A Parade and A Pyramid

Jackson is almost four.  That age at which he understands his separateness from other people, but does not yet understand the separateness of his emotions.  His will is clear and distinct, but his heart is still one with the world.  Whatever is happening to him, be it highest joy or deepest sorrow, is happening to the world.  That thing – the filter, the wall, the individuation of identity – that will eventually teach him that this is not so, that his feelings are uniquely his and that not everyone can be trusted with them –  has yet to take hold.  

I am sitting on the curb watching him and his cousins jockey for position along the edge of the road as the St. Patrick’s Day parade flows by.  As soon as a float-rider’s arm cocks back to toss a handful of Jolly Ranchers into the street, the three of them dash forward to scoop up the treasure.  Other children converge from different angles and the result of the looting and pillaging is not always an equitable division of loot.  As the youngest and smallest among the group camped on that section of sidewalk, Jackson does not always return triumphant.

When he does, the plastic-wrapped corn syrup confection clutched in his little fist, he is ecstatic.  When he does not, his hands empty, his shoulders drooping surprisingly low for a four-year-old, he is morose.  The speed with which he moves from one expression to the other corresponds exactly to the speed at which the next float or tractor or pamphlet-distributing politician appears.  

Driving home at the end of the day, my arms still holding the heat of the sunshine and my head the image of my sweet boy waving his arms to get the attention of the candy-throwers, the parade turns into parable.  I realize that, for Jackson, the candy had not really been the object.  Each time he had been successful in gathering up a piece or two, he’d quickly brought it to the curb and handed it over to either me or his mother.  Once or twice he’d actually opened the package only to stick his tongue to whatever was inside and decide against it.  But he kept going back, kept hurrying hard into the scrum of children.  His prize, though he couldn’t know it yet, was the participation.

People whose business it is to know these things – teachers and preachers, psychologists and seers – tell us that the need to belong is a fundamental human motivation and it influences a wide range of behavioral and emotional responses.  On Maslow’s hierarchy of needs it is right there near the top.  It is the impulse behind every dare ever accepted and the impetus for many a Las Vegas wedding and ill-advised tattoo.  And Jackson has just reminded me that that craving, that insatiable hunger to be a part of something, doesn’t suddenly appear in middle school.  It is there from the very beginning.

It is also there to the very end.  

My fingers are curved around the steering wheel and my eyes are fixed on the flat straight road before me.  Miles ahead the white lines on either side converge into a single point and the road disappears.  The vanishing point.  I am headed toward the vanishing point.  For a moment I am acutely aware of Jackson’s youth and my age, painfully alert to the fact that I may not be around to see his tattoos or hear the stories of the dares he takes or – please, God! – doesn’t.  

I take a breath.  And with the breath the realization comes: This is what it means to be family.  Belonging from the very beginning.  Belonging to the very end.  By blood or by happy accident.  Without having to earn your way in.  Without concern that you’ll spend your way out.  With the freedom to run into the street to grab whatever you can and the absolute assurance that there’s a place to return even with empty hands.

Copyright 2014

Marks of Punctuation, Signs of Life

I like punctuation marks.  I like to know when something ends, when it’s over.  

Which is why this winter has just about driven me to the point of madness.  It’s been a sentence in a William Faulkner novel, winding capriciously from one place to another, picking up subject after subject with tentacle-like conjunctions and prepositions, offering jolts of unexpected discomfort with exclamations and interjections, creating confusion with unpronounceable words and unusual syntax.  

It’s been an Emily Dickinson poem.  Lovely.  At times.  But more often difficult.  To withstand.  Or understand. Or even stand.  On the ice.

In an ordinary winter I know that on New Year’s Day I can clench my jaws and hunch my shoulders against the coming cold and simply soldier through until the first daffodil appears along the ditch at the old house at the crossroads.  This, however, was no ordinary winter.  The dully cold days of January gave way to a foreign February, days of rain and ice followed by something impersonating spring which fled quickly in the wake of more rain and ice and wind.   

And it wasn’t just the weather.  Three Friday afternoons in a row, I stood in a line at a funeral home visitation.  On the Sunday after one of those Fridays, I stood to give the eulogy for one of my dearest friends.  

When March arrived all sunny and balmy, it was clearly in disguise, but I was so eager, so desperate, really, for winter – outside and in – to disappear that I embraced it crazily, only to be betrayed once again as its true intentions were revealed as soon as enough windows had been opened, enough arms had been bared, enough shoes had been shed.  Winter wasn’t over.

I stood at the window looking at the first ruffly sprouts of leaves on the saw-tooth oaks laughing just a little sarcastically at their audacity.  Nature can be so naive.

Then I noticed something I’d not seen when I got home the night before.  The narrow strip of land between what passes for the yard at Sandhill and the branch that borders the pond, the little slip of woods where scrub oaks and bay trees, grapevines and Queen Anne’s lace, kudzu and honeysuckle grow and meld into a particular ecosystem, had been burned off.  The dead undergrowth that, over the winter, had created something like a choke collar on the trunks and stems was gone and in its place was a flat black layer of soot and the faint smell of sulfur.

I suspect it was Keith who struck the match that started the burn – leaned over in the wind, cupped his hand around the tiny little flame, and held it close to the tinder that would ignite all the debris.  He stood there (I know this without having seen it.) for a few minutes to make sure that the line of orange was moving steadily with the breeze and then left the fire to do its work.

It’s what you do in spring.  You ready the land for something new to grow by eliminating the last vestiges of the crop that was there before.  It doesn’t lessen the value of that previous crop, it just brings it to an end.  It just adds a punctuation mark.

I stared for a moment at the black line.  I thought I heard it say, “One cannot always depend on nature to signal the turn of seasons.  Sometimes one must mark the change oneself.  Sometimes one must decide and take action.  Sometimes one must light a match, start a fire, and whisper to oneself, ‘This is where it ends.’” 

Copyright 2014

Chaos and Comfort

The ice storm was upon us.  The rain had been falling since the night before and, in the cold cold air, the water had chosen not to drip from but cling to the branches and freeze.   The power lines were drooping like the fluttering eyelids of a baby fighting sleep.  It was time to get home.

But just in case there is no power when I get there, I thought, I should probably grab a bite to eat.  So it was that I was sitting at the window at Zaxby’s, debit card in hand, when the lights went out. With no way to take my money and nothing else to do with my blackened blue salad with light vinaigrette dressing, the manager handed it over with a resigned smile.  “I’ll come back and pay,” I promised.  

“No need,” he smiled.  “Just fill out a comment card the next time you come in.”

I carefully pulled out on to Fair Road, to which I refer as the Georgia Southern Autobahn, noticing immediately that the traffic light, like those at Zaxby’s, was out.  Cars coming from all four directions were inching slowly toward the center of the intersection trying to figure out who had the right-of-way, when it was safe to accelerate.  I quickly started counting in my mind the number of traffic lights between me and home.  I caught my breath when I thought of the one at 301South and Veterans Parkway.  We were on the verge of chaos.

The verge of chaos.  That narrow sliver of time during which one recognizes the impending loss of control and still resists it.  That place within oneself where the way things are supposed to be is still visible, but fading.  That physical sensation that masquerades as frustration, but is nothing more than fear.

A friend of mine had surgery over the holidays.  It forced her to cancel travel plans and miss seeing family.  When she got back to work she couldn’t find her rhythm.  A few days after the ice storm she wrote to me, “I can't seem to catch up ...  Is it me?  Is it life?  Everything feels so chaotic lately.”

I wrote back, “Is it just awful of me to say that it's a comfort to hear you use the word ‘chaotic’?”

I am uncomfortable with chaos.  As a small child I was dismayed to see a can of Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup shelved with the Chicken and Stars at the old Piggly Wiggly on South Main and wouldn’t leave the aisle until I’d made sure that all the varieties were in their proper orders.  I am unsettled by everything from an unmade bed or a crooked picture to loud arguments between people I love.  I am compelled to make the bed, to get out my level and straighten the picture, to mediate the disagreement. 

The past couple of months, punctuated by unusual weather events and too many funeral home visitations and a round of antibiotics, have felt like nothing less than one interminable fit of chaos.  Unmade beds and uneven pictures have floated at the periphery of my vision with nary a notice.  So, awful or not, it was, in fact, a comfort to know that my friend was living through something at least a little similar.

My fingers paused over the keyboard for a moment.  I took a deep breath, noticed the sunshine coming through the window.  “But, then again,” I typed, “I am reminded that in all the creation stories, chaos is what existed BEFORE ... before the word is spoken, before the light separates from the darkness, before life arises.  Perhaps there is hope in it.”

I wasn’t at all sure I believed it even as I hit “send.”

That night when I got home I noticed the hydrangea between the deck and the carport.  The hydrangea whose unpruned canes had condemned me every time I had walked outside since summer.  The hydrangea whose shape had gone from full to skeletal.  The hydrangea that, like everything else, had been coated with ice.

Sprouting from those ugly unpruned canes were buds.  Chartreuse green, sharp-tipped buds.  Living, hopeful buds.  Pushing through the darkness, dispelling the chaos with the promise of beauty yet to come. 

Southern Living says those buds will be blooms in late spring.  I’m not certain when that is, but I think I can hang on ‘til then.

Copyright 2014

Archery at the Seam

The lines on the sailboats in the boatyard keen in the wind, cats meowing mournfully at some imagined wrong. The tide is low, the water nearly flat.  In the not-too-distance a shrimp boat’s silhouette cuts the gray landscape with edges as sharp as a knife blade.  It is not exactly too cold for a long walk, but I am ill-prepared; the coat is warm enough, the shoes sturdy enough, but without gloves or a scarf, my hands, my face, my ears will be gnawed raw in minutes.

I walk toward the water, the movement unconscious as a long-rehearsed stage direction. I stop at the just-edge, the rim where foam and salt lick the sand, where it is neither wet or dry, where the waves sigh, give up, and move away in retreat.  

I am here because there are things – events and words and feelings conjured by both –  that, up to this moment, I have not taken the time to contemplate appropriately.  I have held them like a bow string, so long, so taut that my body trembles.   Here, at the seam of my world, the place where earth and sea are stitched together, I hope to be able to let them go.

“What does it mean?” I begin, speaking aloud without any self-consciousness.  “What does it mean?” I ask of God or anyone else who might, serendipitously or divinely, suddenly appear and have some thoughts on the matter.  “What does it mean?” and I throw into the winter wind all the facts that I hold, but can’t seem to put together into a reasonable hypothesis.

I pause and take a deep breath.  And another one.  And another one.  I hear the voice inside my head whisper, “There is a difference between the person who does not know how to love and the one who does, but chooses not to.”   

I gasp.   The whisper has released the bow string and the vibration fills me.

At my feet there is an oyster shell.  I pick it up, turn it over, am greeted by a tiny crab, no larger than a nickel. Nearly translucent, with just a hint of veiny blue showing up near his tiny claws, he clings to the edge of the shell with his swimming feet, staring and daring me.  I slide a fingernail between one of the little claws to see if he will grasp.  It is what we do with newborn humans, offer them a finger and watch them circle it with their own. 

I want this shell.  I want to take it with me as a memorial, a reminder of the moment when the fingers of my weary heart loosed the bowstring and let it go, the moment when, standing here –  at the place where nothing is unraveled, where everything is whole – everything I need to know became clear. 

But, of course, I can’t take it.  Someone has a prior claim.  Not necessarily better, just prior.  And in such matters respect must be paid to the one who got there first.  “I will not take your shell,” I tell the crab as I place it carefully back on the spot from which I’d drawn it.  I do not deem it necessary to point out that my greater power would have made it incredibly easy to do so.

My ears are beginning to burn.  The movement of my cheeks feels disconnected from the rest of my face.  It is time to go.  I pick up half a sand dollar, its broken edge as even as the perforation on a postage stamp.  It, too, is from this place.  It, too, is from this moment.   And no one else has a prior  claim.  This one can be mine.

Copyright 2014

Fields of Gold

Leaving Darien, up and over the bridge that minds the shrimp boats, I ease my foot off the accelerator and let gravity pull me down toward sea level. The marsh spreads out on either side, at once embracing the river and wooing the ocean. What had been, not many weeks earlier, a rolling lawn, an endless swath of greenest green, has gone gold. Wispy grain heads waving in the winter wind, it is now a field unto harvest.

I note to myself that, despite heartstrings that need the tuning fork of ocean song to set their pitch, I am a country girl and it is images of sowing and reaping that come most easily to mind. I also remind myself that it is said that the ability to use and recognize metaphor is what makes us uniquely human. I am glad to be human.

On Monday I notice that the fields around home are filling up with bales of hay, huge barrels pushed over on their sides. The whole world has gone gold. I notice and then I forget. On Thursday the telephone call comes. And the whole world goes the color of nothing. The light goes out, the prism breaks.

My friend has died. Died. I feel an explosion inside my chest. A real one. There is heat and pressure spreading from the place where my heart is cradled, where my friend has been cradled for 19 years. Words are coming out of my mouth. I hear them, but I don’t know who is saying them.

They, his family, want me to speak of him. They want me to stand up – on my own two feet, no doubt – and remember him. I say yes, even though I have no idea that I actually can. Later, when I am alone, I sit staring at the computer screen, the cursor flashing rhythmically, inviting me to begin. Where?

I glance around the room and my eyes fall on my faded and tattered copy of The Little Prince. Jim didn’t know The Little Prince when I met him, but it didn’t take long for me to share. And over the years most of our conversations included some reference to or quotation from that story. I put my thumbs to the page edges and the book falls open to the conversation between the fox and the little prince.

As I read the words I can almost quote, words I’ve been reading since I was 16 and discovered that truth isn’t necessarily factual, my breath begins to slow. My fingers begin to move over the keys. I can do this.

It is Sunday. I am standing up, on my own two feet. I open the book and I read.

“[I]f you tame me, then we shall need each other. To me, you will be unique in all the world. To you, I shall be unique in all the world …[I]f you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat …”

It is Tuesday. It is Wednesday. The world is white. Snow, infrequent and puzzling, makes an appearance and we are gawking and fumbling and behaving in unseemly ways as though she were a movie star showing up unexpectedly at a family reunion or tailgate party. I am embarrassed a little until I am reminded that in the white are all the other colors. Somewhere in there is gold. The gold of wheat fields.

It will be a while – not Thursday or Friday or even next week – but the color will return. Gold will reappear. The winter sunrise, the spring daffodils, the summer corn, the autumn leaves will bring me back the thought of my friend. And, having been tamed, I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.

Copyright 2014

You Say You Want A Revolution

Once a year I find myself thrown into the crucible of one the great debates of Protestantism.  Getting the Christmas tree down out of the attic is easy, but getting it back up is something like one of the labors of Hercules.  The steep stairs, the narrow opening, the weight and irregular shape of the tree itself, and the law of gravity create the laboratory in which I test the doctrine of eternal security.  When at long last both the tree and I are lying sprawled in our particular states of disarray and exhaustion on the attic floor and I have not lost my religion, the annual experiment is concluded and I can proclaim, in a voice weakened but not vanquished, that God does exist and he is gracious.

 This year, however, I decided that once the Christmas tree came down it was not going back up.  My days of testing both myself and God, at least in that particular way, were over.  The tree would, I asserted loudly and often, sit downstairs, its pieces in a pile, until I could obtain a storage shed.  Sandhill is not a large house and I knew that it would not take long before the presence of a bristly green heap of faux evergreen became too irritating to endure. Last week, after only four days of stepping over said bristly green heap in the dining room, I watched as a very large truck delivered a 10 x 12- foot prefabricated barn to Sandhill.  The gentleman driving the truck asked me where I’d like the barn deposited.  Having carefully scouted the location beforehand and having ascertained the spot of optimum levelness within reasonable distance of the back door, I walked briskly across the yard and, like Captain Kidd showing the pirates where to dig, declared, “There!”

He’d been gone about 15 minutes when I realized that I really would have preferred to have the doors of the barn facing the road rather than the driveway, a 90-degree difference in orientation.

I mentioned the changing of my mind to Daddy and, within a couple of days and not in the least to my surprise, he and Keith had a tractor hooked to the barn and were rotating it so that the double front doors with the big wooden x’s on them and the two little windows on either side of those doors could be seen from the road.  I wasn’t there to observe the operation, but Daddy says that it really wasn’t all that hard.  It was just a small turn.  And it made all the difference.

January is the month for resolutions, but, after seeing how significant that small turn was, it occurs to me that we might all be better served if we, like the little boy on the AT&T “It’s Not Complicated” commercial who got his words confused, made New Year’s revolutions instead.  What if, instead of resolving, that is re-solving, solving over and over and over again, we choose revolving?  You know, like the planets.  What if we finally get over ourselves and figure out that orbiting is something you do around the center of the universe and that the center ain’t us?

And what if we figure out that when you revolve, that is, when you turn, even slightly, it gives you an entirely different perspective?  Turn the corner.  Turn the page.  Turn the tide.  Turning turns things, inside out and upside down.

Turn around and the shadow in which I’ve been walking becomes invisible.  Turn loose and my hands are free to catch hold of something new.  Turn my attention away from the driveway that leads always to me and I can see the road that leads to everywhere else.  A small turn.  It will make all the difference.

Copyright 2014

For Want of a Fire

The wreath is still on the back door.  The jingle bells tied to its branches reflect just enough of the floodlights at the corner of the house to make tiny blue and green starbursts.  The ends of the big peacock-colored bow move only slightly in the night breeze.  Christmas is over and I really should have taken it down.

My arms are full.  I am struggling to find the key on the ring that holds too many.  Once found, I am trying to fit it into the keyhole without dropping my purse, my briefcase, the box with the leftover lunch pizza.  It slides in with some reluctance and I feel all my weight, physical and psychic, push against the door.  Just get me inside.  

I lean forward to let gravity pull the leather straps of purse and briefcase over my shoulder and down my arm to the floor.  As I do, I feel something brush past my face, sweep lightly across my eyelashes.  Too soft to have been the wreath or the wire-rimmed bow, too substantial to have been an errant curl.  I reach for the light switch.

On the smooth white floor lies a tiny sphere of dark feathers.  A baby bird.  I gasp, knowing immediately that the tiny thing has been either hiding or sleeping inside the wreath and that I have rousted him from his haven.  “Please!”  I entreat the creature, crazily trying to loose myself of my coat and find someplace to deposit the pizza box before figuring out how I will get the visitor outside again.  “Fly away!”

And he does.  He obediently and politely flies away.  Out into the December darkness.

I catch my breath and think, That was too easy.  It did not follow the pattern of my history with birds.  And I do have a history with birds.  Birds have made nests in my mailbox and my dryer vent; they have flown into and not been able to find their way out of my car and my house, the latter infesting my couch with a theretofore unknown insect, the bird mite, an unfortunate parting gift that cost me an exterminator’s visit. 

What I have learned about birds, lovely and melodious though they are, is that they can be troublesome.  Challenging.  Problematic. Gathering up the discarded burdens at my feet I am relieved that this bird, this singular member of the avian community, has deigned to leave me alone this night before New Year’s Eve, this evening when all that is left of Christmas is cardboard to be hauled to the recycling station and leftovers to be dumped into the garbage and remnants of ribbon to be swept from the corners of the living room.

But he has not left me alone.  He will not leave me alone.  I keep feeling the light touch of the feathers across my cheek.  I keep seeing his little body swell like a yeast roll rising in a warm kitchen, wings lifting him just high enough to get over the threshold.  

And now I am thinking of the legend of the Christmas robin, the bird in the stable on the night the Christ child was born.  I am thinking of how it is said that the wind blew hard and cold and the fire was about to go out when Mary began calling to the animals for help.  The ox was asleep, the donkey was lazy, the sheep with all its wool was warm enough without a fire.  Just as the fire was about to die, Mary heard the flapping of wings.  A robin, it is said, heard the young mother’s cries and flew to the stable to offer help.  He flapped his wings at the dying embers until the fire was rekindled. To make sure the fire stayed alive, the bird used his beak to gather some twigs for the fire which rose abruptly and burned his breast.  The fire did not go out that night and the breast of the robin remained red forever as a sign of his valor and selflessness.

I catch my breath again.  This time I let it go slowly.  My visitor has come in response to my call for help, the call that falls from every person who has ever woken up on December 26 tired or disappointed or just a little uncertain as to why she went to all the trouble or why he can’t maintain the feeling of joyfulness all year long.  The little bird has come to remind me that it is in giving that we receive, that it is in the presence of courage and sacrifice that love is born, and that the story will never end for want of a fire.

Copyright 2014

O, Come, All Ye Not Ready

Right about now, “How ya’ doin’?” becomes “You ready for Christmas?” and my voice catches in my throat because, let’s be honest, I never am.

The Christmas letter that has come to be expected could be written, reproduced, and mailed (It has been.).  The tree could be decorated within an inch of its artificial life (It is.).  The gifts could all be bought (Not quite.) and wrapped with tasteful paper and wired ribbon (I can only hope.).  The refrigerator and pantry could be filled to brimming with multiple units of cream cheese and condensed milk and pecans cracked and shelled by the hands of loving parents (Praise the Lord.) and I still would not be ready.

Ready means preparedness and wholeness and availability. Ready implies fitness and qualification like an Army Ranger or a Navy Seal.  Ready infers that I am somehow worthy to enter this holiest of seasons.  No amount of wired ribbon or condensed milk, no number of empty stocking contributions, no measure of time spent reading Guidepost devotions can do that.   I will ever stand at the edge of the stable wondering when one of the wise men is going to turn suddenly from his adoration of the baby and point me out as a fraud.

This is what I am thinking when some unsuspecting soul smiles at me in the Walmart check-out lane and asks, “You ready for Christmas?”

A few days ago, in the corner of a quiet coffee shop, at a table whose wooden top was scratched and watermarked, a friend and I bent our heads together in voices just above a whisper to talk about that, to confess what it feels like to not be ready for Christmas.  “The season got here so quickly,” she said.  “Thanksgiving was hardly over before the first Sunday in Advent appeared.” It has nothing to do with shopping or cooking or decorating, we agreed, but everything to do with stilling one’s brain and filtering out the noise long enough to consider what it is we are supposed to be celebrating.

That is the difficulty.  The stilling, the quieting, the letting go of the ill-considered notion that what I do, accomplish, carry out has some impact upon the coming of Christmas, the coming of the Christ child into the world, the coming of the Christ into me.

I have been watching the moon these last few nights, watching it swell into a consummate curve like a pregnant belly nine-months stretched.  I have watched it, wondering with each rise over the edge of the darkening landscape, when it will be the perfect circle. It is a slow process, this coming of the full moon.  It will not be hurried.  It will not be slowed.  It does not respond to my longing, my urging, my pressing.  

I think of my friends whose first baby, a girl, is due to arrive any day now.  They’d been told by the people who are supposed to know such things that she would be here before Christmas.  Those people had even suggested that they could make her come on a specific day, but consultation with baby Ella set them straight.  She, too, will not be hurried.  Nor will she be slowed.  She is not withholding her arrival while her family gets ready.  She knows that ready is what her family will become at the very moment they see her face, hear her cry, grasp her hand.

That is the answer.  Ready is not something we make ourselves.  Ready is something we become by virtue of that for which we long.  

The moon will wax full, the baby will be born, Christmas will come.

Copyright 2013

Bringing The Band

On the other side of the state, my mobile phone produced the bell chime that sounds like an elevator reaching its destination.  A friend had sent me a message that read, “Y'all might want to call in reinforcements, there's gonna be some property destroyed in the Boro tonight!”  I knew what it had to mean, but the reality was so improbable as to deserve the descriptions it would get in the coming hours: unprecedented, unbelievable, miraculous.

26 - 20.  Eagles over Gators.  David over Goliath.  The No Smoking sign in heaven turned off just long enough for one victory cigar.

Words began flowing out of The Swamp, words strung together into news stories and columns and blogs from the singular vocabulary and distinctive rhythm of sportswriters, words that, in any other context, would be trite and sentimental.  And I read as many of them as I could find.  After a while, because sportswriters are, first of all, good writers, it didn’t really matter that I had not watched or listened to the game myself.  

But I kept reading.  The Facebook posts and the comments on the Facebook posts and the comments on the comments on the Facebook posts.  It was all so much, I don’t know, fun.

And then sometime around Tuesday afternoon, I think, I came across a blog post on the website Gator Country which identifies itself as “the insider authority on Gator sports.”  Written by Nick de la Torre, the post offered five things that stood out about the football game.  Numbers one through four sounded familiar, simply recaps of all the other analyses I’d read.  Number five, though, caught my attention.  Number five was “Georgia Southern’s joy after winning.”  

De la Torre described how, after the clock expired, the team in blue and white stormed the field.  “A normal reaction,” he wrote, “for a team that just pulled off an upset.  That wasn’t the picture that stood out.  The team circled around their band – yes, Georgia Southern brought their band (something even Vanderbilt didn’t do)  – and they sang their alma mater.”

They brought the band.  A team that most of the world expected to lose, a team that was out-manned and out-moneyed, a team that would be disappointed, but not devastated to get on a bus and ride home having done its best but having lost.  That team brought its band.  They brought the trumpets that heralded them as heroes and the drums that beat out the cadence of history.  They brought music, that strange mixture of sounds that musters and rallies and holds together all manner of disparate souls.  They brought the band because, while winning was what they came to do, it wasn’t the only reason to be there.

That’s where I stopped reading.  That’s when it stopped being about just football and started being about life. About having dreams and pursuing them to the end.  About making commitments and never walking away. About always bringing the band.  No matter what. 

In 1910, after leaving the White House, Theodore Roosevelt delivered a speech at the Sorbonne that contained what has become arguably his most famous words.  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better,” he offered.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

If Theodore Roosevelt had been a football coach, I think he would have taken the band. To every game.  No matter how far away.  No matter how long the odds.   ‘Cause if you bring the band, there’s always a reason to sing.

Copyright 2013

Crossing Against The Light

In the navy blue of just dark, the headlights illuminate only a few feet in front of the car. The high beams give shadows to the rocks on the road directly in front of the tires in outlandish proportion to their size, but the hundred-foot pines on the other side of the ditch remain invisible.  Behind me the full moon is but a promise, not even a tease of her liquid silver light yet spilling over the horizon.

Just as I feel myself begin to lean into the bad curve, the arc of road where the beavers dam the creek every winter and the big aluminum culvert may or may not forestall the washing out of the road, a pair of yellow eyes appear at the lip where hard-packed dirt falls away to soft ditch.  The eyes are too low to be deer, too high to be possum or armadillo.  They have to be raccoon or fox and it is too late, too dark for a fox to be out.  Raccoon it must be.

I take my foot off the accelerator and feel the car slow as the lights pans the bend.  The raccoon is standing on his haunches, tiny paws drawn up to his chest as though in supplication.  He is young.   I can tell by his leanness and the fact that his mask isn’t very dark.  

The number of  raccoons, deer, possums, armadillos, foxes, and bobcats I have encountered on this dark stretch of road over the years is not one I can begin to compute, but I do know that every single one of them has behaved in exactly the same way: They have darted into the light.  This one will, too.

So I wait.

He twitches.  He jerks his head back and forth a couple of times.  He makes a quarter-turn toward the ditch and, just as I am about to believe that this raccoon, this one creature out of all the creatures, will behave in a manner contrary to instinct and move back into the darkness, he bolts out into the center of the road where the two yellow cones of light coming from the front of the car frame him like an escaping prisoner caught against the razor wire.  

Another infinitesimal hesitation and he is gone.  Into the blackness that is the ditch on the other side of the road, into the night where just moments before he had been moving safely and leisurely.

The idea that light is safety is a generally accepted axiom of life.   Most of what we fear is that which we cannot see.  With light comes vision, with light comes a banishing of fear.  And, yet, at least sometimes, as with the raccoon, the urge to rush into light – to know everything, to be blind to nothing – does little more than invite danger and expose vulnerability.

This is what I am thinking as I accelerate once more and head toward home.  It makes me shudder.  I am a light-seeker.  I navigate by looking for the sun to rise in the east and set in the west, by watching the stars.  Feeling my way in the dark is not my way.   

And now the raccoon is making me wonder: Is this the choice we must make?  Do we choose to remain safe and in the dark, stumbling around over roots and rocks, chairs and coffee tables, ill-fitting jobs and passionless relationships?  Or do we choose to become vulnerable and step in the light, exposed for all the world to see as small and fragile creatures, willing to challenge large and frightening beasts because life in the dark is not enough?

As I near home I notice that I can now make out the road yards and yards ahead, far beyond the reach of the headlights.  The moon, round and ripe, is clearing the horizon.  Through the brushy limbs of distant pines I see her clear face and feel her long slender fingers stroke my shoulder.  Perhaps the choice is not what I had thought.  Perhaps it is not light or dark.  Perhaps it is not a choice at all, but simply a learning that there is light within the darkness, a place where courage is respected, where fearlessness can be safe, where vulnerability is protected.

I go inside to bed and leave the blinds open.  The moonlight puddles on the floor.

Copyright 2013

What Be Here

Not long ago I was driving down a long flat stretch of highway listening on my iPod to an interview of Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States, he of such soul-ripping lines as “You will always be the bread and the knife, not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.” In the interview he kept saying things I wanted to remember, bits and pieces of sentences that I wanted to scratch out on tiny slips of paper and stuff into a phylactery and feel bouncing on my forehead as I walked through the day, phrases I wanted to tattoo on the underside of my eyelids so that I might fall asleep staring into their mystery and contemplating their magic.  Single words I wanted to turn into tropical fruit Life-Savers and dissolve on my tongue in all their artificial color sweetness.

I’ve been trying to cut down on writing while I drive, though, so instead of reaching for the pen and pad I keep in the console, I opened this relatively new app on my phone.  It’s called Evernote.  I heard about it from my preacher in a sermon he delivered back in the spring.  (My church is cool like that.  We talk about apps and stuff.)  With Evernote I can speak what I want to remember into the telephone and its amazing technology translates my voice into words and saves them in a computer file.   

So Billy Collins was saying that most writers talk about “writing what you know,” but that poets are different.  “We write what we hear,” he said.  It was a succinctly beautiful line.  I did not want to lose it.  I picked up the phone, tapped the icon to begin recording, and spoke slowly and loud enough to overcome the road noise.  “We write what we hear.”

I discovered later, when I got the opportunity to go back and review my dictation, that Evernote had some difficulty in understanding my South Georgia drawl.  “We write what we hear” had morphed into “we write what be here.”  I started laughing and then realized that, improper grammatical structure aside, there was equal truth in the scrambled version of the poet’s declaration.

The breath of a buck blowing hard in the blackness at the edge of the deck.  My own heart beating in rhythm to the pulse of one small star penetrating that same blackness.  A voice, long silenced, reciting words long remembered.  The breath, the heartbeat, the voice overlaid like tracks of music - brass over percussion over strings.  Those sounds, those distinct vibrations moving through the air as waves that get caught by the curve of my ear and pushed through narrow fissures of tissue to a brain that then declares, “Remember that other night when ...?” We write what we hear. 

But at the same time, in the same words, writing acknowledges the existence of “what be here” and, in so doing, makes it real to both writer and reader.  When words are stitched, strung, woven, or pasted together the invisible becomes visible, the intangible concrete, the ephemeral lasting.  It is why we excavate ruins for clay tablets and papyrus scrolls, present diplomas and proclamations, issue marriage licenses and birth certificates.   We need to make a record to make our existence real.

Billy Collins wasn’t speaking just for poets and Evernote wasn’t mistranscribing just for me.  With each thought and smile and sigh offered up into the world we are writing what we hear.  And writing what be here in this challenging, astonishing, mysterious world.

Copyright 2013

Micro, Macro and Penne Pasta

The usually mindless twenty–five minute commute to the office has required a little more attention the past few mornings.  Crews of men in hard hats and florescent-trimmed vests have been supervising the cutting down of some rather large pine trees along the apron of 301 South and a little farther down another group has been digging troughs for, I assume, the long line of pale aqua pipe pieces that have been littering the ditch like massive tubes of penne.   I suspect all of this is in preparation for the extension of utilities to property that borders the interstate. 

           

It’s probably about nine miles from the city limits of Statesboro to the interstate.  Nine miles is a long way to send water or electricity or the digital signals that enable us to buy merchandise with the swipe of a plastic card.  So now I’m thinking about how far we are willing to go for something we want, how far I’m willing to go for something I want.  How far is too far.

           

It is suggested that we reach for the stars and that a man’s – or a woman’s – reach should exceed his grasp.  The motto for the Olympic Games is “Citius, Altius, Fortius,” Latin for "Faster, Higher, Stronger," a declaration that the athlete and, therefore, mankind for whom the athlete is the idealized symbol, must be incessantly stretching and straining the limits of what is possible, never content with what is.

           

At the same time, though, we are admonished to live simply and modestly.  There is a pair of ruby slippers in the Smithsonian, our national repository of culture, that reminds us that the means to obtaining our hearts’ desires lie, not in some far away land, but within ourselves and that there is no place like home. 

           

Can the dichotomy of the two positions be reconciled?  Can both be true?

           

I confess to not remembering much from the two semesters of economics I took in college.  Adam Smith.  Opportunity cost.  Guns and butter.   What I do remember clearly, probably because it had immediate applicability to my life in answering the question of whether I should keep studying or get some sleep, is the concept of the point of diminishing return, the idea that at some specific moment, location, or cost the benefit of continuing in the same direction will be reduced.   The problem back then, with the study or sleep conundrum, and now is always determining where, exactly, is that point?

           

I suspect that the men in the suits who hired the men in the hard hats have reams of data, stacks of printouts with colorful pie charts and lots of decimal points, confirming that their point is somewhere beyond nine miles, that the cost of installing all that giant pasta under the edge of a four-lane highway will be less than the eventual benefit of having jobs and a tax base that far from town. 

           

I’m not that lucky.  I don’t have models and projections and pie charts available each time I’m trying to decide whether nine miles is the point at which I stop reaching and start grasping.  There is no way to label the pros and cons of the various choices as constants, coefficients, and variables and then solve for x. 

           

Most of the big decisions of my life have already been made.  Some of them turned out to be excellent choices, some not so good.   What they all have in common is this: Each one involved both reaching and grasping, not one or the other.  Using my eyes to look as far ahead as I possibly could and using my heart to hold on to everything I knew to be good and true.  Having vision and trusting experience.  Not exactly a reconciliation of the dichotomy.  Maybe something more like detente – an acceptance of difference and an easing of tensions followed by an acknowledgment of the equal possibility of both contentment and regret.

           

Perhaps that is the best one can hope for, along with the worst that one should expect, which is the reality that, continuing to reach or pausing to grasp, one can never ever ever be absolutely sure.

Copyright 2013

"A Route of Evanescence"

I crossed the room to say my goodbyes.  The eulogies had been poignant and funny. The burial site, under a moss-covered live oak, was beautiful.  The visit with the family was warm and uplifting.  It was time for me to leave them in a tight knot of each other.

“Don’t get up,” I offered as I reached down to take his hand.

“No, no,” he said, releasing me from a grip still strong.  With one hand on the edge of the table and the other on the back of his chair, he began pushing himself up.  “I want to tell you a story.”

A story.  

I had just been looking at a photo on the mantel, a black and white wedding portrait of him and his bride, handsome boy and beautiful girl.  They were together for sixty-three years.  Five children and fourteen grandchildren crowded the photo albums.  There were lots of stories, but he wanted to tell me only one.

He turned from the table, curved his arm around my back and moved the two of us away from the voices that rose from the table, overlapped each other, and drifted out the doors toward the ocean.  Propping his elbows on a high counter, he leaned forward and I leaned in, not wanting to miss a single word.

“Emily Dickinson wrote a poem about a hummingbird,” he began.  I nodded, more out of respect and encouragement than actual knowledge.  “It goes: ‘A route of evanescence/With a revolving wheel;/A resonance of emerald,/A rush of cochineal;/And every blossom on the bush/Adjusts its tumbled head, –/The mail from Tunis, probably,/An easy morning's ride.”

The words rolled out with the ease of the oft-recited.  I could imagine him standing in front of his classroom of undergraduates, Philistines all, incapable of grasping the power in the spare words.  He took a shallow breath.

“I put a hummingbird feeder outside Mary’s window and one day while the young woman who came in to help us,” he paused and raised his eyebrows questioningly.  I nodded, this time with actual knowledge, to let him know I was aware of the role the young woman.  He offered parenthetically, “She was a life-saver.  We couldn’t have done it without her,” before continuing, “one day while she was there I looked out the window and saw a hummingbird at the feeder.  I watched it for a moment and then said, ‘The mail from Tunis, probably, an easy morning’s ride.” He was staring into the distance now.  Watching his profile I could see the tears begin to rise in his eyes, hovering just behind the lashes, not falling.

He turned then and looked at me straight on.  Wherever he had been just a second before, he had returned to the present.  “The young woman, the one that helped us, she heard me and said, ‘What’d you say?’”  His cheeks rose up to meet his eyes and he chuckled.

I laughed.  I could just see the quizzical look on the nurse’s aide’s face, the lack of comprehension, the wondering of what a hummingbird had to do with the mail.  And I could also feel his sadness that, by then, the Mary who had understood his fondness for Emily Dickinson and who would have enjoyed the moment was lost, vanished somewhere inside the body that still required the care of this kind and tender woman.

I have seen love before.  Never before have I seen it more quietly, yet eloquently expressed.  

The leaves are turning and the days are getting shorter.  It will be months before the hummingbirds return, but I am certain that the first one I see will be bringing the mail from Tunis, a love letter from Mary to Hollis, sealed with a kiss.

Copyright 2013

Blazing Star and Baseball

It is still September.  Still September and I am startled on my Sunday afternoon walk by the tall skinny stalks of blazing star that have already appeared at the edges of the road.  Florescent purple spikes, they sway in the breeze over the round faces of asters, yellow as grocery store lemons.  It is not time for blazing star and, yet, here it is.

I wonder if it’s because of all the rain, all the daily, drenching rain that made the summer feel so unfamiliar.  I wonder if the tiny calendars inside the wildflowers have all been thrown off by the fact that they didn’t have to struggle for water, that their roots didn’t have to stretch very far, that it was all so easy.   

What I don’t have to wonder, what I know is that the blazing star, my favorite among the autumn wildflowers, will not last into late October this year.  I will not be cutting armloads of the stuff at Halloween and filling my ceramic pitcher with the spiky stems to sit on the kitchen table next to a pumpkin. 

We are a culture that reveres early.  We extol the early bird who gets the worm and the early riser who is healthier, wealthier, and wiser than ordinary folks.  We make ourselves feel more secure with early warning systems.  We convince ourselves that with early detection we can outsmart disease.  We have come to the belief, acknowledged or not, that we can supersede whatever other forces exist in the world – nature, divinity, time, other people – if only we get a big enough head start. 

If we idolize early, we despise late.  We almost always attach to it the modifier, “too,” as though the very idea of late is excessive and distasteful.   And, of course, we use it as a synonym for dead.  So, when the language relegates that which occurs after the expected or usual time (the definition of late) to the category of undesirable, impermissible, or impossible, what happens to those things which take their time, that meander, that do not hurry?  How do we honor virtues like patience, persistence, and endurance if getting the worm is all that matters?

It is still September.  But come October – October 1, to be exact – the Major League Baseball playoffs will start and Evan Gattis will be playing.  So will 249 other players, but Gattis is different.  He started the season as a non-roster invitee to the Atlanta Braves spring training and his story has become well-known since then:   25-years-old and out of baseball for four years.   In the eight years since high school graduation, while other young power hitters made their way through the college and/or the minor leagues, Gattis had spent 30 days in drug rehab and three months in a halfway house, and two years working as a ski-life operator, a janitor, and a golf-cart boy, among other things.  After making his way back to college, he played one full season and was drafted by the Braves.  

There were most assuredly people who knew Evan Gattis in the drug rehab or janitor days bemoaning the fact that he had lost his chance, squandered his talent, missed the worm.  Those people were not in the stands at Turner Field on April 3, when Gattis homered off Roy Halladay, one of the best pitchers in the league, in his Major League debut.  

The mother of one of my childhood friends once referred to her as a late bloomer.  I’d not heard the phrase before and didn’t understand at first what it meant, but there was something about it that resonated, something that I recognized in my eleven-year-old self.  

I graduated from high school at 17, was practicing law by the time I was 24, but it took until I was 55 to become an author, my version of making it to the big leagues.  There were plenty of times when I wondered if I’d missed the worm, but the roots kept stretching through dry soil and hard earth and eventually a blade of green broke the surface and finally a leaf appeared and then one day there was a flower.  

The blazing star bloomed early this year and it has already begun to fade, but yet to come is the gerardia and the beautyberry and the ironweed.  I can wait.  

Copyright 2013

Time Spirals On

The anniversary has come and gone again.  The anniversary of the day that became a hinge, when time bent into before and after.  The anniversary of another day about which the sentence always starts, “I remember exactly where I was.”  And I do.  We all do.

What I remember is being in Sky Valley with my mother, aunts, and cousins on a long-awaited girls’ trip.  What I remember is getting up and breathing cool mountain air, sitting on a second-floor porch with a view that rolled out in waves of all the different Crayola greens until it met the sky.  What I remember is all of us laughing and talking over each other as we piled into the mini-van to drive to Highlands and stopping at the pro shop for JJ to buy Gregg a shirt.  What I remember is JJ walking out with a bag in her hand and an inscrutable look on her face and words tumbling out so fast that it took all of us a couple of minutes to understand what she’d just seen on the television.

There are other hinges.  The day in November, 1963, when our second grade classroom work was interrupted by a sudden squawk from the brown intercom box at the corner of the blackboard and the crackly voice of an AM radio announcer said simply, “The President has been shot.”  The night in September, 1972, when my exuberant monopolization of the family television for the purpose of not missing one single stroke of Mark Spitz’s run at seven gold medals turned into a hollow-eyed vigil as Jim McKay, growing older by the moment in his yellow blazer, tolled the growing number of deaths in the massacre of athletes at the Munich Olympics.  The morning in January, 1986, when I drove into the carpool line at First Methodist Preschool to pick up Adam and his teacher could tell, because I was smiling and chattering away, that I’d not heard about the Challenger, how it had exploded into the bright blue Florida sky, how all those smiling, waving astronauts, including the teacher, were simply gone.

And other hinges.  The non-historical ones.  The ones that won’t be found on a Wikipedia timeline.  The ones that bent and crimped and creased time for no one but me.  The days that started out like every other day and took detours I would never have expected or imagined.

We learn about time in units and, therefore, tend to see it as linear.  One day follows another, one year comes after another.  We say things like, “You never get a second chance to make a first impression” and “You can’t unring the bell.” 

Hinges and our remembrances of them teach us that we aren’t just marching forward in a straight line.  We, as a species and as individuals, are actually spiraling, coming back again and again to the same points – the same people, places, and experiences, over and over, just on higher or lower levels – because there is still knowledge there to be gained. 

 It is why, despite the universal desire for peace, there is still war.  It is why, despite all we know about the things that cause illness and disease, there are still people bringing about their deaths by their own behavior.   But it is also why Diana Nyad kept trying until, at age 64 and after failing four times, she swam from Cuba to Key West. 

“We will never forget.”  The unofficial slogan of 9-11 remembrances.  There is, though, a belligerence, a harshness, a quarrelsomeness to the statement that makes me recoil.  I’d rather that we always remember.  I’d rather that we lean into the bends in time, the creases in our days, that we absorb them all so that, the next time around, we are full and strong and maybe, just maybe ready to learn.

Copyright 2013

Beauty and the Reach

One of them looked like the Jacob’s Ladder I used to make with a long loop of string laced in and out of the fingers of my two outstretched hands.  One of them could have been a hammock tatted for a hummingbird.  One, draped over the deck railing and onto the bannisters, was a net for flying fish and all of them, all of the dozens of spiderwebs that dangled and hung and cascaded from every corner and edge of the landscape, were constellations, thousands of clear water stars the size of pinheads drawing archers and hunters, dogs and bears, crowns and serpents across the morning sky.

I am often caught up short as I walk outside first thing in the morning.  While I have been encapsulated and cocooned inside my climate-controlled house, the world has been playing.  Animals have danced in the darkness and left behind a wild confusion of footprints.  Hard buds have softened and swollen and opened into flowers.  The sun has silently bleached away the darkness and twisted itself into a tie-dye scarf whipped loose and left to float over the clouds.

But I had never been witness to such a display as this one.  The entire backyard shimmered as the webs swayed almost imperceptibly.  Dew drops, strung like glass beads on filament, trembled in succession, the impish breeze turning them into dominoes.  I pulled my camera put of my pocketbook and began snapping photographs, the rhombuses and trapezoids and wildly scalene triangles in the web designs made obvious by the zoom lens.

Each time I lowered the camera from my face I saw another, more elaborate web beckoning me to come, come see.  And it is only because I heeded the beckoning that I walked up on the most exquisite, the most ethereal, the most splendid web of all.  It stretched all the way across the double French doors that lead on to the deck. It attached to the overhead door frame and the base of a chair sitting nearby.  My arms, curved out and up and over my head, could not contain it.  Unlike many of the others, it was round – not a compass-drawn circle, more like a hand-rolled pie crust – and its sections spread from the center like the spokes on a bicycle tire, delicate and shiny.  Sheltered by the eaves of the house, it was covered in a lighter coat of dew, making its beading sparkle more like opals than diamonds.

After recording its beauty as best I could with the camera, I stood in the quiet dampness for a few more moments, breathed deeply, and wondered what might have become of the creature that had spun such a web. Then I went to work.

That night, I watched the full moon rise from the study window.  The sky was less than clear, but I thought I could still get a good picture.  I could sit outside and wait for the clouds to drift off. 

The night noise was sucked into a cone of sound surrounding my ears as I opened the door.  The warm moist air fell on my arms like a towel and I stepped out on the deck. Only one step and I remembered the spider web. The exquisite, ethereal, splendid spider web whose delicate strands were now caught in my hair and my eyelashes, stuck to my cheeks and my chest, hanging in sticky strings from my arms and legs.

For a moment I forgot the moon.  I turned to face what was left of the transparent tapestry that had so enthralled me just a few hours earlier.  The tender tension was gone; long loops of gossamer hung limp in the darkness. The symmetry was destroyed, the delicate balance gone. “I’m so sorry,” I said over and over.  “I’m just so sorry.” I can’t be sure whether I was apologizing to the long-gone spider or to myself.

I brushed the silky threads from my face and, in my repentance, felt the truth of the moment settle over my head: That which is beautiful, which took such effort and love to produce, is easy to forget if one becomes preoccupied with searching for the next beautiful thing.  And perhaps it is in abandoning the exhausting search that beauty in all its forms finds its way to one’s door.

Patience with each.  Each in its own time.  Time for all.

Copyright 2013

The Road With No Name

The road did not always have a name.  It was just a road, barely wide enough for two cars to pass in some places, dusty in dry times, slippery in wet.  It connected two county-maintained highways, both of which had names but no road signs.  People didn’t often need directions out that way, but when they did they were given and received by landmark.

When we moved there in January, 1974, becoming the only human residents on that three-mile stretch, Daddy went to see Mr. Fred Darley about buying insurance for the house.  The insurance company wanted an address, a real address, something other than Route 1, Register.  “We need a name for that road,” Mr. Fred told Daddy.  “How about Bradley Road?”  

Daddy wasn’t about to be that presumptuous and quickly demurred.  He didn’t need a road named after himself.  “So let’s call it Settlement Road then,” Mr. Fred suggested and Settlement Road it became.

Our first mailbox was up at the paved road, two miles from the house.  Something about the postal service not extending its route for an initial period.  Eventually it got moved to the crossroads, only a mile away.  At some point the USPS decided we were there to stay and let us dig a hole and plant a box at the edge of the road right outside the front door.  The mailman leaned out his window, stuffed the bills and magazines and sale papers inside the mailbox, and then turned around in our driveway to head back to civilization.  It was a big day.

Our cars and trucks and tractors were pretty much the only traffic, except for the mailman, and the sound of an approaching vehicle always prompted Keith to the living room window to see who it was.  Mama complained that her drapes got dirty from all the pulling back and peaking.

That was a really long time ago.  The road is still dirt, dusty when dry and slippery when wet, but no one flinches at the sound of a pick-up or a four-wheeler.  We don’t recognize every vehicle and, sadly enough, the drivers of some of them don’t even wave when they pass by.  Just the other morning I had to wait at the end of my driveway (Wait at the end of my driveway?  What’s with that?) for two cars to pass, neither of which was driven by someone related to me, before I could pull out into the road.

Along with my surprise came another feeling, one that lasted less than a moment, but which I could describe only in ridiculously inappropriate terms: I felt trespassed, violated, even victimized.  When had this road, this path for vehicular traffic, become so, well, public? When had my little piece of creation become so open to the rest of the world?  How could I have missed it?

I did not pay a lot of attention to the surveyors who plotted out the tracts where other people now live.  I did not really notice the distant sounds of the well-drilling equipment or the backhoes.  I never really looked all that far past the bend where the palmetto scrubs begin growing.   

Change is never sudden, there is no single second in which the metamorphosis takes place, no twitching of Samantha Stephens’s nose to blame.  Not really.  It is just the realization of change that is sudden. And sudden is painful.

To avoid that pain, one must pay attention.  Be it weight gain or sunburn or the disintegration of a relationship, it is neglect and distraction and failure of concentration that are at fault.  To ward off the extra ten pounds, the burning red skin, the visceral ache of a broken heart, one must watch and listen, one must choose deliberately, one must do nothing by rote.  That, if we want to eliminate the regret and sadness and panic that accompany every occurrence of sudden, is the challenge.

I am more careful now at the end of my driveway.  I take my time in looking both ways up and down the road that did not always have a name.

Copyright 2013