Lullaby

She snored like a bullfrog.

He loved bullfrogs.

Of course he had never gotten over the way that they plopped into the water in the dark just before you came upon them lolling in the moonlit grass. And he had never seen her at all until it was too late and she splashed him silly.

That was only an expression.

Of course the way she looked at him with one eye, the other drifting off somewhere else, or maybe that wayward eye was searching for another way into his beating heart.

You could have called the expression on her face a smile if you wanted to.

Then one night he saw her sleeping, truly for the first time, and it turned out to be the last good night of sleep that he ever got.

The baby slipped out like a goldfish through two fingers and wailed into the night. And then she slept like an angel and he could only gaze in wonder.

So they called the baby, Gabriella.

They could only hope.

Her grandfather drank –

Icewater.

Cairn 2016

I understand that humans have built cairns to mark the way or as a way to remember something for a long time.

On the Friday after the Tuesday when our country had elected a supremely unqualified man to be President, I had tried not to stumble on my way down to a rocky point near the Kaw River. A couple of years ago, there had been an inukshuk at the edge of the river there below the North Unit of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Power Plant when a good man – these judgments are my opinions, of course – and I had been walking together. I remembered – and I wanted to remember - the good man. I wanted to get the other man out of my mind.

There are of course consequential actions. But consequential for whom? The future appears to be much more uncertain if you are an immigrant or a Muslim in this country, or if you’re gay or a poor single mother – among other people. Many of those folks have been having a harder time living their lives than I have for quite a while. That should not be forgotten.

It’s simply true that one person makes a difference in other people’s lives – sometimes. I don’t wish to try to paint a silver lining on anything here or to digress too far from the where I was when I started these thoughts near the river a few days ago.

But consider the ancient philosopher, Diogenes of Sinope, as our reference point. He was a Greek who was born and had lived and died around 400 BC. He came to believe that virtue was revealed in actions and not theoretical ideas. He possibly looked somewhat like the man I see now and then when I am walking – sometimes sleeping on a bench up along the levee. That man looks homeless to me. He’s short and a little heavy – not very clean. His light-colored hair is a dirty mess, but cleanliness is likely not his primary concern. It was said that Diogenes often slept in a large, empty ceramic jar of the kind that once contained olive oil or grain. Diogenes was the man who supposedly went around the marketplace with a lighted lantern in broad daylight looking for an honest man. It’s the kind of thing people might remember, I suppose.

At about noon on Friday, I wanted to get the swirl of consequences out of my head. There will be time to consider the consequences of one unvirtuous man in a powerful office or the ongoing neglect of other men. Instead, I built a cairn.

Let’s be clear. It took me almost ten minutes of my time. I had to select and pick up rocks that were scattered at my feet with my bare hands. I took some small care to place them and balance them. It became a short stack of stones by the river. A cairn.

And philosophy – at least as far back as Diogenes - is just a questing for meaning. I use words, but it is the meaning that matters – if something is going to matter at all.

So in my mind, it was the absence of an inukshuk that reminded me of a good man and another day some years ago. The present was a beautiful day on a Friday along the Kaw River. Water sparkled as sunlight caught the edges of ripples as the muddy Kaw water flowed over the mud and rocks of the river bed. Pigeons sometimes flew off from their perch on a cable over the dam and they would swoop and swirl, turning in nearly perfect synchronicity. Individual birds flying as a flock, their instincts marking memories in their fleeting patterns in the air. And when they all turn on a wing together, the sunlight catches on an edge and flashes a signal at me.

Have I gone too far? I did not mean to say that the river or the rocks or the pigeons or even the sun had any intent to tell me anything at all. But might I still derive some meaning out of thin air?

I left the cairn behind me. I have a device and so I had taken some photos. I headed for the library to help with the New York Elementary School Chess Club. They were to meet at the there this time because there was no school this Friday. A man, who is a little older than me, has a passion for chess and for kids. I would say that he is a good man.

Now I won’t go on and make too much of this good people thing with a lengthy further listing and definitions of people I know. I have encountered many good men and women – and good kids – along my way. But good people should be remembered amidst the swirl of bad news.

Later that Friday, I ate well at the Basil Leaf Café with my good wife in the evening. We have a good roof, running hot and cold water. It comes from the Kaw and is drinkable, thanks, in some part, to a government of the people. We have electricity, clothes and appliances and luxuries that Diogenes could never have imagined. I slept that night in a comfortable bed.

And still we have our fears.

I woke up on Saturday and walked to meet the sunrise at the river. There was frost on the grass. The air was crisp, but I was warm and well bundled. Diogenes – or someone who looked a lot like he might have looked – was sitting once again on the bench in the still morning air overlooking the river and the rising sun.

I walked passed him and down to the point of rocks where I had built the cairn. I had to watch my step. A large tangled raft of drift logs had jammed months ago in high water against the large limestone boulders of the levee. A rough and partial gravel path went down. Loose gravel and larger rocks sometimes turned under the weight of my foot.

A few stones near the top of the cairn had fallen – maybe a dozen or so. Maybe I hadn’t balanced them well. Maybe a pigeon had tried to land on the top stone. Maybe the earth had shivered.

I rebuilt the cairn. Not the same. No, the cairn was not quite the same as I had constructed it the day before. But perfection was not the point. Permanence is not the point. Remembering is the point.

My friend from some time before is a geographer. He teaches in Wisconsin. Married. Has a son. In the map that is in my mind, I supposed that I could call this place Inukshuk Point. Or Pigeon Point. Or even Diogenes Point. I could name the cairn after my friend, if I wanted too. But the cairn won’t be standing there long enough to hold the name – except in my mind. And then there will just be scattered rocks. But there will be time to remember.

Although even that rocky point just downstream of the dam has already changed significantly in my memory. That is, the river – sometimes moving with great force – had pushed and pulled the mud and the rocks into different places.

You have to give those Greek philosophers some credit. Heraclitus said it well when he said that no one steps into the same river twice. Of course, I think that there’s a small joke there. It’s on us. Not even I am the same man who built a cairn on Friday and then came back and rebuilt it on Saturday at day break. I never even stepped into the river.

It was an incredible morning. Hardly different from other incredible mornings. Me, being there, in that place is one difference, I suppose. I breathed in the cold clear air. The cold air meeting the warmer surface of the river pulled up tendrils of mist. The spirits of the Kaw made their own swirling rituals and recollections, the sun catching the edges of vapors as they turned, rising.

I walked along the rocky edge of the Kaw. Watching my step. Looking out over the water and up as the sunlight caught the edges of leaves not yet fallen. The sky was reflected in the river. A large black bird flew out of the mists towards me, spread her wings, catching air, and settled on a low island of rocks out in the middle of the flowing, ever changing river. It was all the same and not the same. Some memories must go back millions of years in the forgotten channels of my mind.

Seagulls cried. Some flying down river to the east, some flying up river to the west. Some flew north and some, south. And some circled, their white wings catching the morning sun, over the outwash of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Plant on the far bank.

I turned and made my way up the boulders of the levee. One careful step at a time. Part of the way up towards the top, I picked up a smooth pole. It must have drifted in from somewhere upstream. Sometime ago. This time, I used it to help my balance. And when I had nearly reached the top and didn’t need it anymore, I jammed one end of the stick into a hole between the large and irregular rocks. The other end, by accident and necessity, pointed towards the sky.

Sunday, late in the afternoon, I came back down to that rocky point. The river water whispered and burbled around mossy boulders. My cairn was still standing – just the same – although the light was different. And I could see that someone else had been there. They had built another cairn alongside mine. If you used your imagination, you could see a rocky half-moon rising out of solid rock.

I took some more pictures. And then I turned and headed back to my home. The man with the familiar scruffy face was sitting on the bench overlooking the river. On the bridge, I came upon two girls, one tall and slender with blondish hair, the other short, with red hair. Both had their hair tied back in pony tails. They were leaning up against the railing looking out towards were the river took a bend and continued on to the horizon – and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. They turned their heads to glance at me and I saw the late afternoon sunlight catch the edges of their eyes. And then they looked down at the muddy sunlit surface of the Kaw River.

I imagined that if they looked carefully, they could see the shadow of a man walking along the shadow of a bridge on a November Sunday afternoon. And then they looked out with their whole lives ahead of them – perhaps, one day to look back on and remember.

Link to: Inukshuk by the Kaw - Dec. 2014

Count 'em and weep

It was too warm for November. The sun was shining brightly. The sky was reflected in the river – sky blue. A pale half moon was rising over the horizon.

As I crossed the Kaw River Bridge, I was feeling very lucky.

And that’s when I saw the geese.

They were all lined up, one by one, on top of the Bowersock Dam. Now if you’ve been watching the river – and I even watched the Bowersock folk building that dam – and you understand that the river is variable – it will make some sense to you that the Bowersock dam is topped with a series of black rubber inner tubes each about forty or fifty feet long and 6 feet or so in diameter when they are inflated so that they will hold the river back and keep the mill pond at a certain level. Which they were. Tubes inflated.

But it seemed quite odd to me to see the geese all lined up along the top of one of those inflated black rubber inner tubes in the late afternoon sunlight. And then in occurred to me that I could play blackjack with the geese.

I started counting. One goose, two goose,  three goose, four goose … there was some crap on the black rubber inner tube … five goose, six goose, seven goose, eight goose … cars drove over the bridge, their emissions unseen … nine goose, ten goose, eleven goose, twelve goose … an ambulance screamed past me on the bridge … thirteen goose, fourteen goose, fifteen goose, sixteen goose … a firetruck followed, sirens wailing and lights flashing as if it were headed to an emergency or something … seventeen goose, eighteen goose, nineteen goose, twenty goose.

I should have stayed right there. There was another goose swimming in the mill pond just this side of the dam and several more not that far away.

And the then the swimming goose honked up at me on the bridge.

“What are you looking at?”

I was stunned. I had just been idling my life away, playing a little blackjack, counting geese on the Bowersock Dam. But I hadn’t counted on this.

“Who wants to know?” I stammered back. I had insufficient wit for a better rejoinder.

“The name’s ‘Black Jack.’ I’m from Canada.” He paused, looking around. “Sure is warm for this time of year.”

“Yeah,” I managed.

“Don’t you know about the game?”

“What game?” I hesitated.

“The climate game, fool,’ Black Jack honked. He wasn’t apparently trying very hard to be nice.

“Uh, the climate’s not a game, Mr. Jack,” I said.

“The way you humans are playing the climate, it is, fool,” Black Jack answered. “You’re such gamblers – and bad ones at that. One emission over the number and you lose.”

“What’s the number?” I asked.

“No one knows for sure,” he said, “That’s why you’re a fool for thinking you can careen right up to the brink of disaster and then expect to stop just in time.”

“Well, it’s not just me,” I said.

“Right. You drive a car. You have electricity. You get your strawberries shipped in from Chile or someplace. And don’t try to tell me that your cow’s farts don’t stink. Fool.”

“But I’m just one person,” I said.

“Right, and when enough of you ‘one persons’ decide to get their shit together, you can send a human all the way to that moon over there – and back safely. Black Jack honked derisively. “Fool. What’s the point of having a government at all if you don’t use it for important things. Get together.”

“But it’s not that simple,” I said.

“Who said anything about simple,” Black Jack said. “We geese fly south for the winter, back north to have and raise our families. All on our own power. And not one goose at a time. But it’s no walk in the park, let me tell you.”

Black Jack honked. And the whole line of geese behind him joined in. “The word among the intelligent life on this planet is that you humans – individually and collectively – are not smart enough not to fowl your own nest (pardon the pun, (he honked)). You’re fools.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. I knew I when I had been insulted. I walked away.

But I couldn’t help myself. I turned back to the dam. I could at least win at goose-on-a-dam blackjack. I counted again. Damn. Twenty-two gooses. Geese. Collectively. Individually, it was twenty-two gooses and one fool.

I hollered down. Black Jack was sitting on the dam, one goose from the end of the line. “I’ve always wondered something about geese. You know how you fly in a V formation?”

“Of course we know about that. Wind resistance. Efficiency. Conservation of energy. Any goose knows about that.”

“No, I know. I mean... When I see you flying overhead, it always seems as if one leg of the V is longer than the other. Why’s that?”

If you’ve ever seen a goose shake his head slowly from side to side while sitting on the inflated black rubber inner tube of the Bowersock Dam on a warm November afternoon, you’ll believe me when I tell you what that goose said.

“There’s more geese flying in that leg of the V, fool.”

Halloween is about uncertainty

Story on YouTube: Halloween is about uncertainty  

Read by author - 13.5 minutes

Text: Halloween is about uncertainty

Halloween is not about the candy at our house. It’s about fear. Well, not really. Halloween, the way I celebrate the holiday, is about uncertainty. For more than twenty years the theme, with variations, asks this question: is the dummy real?

This year I sat with a dead Furbie and a plastic Jack-O’-Lantern filled with zinnias in front of me on the patio table set away from the sidewalk to the porch. I wore a baggy black suit, tangled gray hair tumbling over my shoulders with a pink bowler hat and a purple flower sticking out of the top. I also had on a slightly creepy mask with sun glasses lenses covering the round eyeholes. But anyone could see my nose and mouth, my mustache and beard – if they looked carefully. But in the weak light of our porch where my wife, Dawn, was waiting behind the door with a bowl full of candy - and dark shadows everywhere - this is the question I overheard all evening long: Is it real? And the frequent response: It’s not real.

No one counted all of the kids last night – plus their parents, trailing along. There was candy left over at the end of the night, so maybe there were a hundred kids or so. But it wasn’t about the candy.

I wish I could tell you all of the stories, but so often, things happen so fast. You can’t even see everything right in front of your face. Kids come and go. You hear voices and many feet kicking through the leaves. I mostly just sat still off to one side. Sometimes kids would walk by me and not even see me at all. I could see them looking up at the rope spider’s web and the inflatable spider closing in on two dangling and caught dolls between the front porch pillars.

I have all night.

And then a kid stops right in front of me. The game of uncertainty begins. I can’t see their eyes. They can’t see mine. We read each other’s body language. All mine says is that maybe something - they don’t know what - is sitting just right over there in the shadows. I can see their uncertainty as they pause.

Fear is a primal instinct. Without it, my ancestors would not have survived to pass along their genes all the way through millions of generations of humans to me – and to these kids. They know in their heads that we are really just playing - mostly. There’s the safety net of their parents. Other kids all around. Ordinary houses, with ordinary people, porch lights on. It’s just Halloween.

One boy – I couldn’t quite figure out what his costume was - remembered when he saw me what he had forgotten. I’d added an occasional twist for just this year. Rather than always just sitting entirely motionless, I slowly, mechanically, twisted my head from side to side. The kid loudly announced to his three friends that I was real and that I had scared him half to death last year. And then his pause announced to me that he suddenly realized that he didn’t know for sure what he was looking at this year.

I listened to the boys reassuring each other that I was real - as I robotically shook my head ‘no.’ 

Uncertainty works on so many levels. Even if they were nearly sure that I was a living, breathing person, the next question was right on its heels waiting for them: Is he safe?

But it’s just Halloween.

Each age of kid that I have played with on Halloween night – from parent to toddler – asks those questions in their own way. Each kid asks within his or her own mind for themselves this existential question: Who is that, and why am I here? Candy? As for me, I just want to play with their uncertainties. I have my own instincts to play with. In the end, I want these kids to like me a hundred times more than I want to scare them and in the end, this is a game that we play with each other for just one night of the year. It’s a simple game, really, but with hopefully just enough uncertainty to make it interesting. A coin flipped sparkles as it spins in the air.

A lot of kids from the neighborhood have played this game before. They know my face and name in the light of day. But uncertainty is well woven into the web of reality – and not just on this one night. In the darkness, rustling leaves all around, kids think that they know what they know – and then I catch the loose thread of their imagination. Human instincts fire faster than our good sense. I just watch and wait.  This is why I came to this house on this night of all nights. To see them. To hear them. To give them something to remember as they will give me something to remember. After our instincts, that is what we are, after all, an accumulation of our memories. We can’t hope to hold onto all of them for long, but a tickling of our instincts is what sometimes makes us feel alive.

The brave young man and his friends made it up onto the porch. I heard them consulting with my wife about my possible reality. And when they came back down to my level, I was still shaking my head back and forth. They began to dare each other to go over and touch me. Soon, one of their parents standing back along the sidewalk double-dog-dared them. Some of the kids began a chant, ‘touch it, touch it.’ I watched and waited. One boy dressed in black did step slowly towards my table. He eventually reached out his hand and touched the flowers – then jumped back. Another came around the back and touched my shoulder as he skipped by. I waited. Reality was wavering. We had nearly fully entered primal territory. All Hallow’s Eve.

Everyone – even me – knew in their heads that this was just a game. Everyone was old enough to see me breathe – but misdirection is how illusion works. And so quickly you forget what you just knew a second ago. And they all had very ancient and nearly forgotten primal minds pulling at corners of their uncertainties.

The boy who knew me when he first saw me was hesitating just a few steps out of my reach. Uncertainty had hovered and gathered for several minutes now. And then I pounced. Only standing up half out of my chair with a sharp growl. Before he could even think, the brave boy turned and yelled, ‘That’s it,’ tossing his full bag of candy high into the air, and hurrying away.

One of his friends came and retrieved the bag and then they all shuffled off through the leaves, telling each other what they thought had just happened. They had been an appreciative audience in the end.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. I prepare some. I’ve learned that when it comes to actions that less is more. And silence is louder than people think. I watch and wait. And then I wait a little longer. And then even I don’t know what is going to happen next. Suddenly I am the one in primal territory. We’re all creatures tumbling and tickling - shuffling. I laugh without thinking. Someone screams high into the night and the next moment a little girl is laughing with me.

I could tell you stories, but it’s not the same as living life.

But here’s one more story.

Later in the evening, a young woman and a little girl approached from across the lawn. The young woman, in the light of day, is my neighbor. The little girl was holding onto her as they walked carefully across the grass – stopping finally still twenty or twenty-five feet away. I called out. The young woman, so apparently from Wonderland, said that she was Alice and the little girl was Cinderella. In the half-darkness none of us could really see each other very well. Uncertainty was in the air. I waited, but not too long this time. Then I raised one gloved hand slowly into the air and waved. In an instant, before she could even think, Cinderella dashed back to the driveway. And then she slowly came back to where Alice still stood. Together, they came nearly to where was sitting, but well out of reach. This time, I took off my mask and Cinderella looked into my eyes. Who did she see? Then Cinderella told me that she lived on the next street over. Alice had explained that Cinderella had come over to help hand out candy. It’s Halloween night.

And then there were more kids coming and I put my mask back on to watch again and wait.

Not every day or every night – but sometimes we live for the unexpected. A little fear reminds us that reality can be scary, but hopefully we also can learn to face our fears and live with our instincts. And sometimes surprise is a gift from the universe. If we can live with uncertainty, life can be joyful – if a little crazy sometimes.

The night had grown quiet. After we finally turned off the porch light, my wife and I walked up the street. I knew our friends had gotten York Peppermint Patties to give out – but it wasn’t about the candy. After David let me and Dawn in the back door, their daughter laughed, home working on a thesis, when she saw me in my gray wig and pink hat. I could clearly see her eyes. And then as I bit into a piece of candy as we sat together on the sofa, she told me that she still could remember being scared to go onto my porch – on a Halloween night roughly twenty years ago. These memories are a little bit of who we are.

And I have already forgotten much of what happened on this Halloween. When I sit out on my lawn, I try to see every kid, knowing that I can’t. Everything happens too fast. I go with my instincts. Every year the kids manage to surprise me. Halloween is, after all, about uncertainty. And the next day there is candy left over for all the saints and the sinners – and more kids being born into daylight every year. Here’s the question: Is love real? And following on its heels, is love worth the risk?

Uncertainty and surprise.