, and then you might be lucky, because it might be summertime, and you won't have to walk as long or as far before you've sweat everything out.