Obviously

 

It was just another walk to the river.

Past the middle school,

the alley,

the church.

One foot in front of the other.

Grown men playing at being swordsmen in South Park.

Bygone ways from bygone days.

People strolling along on Mass. Street.

Snatches of conversation,

nothing worth repeating.

A mother baby-talking to her baby,

baby riding high on daddy’s shoulders.

“Too much sun. Too much sun.”

The ghost of Don McLean singing American Pie

outside the store that sells beer brewing stuff

to people who want to brew beer.

I listened to the music for a while.

And when they had caught the last train for the coast,

I got up to get a drink from the water fountain nearby.

The water was warm -

but it was wet.

It was water.

The Dusty Bookshelf was crowded.

People lined up to buy books.

More books piled up than

anyone could sell in a month of Saturdays.

And then some.

I walked out.

And then finally as I crossed the Kaw River Bridge

I thought I might just as well turn back...

but inertia carried me on down to the water’s edge.

I found a drift-log resting in the shade of a sycamore tree.

A pleasant breeze.

Cicadas singing.

City sounds receding into the background.

I rested.

With an unfocused gaze,

I reflected on a river reflecting sky.

I noted what I had noted.

And time passed as it always does.

And now the past is past.

I have have written

what I have written

and I wonder:

Have I said too much?

Have I said too little?

Probably.

 

One blackberry at a time

My friend invited me to come over to his house to share in his surplus of blackberries. Being a friend, I could hardly refuse, but it was something of a nuisance, ducking underneath the netting draped over the canes to keep the birds out, scrambling around on hands and knees, reaching awkwardly up into the canes to get to the ripe ones almost out of my reach.

Blackberries just don’t ripen all at the same time, rather they ripen one at a time in their clusters from green to red to black, or more precisely, they eventually ripen to a very deep, dark, lustrous purple. At that point the berry will very nearly drop into your hand when you reach for it. But my point is that you have to pick each blackberry one at a time.

So you look for the ripe ones. Sometimes they’ll hide behind a leaf, sometimes they are just one more finger’s-length away from your outstretched fingers. But seek and you shall find. Blackberries!

Sometimes you’ll get lucky and collect two or three ripe ones in a handful before dropping them into the bowl. Eventually there will be enough in the bowl for a cobbler or crisp. And if you’re really ambitious, there’s jam. But I rarely want to work that hard. Thankfully, my friend has a relatively small patch of blackberries.

But as picking blackberries goes, it turns out that a blackberry will end up in your mouth – one blackberry at a time. And then another. And then you begin to realize that one blackberry is sweeter, juicier than another. They’re all good, mind you, but as you’re picking them, one blackberry is sweeter and juicer than another. And, oh, just how sweet and juicy that can be. Better than you imagined. And then the picking becomes a quest.

And yes, all of those blackberries that do make it to the bowl will be as good as they can be all jumbled together in a cobbler or crisp, but I recommend eating blackberries one at a time – handed to you like a gift. Juicy. Sweet.

You’ll taste the difference. You’ll taste the wonder.

Happy Anniversary

  

After 35 years of marriage, this is mostly what I want: to chop vegetables at the dining room table while Dawn is putting together the pasta in the kitchen.

I pick up a Japanese eggplant from the cutting board and turn around, pretending that it’s a gun. Dawn laughs. I chop some more vegetables. She yells at my back from the other room that the music is too loud. I pretend not to hear. It’s Paul Simon on the CD player, but I’m not really paying attention to him either. I’m mostly trying not to leave slices of my finger on the cutting board.

At some point, Dawn tells me to go down to the basement for a couple of onions. Later she tells do something with the goat cheese. I have to ask her again what she meant because I wasn’t really listening. And then she tells me. Again. And then she tells me to get some parsley from the garden. About a third cup. When I come back with a small handful of parsley, she sends me back for another small handful. “Yes, chef!”

When Dawn and I cook together, I’m always the sous chef, she’s always the exec. We both like it that way.

I get to be the man opening the jar of Kalamata olives. I get to chop vegetables. I get to take the scraps out to the compost pile. She makes sure things come together when they need to come together. We both said ‘I do’ and now we’re doing it.

The words Dawn and I exchange when we’re cooking together are entirely insignificant. They are neither prose nor poetry. We simply punctuate the air with a word or two at a time for emphasis. It’s the doing that matters.

Chopping eggplant and squash, onions and peppers. And garlic, plenty of garlic. A few words back and forth just to help move things along. And yet I think it’s those few words and sentences – spoken without even our noticing – that weave our lives together. Without those few words - without the repetition of doing things together using merely incidental words - there is no marriage. So there will be thousands - maybe millions - of those incidental words spoken over the life of our marriage. But nobody’s counting. Or even really listening much of the time.

It’s like this. You pick up a word. Take a fragment of a sentence. Put vegetables in a skillet, turn up the heat, and soon you have ratatouille. Slice a loaf of ciabatta in half and toast it in the oven. Add goat cheese, sun dried tomatoes and Kalamata olives to hot pasta, and soon the two of you are eating out on the patio, telling each other how good the food tastes.

And so there we were. On a mild evening in August with the sun going down behind the neighbor’s trees, words had been strung together in slightly longer strings as we ate together on the patio, but it still wasn’t about the talking. It’s just ratatouille.

And that’s mostly what I want.