Hanging By a Thread

In the morning, when I return home from my walk up and down the Walhalla ravine, I water the outdoor plants. A week ago, as I was stretching the 100 foot garden hose to it’s full length to reach the bed of scarlet impatiens in the front yard, I spied a desiccated, shriveled brown leaf dangling in the air at eye level, suspended by one gossamer filament; just one long spit of spider silk attached to the tip of a bony, leafless branch. It twisted ever so slightly and slowly in the soft summer breezes. It is a phenomena I’ve seen before, a magician’s trick performed by Nature. Nothing miraculous but exotic enough to warrant a close inspection upon which I imagined that this particular leaf resembled a brown paper ghost on a stick. Having sufficiently marveled at this apparition for a few seconds, I proceeded to complete the ritual task at hand.

The next morning, it was still there. Despite its precarious existence in midair, it continued to defy gravity, refusing to become just another fallen leaf lying on the lawn. I was impressed that something, so fragile that it was vulnerable to a mere gust of wind or drop of rain, could survive to repeat its feat of prestidigitation for another show, another day. And the next day, it was still there. My son had come out to help me do the watering and I showed him the amazing floating leaf. He was amused but only took it as an opportunity to immediately try to destroy the illusion by bringing it crashing down. He cocked his head back, stretched his spine and waived his hands in the air but unlike a carefully constructed castle of sand or a tower of colorful wooden blocks that he delights in demolishing, this leaf was just out of his reach.

When I returned again to find the leaf still floating, I wondered if I should see it as a post-less sign on my path insisting that I take heed of some warning. It did remind me of a device I often use in my Valentines of suspending a symbolic red heart in a space near a real world object, like an ear or a brain or a stop light or a broken window, depicting the metaphorical connection I was making between passion and the subject of my accompanying poem. I didn’t need the dangling leaf to warn me about the fragile and ephemeral nature of my existence. Lately, every time I walked the ravine I focused on being aware of the moment I was in, worshiping the beauty of the sylvan cathedral with sky blue stained-glass windows and a choir of crickets I was moving through, comparing my invaluable freedom to that of an imprisoned criminal or my relative health to those afflicted with a disability, thinking of friends and family who had passed away and no longer had a consciousness of the sparkling stream of life that I continued to walk beside.

It had been about a week, the simple beautiful mystery of the weightless leaf had withstood a couple short summer showers beneath the green canopy of my laid back mulberry tree, so I finally decided it was worthy of being memorialized by photographing it with my cell phone. Later that afternoon, I was reading a book in my screened-in porch when I became aware of the rustling leaves in the front yard trees sounding like applause and then realizing that it was the percussion of another summer shower briefly moving through. After the rain stopped, I decided to check on my insubstantial friend and discovered that it had taken its final bow.

Recipe for a Perfect Summer Day

Start with a sunny day

Place in a blue sky

Mix in puffy white cumulus clouds

Heat at about 84 degrees

Then, into a private country setting with a shady lawn and a tree-lined pond, add yourself and your beautiful wife on a blanket

Peel the clothing

Stuff with a baguette, boursin cheese, tomatoes and fresh basil

Liberally coat with sunscreen and place on an inflatable island anchored in the pond.

Rotate positions to keep the flesh under the arched canopy while cooking so as not to burn or over heat.

Allow the inflatable island to slowly drift aimlessly around the pond propelled by soft summer breezes

Baste with a six pack of grapefruit shandy.

Serve in a quiet setting accompanied only by singing birds, fish splashing and leaves rustling.

Bon appetit.

I'm Thankful My Birthday is August 16

I’m thankful my birthday is August 16. I just finished my annual birthday bike trip to and from Antrim Park and it was another beautiful sunny day. I don’t remember a birthday of  mine that it wasn’t like this. I’m sure that over the past 63 years there has been rain on my birthday but the middle of August in central Ohio is pretty dependably hot and sunny.

My mom told me I was a ten month baby so I was obviously holding out for this date. Since I was her first it probably just seemed to her like a long hot summer that would never end but I enjoy thinking I was in no hurry. Its a day to just lay back and savor the flavor of the end of summer.

Numerologically speaking I love the fact that 8, 16 and 52 are all multiples of 4, my number. And of course, it is the day Elvis died which means since 1977 there has usually been something going on involving good music if nothing else than listening to the King.

Yes, my birthday is usually a halcyon day that I enjoy spending with Mother Nature including a dip in a rural pond which I’m on my way to do now. It’s good for a morning bike ride to a quiet place to contemplate the passing years of my life as the sun, the blue skies and the billowy clouds reflect on the water of the quarry. As I glided fast down Walhalla Ravine, I sat upright on the bike and held my arms out in the rushing air trying to embrace the warm love and happiness that surrounds me in every way, right now, today, my birthday.

I'm Thankful For Acorns

I’m thankful for acorns that fall on the road where I can smash them with the heel of my shoe. I love the sound of the cracking and the feel of the crunch that ever so slightly vibrates into my foot. It requires careful calibration of the length of my steps during the approach in order to land the heel directly on top of the nut and apply the full weight of my body thereby achieving maximum explosive effect.

It is something like the pleasure I get from popping bubble wrap but not quite. There is something more deeply satisfying about this act of destruction. Breaking something could be a way to relieve stress or experience a joyful sense of power that probably goes back to childhood. On our recent trip to the beach, my 4 year old son wasn’t as interested in building sand castles as he was destroying them. But I wonder if stepping on acorns doesn’t touch a particular core memory of mine.

I don’t have many memories, core or otherwise, of my early childhood but this is one that has stuck with me if only as one of the few fables of my youth that I have repeated to myself over the years. It was not a pleasant memory. Simply told, I accidentally stepped on what was either a water bug or a cockroach and it must have been a good-sized one because it created an audible crunch. It was one of those sounds that imprinted itself on my soul like the first time I heard an electric guitar live but, unlike the pure spine-tingling ecstasy of the electric guitar, the squashing of the bug was a disgusting wound to my psyche.

If crunching acorns with my shoe is something I enjoy doing, in part, because it echoes a childhood memory, am I cracking open a wormhole to my youth or am I embracing the wound and fondling the scab?

Slipping Away

Lolo, our new kitten, came to us when she was just a couple weeks old, having been rescued from the mulch pile at Lowe’s by my wife who was working there. Lolo was heartbreakingly tiny then and had to be fed with a miniature baby bottle which she attacked with amazing ferocity bordering on insanity. I would have to straightjacket her legs with one hand while forcing the bottle into her mouth with the other. Our persistence prevailed and she grew like a weed. The cute little ball of fur that had previously preferred to sleep in the crook of my neck and shoulder now bounded though the house like a small weightless cheetah, flashing from room to room, skittering across the floors, leaping on and bouncing off the furniture, flying up drapes, dresses and pant legs. She is fast, determined and relentless in her pursuit of human flesh to capture and gnaw on. It is an amazing sensation to walk across the floor in sandals and feel her sharp biting and scratching seamlessly alternate step by step, back and forth from one ankle to the other as if you are walking through a quicksand of teeth and claws.

Our cats have always lived the indoor, outdoor life style and I made the mistake of letting this feline cub get a taste of the suburban jungle a little too soon which probably resulted in her acquiring a case of fleas. Even supervised visitation with Mother Nature is now forbidden until she can get spayed. However, she remains undeterred in her quest for adventure al fresco. She sees her big brother exercise his freedom of movement and follows him right up to the door before being forcibly detained. When we open our front door from the outside, it is like triggering the lid on a jack-in-the-box. She has obviously learned the embarrassing sound of our SUV’s rumbling muffler allowing her to lie in wait and spring out into the porch at the first crack of light. It is hard to maintain constant vigilance for an unrepentant, recidivist escape artist during our normally unconscious habit of exercising ingress and egress.

Inevitably, I let my guard down and release the Kraken. Usually, her escape is short-lived as I bend down to confront her under the chaise lounge, grasp the closest portion of furry anatomy and gather her up in my arms, apologetically assuring her of my love while scratching her under the chin to soothe the savage beast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when she finally did successfully elude immediate and easy recapture, it would be under cover of darkness. I came in from lounging on the porch one evening for just a moment to retrieve a book and my reading glasses. When I returned I realized I had thoughtlessly left the door to the porch open. After a cursory search of the house determined that the prisoner was missing, I grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the dark world of unlimited possibilities that must have stretched out before her.

I was aware of every second ticking by as I fell through the trap door of fear and self-loathing. I’ve been down there before. My first son eluded my supervision when he was three and there were a few minutes of sheer terror and imagination run amok before I found him tagging along with our golden retriever as they blithely explored the neighborhood. Obviously, searching for a cat wasn’t as terrifying an experience but it does play the same accompaniment of regret and self-criticism to the mental melody of the search protocol. In between my observations of the way the street lamp lit the hilly contours of the neighborhood lawns with an empty yellow-green smoothness and the way my flashlight would cause bush leaves to project shadows moving in reverse toward me, momentarily looking like my dark little escapee, I thought about how I had let so much in my life slip away. Girlfriends, my mother, my first son, my career. I had lived for the moment and lost the strength of memory. I just never had a strong grip on the steering wheel of my life whether through carelessness, laziness or just reveling in my imagination.  When your head is in the clouds, the world slips through your fingers.

After having circled the house for the third time, I decided to take a closer look at the area underneath the van in the driveway where I had shined the flashlight from a standing position earlier. That extra effort to get down on my knees yielded the result I had been searching for.

Crying

Last Mothers Day, I once again found myself looking for inspiration to use in creating Mom’s card. She lived alone and other than exercising at the spa in the morning, Mom filled most of her days watching a lot of television. She had switched from having CNN on all day to watching the Turner Classics Network. Recently, she had been effusive about what a wonderful movie “A Streetcar Named Desire” was. When she talked about it, there was a smile on her face and twinkle in her eye. I thought maybe there was something there I could use to make the card because watching that movie had really touched her.

Naturally, the first thing I thought of was the iconic scene where Marlon Brando, in a torn shirt, cries out “Stella” from the street and pretty quickly, I morphed “Stella” into “Momma”. In trying to justify that segue, it occurred to me that Stanley was crying out to his wife in the apartment above much in the same way a child might cry out to his mother if they were separated and he needed her love. Using that tenuous connection and my limited artistic abilities, I created a pretty scary looking Marlon Brando crying out for his Momma in a big word balloon. I added a poem for the inside of the card to help explain the thought behind the image that I worried looked a little strange for a Mothers Day card.

Later that June, Mom died in her sleep. Despite the fact that she was 90 years old, her death was shockingly unexpected. Up until the last time she laid her head on her pillow, Mom was apparently healthy, happy, active and mentally sharp. It was hard to believe that anything had gotten the better of her because she was so strong. I often told her that I thought she would outlive me. When the family gathered at her home that day, we said the good-byes she could no longer hear and kissed the face that could no longer respond with her sweet smile. I had brief fits of crying and shed a few tears but mostly I remember just shaking my head in disbelief.

As with my father and my son before him, it fell on me to prepare and deliver the eulogy at the burial of Mom’s ashes. I didn’t write about how her death effected me or anecdotes about experiences we shared. I focused on her, how she lived, what she accomplished and what was important to her. The morning of the ceremony I rehearsed it a few times on my porch hoping that it would help me develop the strength or emotional callous I needed to get through it without breaking down and losing the ability to speak. I needed that because I knew I was a crier.

I’ve always considered myself a stoic personality. I know how to take things in stride and  keep my emotional equilibrium. When it comes to the death of a loved one, I focus on being thankful for the time we shared. I don’t have much use for dwelling on the negative. Wallowing in grief and regret for what might have been don’t seem to be “productive”. It doesn’t help me get to the happiness I’m always trying to reach. Mom’s favorite story about me was how, at a very young age, I came up to her and complained “I’m not having any fun.” It was a simple story but it seemed to encapsulate the search for happiness that drove me throughout my life.

On the other hand, I know how easily I can cry. For instance, it happens with regularity when I watch CBS Sunday Morning whether it is a sad story or, more often, just something beautiful. Not beautiful in the visual sense, something that is aesthetically pleasing, but the beauty of the human spirit that resonates with my beliefs and values, something that touches my heart by way of my brain. It could be a speech that stirs my pride in my country or seeing the sacrifice someone put in to help other people. It could be the lyric of a song that uncovers a salient truth or the music that takes me back to the purity and freshness with which I experienced it in my youth. Just now, I welled up at the precision solemnity of uniformed South Carolina State Troopers taking down the Confederate battle flag.

The ceremony was at the grave site with a small group of family and friends. Despite the rehearsals, I had a tough time getting through the eulogy. My halting voice would occasionally crack into the high-pitched range that forecasts a downpour. At times, I had to stop and gather myself with a deep, cleansing breath. There were tears but no storm. After struggling to make it to the finish, I felt like much of it had been unintelligible but my family assured me they’d heard it all. It was a beautiful, mild summer day and the sunshine seemed to dry me out. I walked around to hug my brothers and sisters and felt composed again.

Then the attendant directed us to the polished wooden cube that held Mom’s ashes and suggested we might want to touch it, thereby leaving something of ourselves with it, before burial. I hadn’t envisioned this part of the ceremony but, feeling a bit dazed, I followed the line to say a final good bye. When I got there, an involuntary impulse directed me to fall to my knees. My mind was no longer in control of my actions. My body bent over and my head and hands fell on the box. The dam inside me broke and the tears fell in a torrent. I was flooded with a grief I had never experienced before and did not know I was capable of feeling. An anguished cry of “Momma” burst from my throat.

My Habit

I call it my ‘retirement beard”. As the days of court appearances dwindled down to a trickle, mornings without the shaving ritual accumulated, allowing a force of wispy soldiers to occupy the pristine beaches of my face. I’ve dabbled in a few tonsorial adventures in my life. The most memorable were the copper-red muttonchops that I allowed to grow wild and referred to as my ‘lobster claws’ because one was longer than the other. I was young and I believe the look I was going for was weird or just plain rebellious repulsive. As I aged, an occasional extended vacation period presented the opportunity to dispense with the daily shave and flirt with the stranger in the mirror. But these dalliances never lasted long for one basic reason. I couldn’t stop playing with it.

Now, I am not someone who is prone to any sort of obsessive compulsive behavior or addictions. I never developed cigarette smoking or coffee drinking habits in large part because I was too cheap to be anchored to any financially draining pastimes. Fortunately drugs like caffeine and nicotine didn’t do enough for me to justify the expenditure when compared to the drugs and alcohol I did enjoy. Even those worthwhile drugs and drink were relegated to functions of social events, or what I generally referred to as “partying”. Other than elevating my consciousness to watch an occasional ballgame on television, I’ve never been one to sit around by myself and drink or get high. I don’t hang out at bars to drink unless there is some live music I’ve gone there to hear. My self-analysis has always been a diagnosis of a non-addictive personality. Playing with my facial hair appears to be my Achilles heel.

If I’m not using my fingers to tug, twist or twirl it, I’m using my lips to mash it or to be brushed by it. Consequently, I often look like either a dastardly villain plotting someone’s cruel demise or an excited old toothless prospector. It’s one thing to indulge this pleasure in my private moments but when I’m with other people its embarrassing to constantly succumb to this telling lack of self-control. On the other hand, I’ve known women whose hair-fingering obsessions wove an hypnotic spell on me that enhanced their attractiveness. Maybe their habit says more about their weaknesses than I may suspect but I just don’t think there is an equivalency of acceptability between playing with the hair growing from one’s scalp and the crop growing on one’s face.

Unlike most addictive substances or amusements, my facial hair is always there in perfect unlimited propinquity to my lips and hands. Indulging my habit costs nothing, usage doesn’t result in any material depletion and it’s harmless except for the damage to one’s social esteem, much like nose picking or chewing the inside of the cheek. Its pleasures are manifold. The face is one of the most sensuous organs and erogenous zones on the human dermal landscape and when combined with the sensitivity of the fingertips, its hard to resist bringing them together. Twirling a tuft of beard between the forefinger and thumb slaps it against the shaved cheek with the soft propulsion of the pad of a kitten’s playful paw. It pinpricks the skin with the slightest shock, like that of one electron. Plucking short strands of mustache, I bend and release them so that they bristle against the top of my upper lip. The sides of two fingers pull a row of beard, twist it like a curling iron and sculpt it into a bouncy ringlet to be pinched and preened. All these fine motor calisthenics are done repeatedly, pulling and pricking the skin with just the slightest amount of stimulation, relieving stress, anchoring me to the corporeal and allowing my imagination to roam.

An addiction is a means of filling a hole with something other than what’s missing. What subconscious need compels me to engage in such constant self-fiddlement? Am I merely seeking physical pleasure and stimulation or is it just another temporarily satisfying but ultimately futile attempt to find the connection between my mind and my body that I’ve been searching for since I was a little boy coming home with a stolen Playboy?

Resumption

After a winter suspension
    my morning walks resume
    and the ravine is just waking up

Tree limbs are still just black webs against the sky
Broken and sawed off trunks are scattered like dinosaur bones

Newborn bush petals float in pale green and yellow clouds
    of mist across the slopes

Bleached brown survivors who refused to fall
    hang like abandoned laundry on branches
    bravely standing out until they are overwhelmed
    by the coming Spring clothing

Discrete spiked explosions of green
    shoot through the blanket of dead leaves

Recent rains have the creek
    loudly rushing over shale steps
    falling into pools of bubbly froth

A lone emerald head white collar duck
    sits in the swamp

Waiting at the end of my walk
    is an orphaned kitten
    I will begin to love