Conversation in the rain

If it hadn’t been raining,

Charlie wouldn’t have been looking out from

under the awning of the rec building in South Park.

I walked up to him to compare forecasts

and he decided to share half of my tiny umbrella,

for several blocks –

not that it would do much good.

He’s a man a full generation older

and he steps lively in his thoughts.

And with our shoes quickly filling

as puddles filled sidewalks

and the surrounding lawns squished,

we walked with our ears occasionally close

half underneath my inadequate umbrella.

We hadn’t seen each other for awhile

and we each inquired about the other’s health

and then Charlie wanted to ask me about

a quote about existentialism

from a man named Krutch.

We paused under an awning at Footprints

so that he could consult a note from his shirt pocket.

Then we stepped out into the rain

and after some thought and more raindrops

I essentially had to agree:

Nature outside ourselves cannot be man’s source of meaning.

An existentialist must find meaning within.

Charlie said to me then that Wordsworth

was therefore refuted.

And after each of us jumped a couple of

gushing gutters he said

that then here was what Wordsworth had to say.

And he quoted me line after line

of a poem

for roughly a city block,

as we ducked under dripping tree branches

and splashed.

And when we turned at the light,

I had to admit then as well

that Wordsworth really wasn’t wrong.

Charlie laughed.

We were well soaked below our knees

and the rest of us was reasonably damp.

We parted at the corner of 17^th and New Hampshire,

each to change into drier clothes.

If it hadn’t been raining,

I wouldn’t have gotten wet.

Honk

I walked across the Kaw River Bridge. There was just a little water flowing over the dam – probably only hundreds of gallons a second. Several years ago, the wooden flashboards that held back the mill pond upstream of the Bowersock Hydropower Plant had been replaced with a series of massive concrete pylons and long inner tubes, the last of the four large tubes had nearly been fully inflated again after releasing the excess water from recent rains back along the Kaw River Watershed.

I paused to take a photo of the sun’s path on the water downstream. I walked on. The water under the bridge was almost the color of chocolate milk, the tops of the ripples catching the low morning sun’s rays and lightening the thin soil and water slurry.

The city around me always hums. A car would pass occasionally on the other side of the concrete barricade on the bridge at this early hour. Then I heard what sounded to me like a Canada Goose merely adding it’s honk into the growing cacophony of the day. But when I listened more closely, I thought I heard an echo. There was a honk, and then a half-beat later, one note lower, a fainter honk from the shallows below the dam.

I had by now spotted a goose standing on one of the pylons. Honking and pausing. And then a lower beat was missed. I had been mistaken. It was two geese speaking as only geese can speak. And as I stood a little longer, I heard more geese honking from near the low island of limestone boulders near the middle of the river. I couldn’t understand geese language. Perhaps humans are the ones just making noise so often. I hope I am at least partially mistaken. At least look at this bridge and the dam that humans have built. And the cars and jets that carry us from sea to shining sea. Who are we?

The earth was spinning a thousand miles an hour underneath this bridge suspending my feet above thin air and the waters of countless thunderstorms endlessly passing on the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I stepped along at my pace.

Some fishermen had lines in the water just below Bowersock North. One had hooked a fish surely contaminated with human-made chemicals. I paused again and then turned to walk home.

The geese were still calling to each other. Then the goose on the pylon stepped into the air and flapped easily down to the shallows.

Was anything important happening at the Kaw River Bridge this morning? Was I merely making up some sort of meaning out of earth and water and fire – and life. Life does seem to mean something - to more than just me.

I walked on. It was a cold north wind for May. Perhaps the sun would warm things up in a few hours.

And then I saw a large bird circling over the island. Looking closer, I saw the white head and tail feathers of a bald eagle. What was that eagle doing there? Besides the fact that humans stopped using the chemical that had been weakening the shells of eagle eggs, among other damage, saving the bald eagle from extinction,  I would have expected that eagle to be miles to the north by now. It flew with a few strokes of it broad wings across to a fully leafed out tree where eagles usually often perch in the winter on bare branches to fish in the outwash of Bowersock South.

Life is not simple. We share this planet with species that care as only they can care. And here we are.

I bought some strawberries at the farmers market and, after a few more blocks, shared a few with the baristas at the coffee shop and then, still later, with some neighbor girls getting ready for their soccer game in South Park. I probably should have bought another box. The sun was still climbing higher when I got home.

Earth Day

It was Earth Day. As far as I could tell, the universe did not seem to care one way or the other and I was at best an insignificant part of it all. Still, the sky had dawned a brilliant blue – the early chill quickly warming. I walked along Rhode Island Street towards the river to participate in an organized trash cleanup event. I supposed that on such a bright day that anything might be possible – but only in theory. Reality is only what actually is.

Half way to the river, I saw what looked to be an animal – maybe a cat – ahead about a half-a-block on the sidewalk. As I approached, the animal became instead a full grown opossum. I walked carefully nearly close enough to touch the opossum, but it paid no attention to me whatsoever. It was stepping out an extremely slow dance in a very small circle, circling ever inward around itself at the edge of the concrete – one dragging half step and then a long pause and then again a half step and a pause.

Eventually, I bent down on one knee. The opossum’s mouth gaped open near the ground – sharp teeth exposed. It looked like there was blood on its lips. Sounds of pain and struggle came from deep within, but only just audibly enough for me to hear.

The opossum seemed to me to be so completely alone – dying perhaps. Its life – whatever that life had been - was about to be over forever however beautiful the day. The opossum was apparently passing before me in some anguish.

In those few moments the universe became just me and the opossum – the air that we breathed into our lungs and the earth holding our bodies up was all. I said, out loud, ‘I’m sorry.’ I wondered what I could possibly mean by those words and then I repeated them again. I carefully reached out my arm and touched the back of the opossum with my hand. To me, that’s opossum’s fur felt so very unexpectedly soft.

And then I walked on.

This apparent ending was only the beginning of Earth Day, after all.

Bags of trash were picked up. There was a boat and people fishing in the low, yellow sunlight on the river. A white pelican flew high overhead flying south by southeast as I later reached the bridge. Mass Street took my walk due south to a coffee shop where I tried to make the baristas laugh with some silliness of mine. Suddenly, I so easily felt my own life within me.

Then I stepped back out to the sidewalk for the Earth Day parade. A young girl scout handed me a plastic packet of daisy seeds as she walked by.

Everywhere I looked, in sunshine and shade, I saw beautiful people on Earth Day. A fat young woman walking in cut off jean shorts that were riding unevenly up her heavy thighs. A thin man in a grey beard and glasses resting on his nose riding a bicycle with gigantic tires. A mother with her breasts freckling above the V of her dress walked by with her child.

It continued like that all day long. South Park filled with people and awnings. Kids scrunched their eyes shut, getting their faces airbrushed into tigers and zebras. Kids soaked themselves to the skin playing around the Roosevelt Fountain. Grownups talked about solar and recycling. Music played from the gazebo. Yoga in the grass.

And nearing home, a boy riding his first bicycle called out to me from under his bright blue helmet – except for the visor, it was just like the kind his dad wears when he rides his motor cycle. And then two neighbor girls stopped in at my house to see roughly ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond.

And by evening, with the trees to the west leafing out and sun dappling through, my wife and I ate papaya salad out on the patio.

And finally then, near midnight, I stepped outside once more just to look around. Over the neighbor’s roof, the yellow moon, waning, shone through a hazy sky. And still when I turned, I could see my moon shadow against the dark grass and a budding peony bush.

What more should I say? The sky had not been cloudy all day. But I imagined that the opossum had died on Earth Day.

In the neighborhood

I saw five girls at my garden pond yesterday morning. Well, three, if you didn’t count their moms. And there was one boy, sitting in the grass and clover. Well, two, if I counted again.

The moms reminded me of girls when they were catching tadpoles with their knees on the stones and their hands in the water. And the tadpoles were smaller than watermelon seeds with wriggling tails.

How does it all work? I’ve walked around the block many times and I’ve read books, but when little girls are picking arugula and spinach and lettuce leaves in my garden and big girls are picking up little girls and a little boy like watermelons with wriggling legs and the sun is shining like a dandelion in a bright blue sky and the soil is black from the day before’s wind and rain and the green grass is so soft under bare feet… How does it all happen?

There must have been boys puffing out their throats and singing in a warming spring night. And we all had tails once upon a time and we wriggle what’s left of them without even hardly trying. And when we can’t hardly tell the boys from the girls in the dark or among the stones on the edge of a pond, it is not much more than a jumble of toad’s legs and what was left of those wriggling tails. What has been happening for a long, long, lime time, continues to happen again and again.

One plus one equals two. That much I get. But where does the love come from? What about all the love?

And now back up again one step or two. Yesterday morning I saw ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond – if anyone had bothered to count. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls with a ten foot microscope. And on top of the dark clear water reflecting the bright blue sky, there were five girls more or less. And tadpoles in and out of a silvery pie pan. And wriggling tails in cupped hands.

And laughter.

Old man Dylan explained some of it something like this when he was younger: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

The times have been changing here and there if you look closely, but they’ve never really been simple. Only a few tadpoles will end up as toads on the lawn. And only some toads will sing and some girls carry watermelons. And the love doesn’t just happen. Especially the love. My hunch is that the love increases in a more complicated way than the wriggling.

But I really haven’t seen how most of that goes. But yesterday morning I saw five girls catching tadpoles and later that day a girl I first saw thirty years ago came home from work and we had salads with spinach and lettuce and arugula. Well, I didn’t have arugula. Some boys and girls just don’t like the taste of that sharp tasting green. And coffee never stunted my growth because I don’t drink it, either

And I didn’t forget to mention the goldfish, but they are not gold. They’re orange. But they do have wriggling tails. I saw little ones swimming that I’m sure I didn’t put into that little pond so there must be some boys and girls. And when I bring out my father’s old microscope, I can see more wriggling in that pond water that my naked eye never before imagined.

So I still know only a little about boys and girls, but what I really cannot explain very well is why my wife loves arugula and me as much as she does.

I sang to her on a warming spring night long ago, but we didn’t have tadpoles until a few years ago. We do have a black and white cat with a slow wriggling fuzzy tail. Her name is Rita. I think you love what you can name, but sometime you only remember the faces. And when the names are more than the peony buds starting to bloom ahead of mother’s day this year and then there’s a bunny sitting in the clover… I have to wonder.

And did I forget to mention that we have had more than one generation of girls in our neighborhood? And we still do. I have seen and heard their names and their faces around my garden pond. And sometime tadpoles wriggle in a silvery pie pan.