September Sun

September 1^st, and I’m sitting against a fencepost in the yard, soaking up some sun. I never do this – although I’ve bunched a jacket beneath me and propped a pillow at my back, I’m not particularly comfortable. Nor do I enjoy sunbathing – it’s too hot for me, usually, and unless I’m at the ocean I get bored almost instantly. But today it’s partly cloudy, so the heat isn’t an issue. There’s a sweet breeze – literally sweet; I can smell it – and the fact that it’s suddenly September adds a bittersweetness to the mix, an urgency that I heed. We won’t have many more days like this and, even if we do, classes have begun and my time is limited. And so I’ve assembled this makeshift chair and rolled up my t-shirt sleeves so I can feel the brush of a burn on my shoulders. My feet are bare and I’ve abandoned my sunglasses – these rays are meant to reach me.

Our neighborhood is a quiet one. No such thing as traffic out here – I think I’ve counted 2 or 3 cars at most in the last hour. Someone out of sight is making a small racket. Sounds like he’s hammering a metal post – a rhythmic, ringing series of clangs and clanks – but it’s far enough away that I don’t mind. A neighbor kid is clearing some messy growth from our backyard. Leigh hired him to machete an area that has become a tangle. It’s not really the backyard… more like the back of the backyard, a nondescript area that separates the tamed lawn from the untamed ridge. Beyond this intermediate zone is the heavily wooded slope I refer to as “the jungle.” It’s really just an extensive, thick stand of mature trees and underbrush. I find it a little funny that Leigh’s having the margin cleared – she wants to improve the view. To me, the view can be summarized in a word: green. But where I see green – shapes and sizes, versions and varieties, tones and shades of green, yes, but in the end, just a mishmashed canvas of green – Leigh sees fern and wildflower and shrub and poison ivy and maple saplings. I think she’s needlessly shaving off a layer of green in order to appreciate another layer of green, but it makes her happy to open up the yard to the wider world, and it makes the neighbor boy happy to have a pocketful of twenties, so why protest.

Thirty yards upridge from his efforts, more in the front yard than the back, I’m surrounded by buzzing and chirping and rustling. There’s an aural intelligence to these acres, I’m sure of it. The overlapping sounds of the wind, the chipmunks’ persistent, cranky cheeping and trilling, the yellowjackets and wasps that whizz by but rarely bother – it’s complex but accessible music. Visually, too, there’s composition everywhere. In the grain of wood where I sit, in the fringe of grass which is really ten kinds of grass and clover and weed and moss and another dozen things I can’t identify. I’m a little in love with the nail heads visible in the wood planking of the walkway. You’d call them round, and flat, but not a one truly is. Each has an irregular perimeter – rightly call them roughly round, or roundish…And they’re grooved, some of them, or appear embossed. It’s possible I’m the first person to closely examine these particular nail heads, and I feel as content as an explorer who’s stumbled upon some new species of tortoise. Some of these nail heads look like tortoise shells, actually…

The breeze picks up and brings me back to my senses; it’s almost like I can feel the wind through my skin. Along the driveway, a stretch of dried grass, fallen leaves, and gently curved twigs is disturbed by a low-flying current. It’s like a leafy chorus line – the whole strip rises up and tumbles and flutters – but it’s a chorus line with no stamina. As quickly as it kicked up, it dies down.

The post I’ve been leaning my head against is embroidered on either side with spider webs. A couple of butterflies flit by, and two hummingbirds parry, battling for rights to the feeder. A big tree groans, the neighbor continues to hammer. The boy’s still hacking at the underbrush – every so often he exclaims from the effort. The sun’s become hotter and the clouds have dissipated. I’m sweaty and happy and – despite what I know to be pervasive suffering, near and far, despite what I know to be fear and loneliness approaching those I love – for this hour in the September sun, I have been sated.

Eat a Peach

I have a thing for peaches. I love them. In the morning, with my cereal, I slice them up and have them for breakfast. My slicing method is precise and never varies. I wash the peach, and I am like a parent giving a child a bath. Firm, but gentle. It’s important to rub closely around the dimple at the top of the peach, where the stem was attached. Sometimes a little nub is still there, like what’s left of a baby’s umbilical cord in those first days or weeks of infancy. I use my thumb to knock it off, and it falls into the dish drain, which I clean as rarely as possible. I don’t like the sliminess of it. Those little translucent slivers of onion, spaghetti worms, thumbnail-sized specks of broccoli or garlic – it makes me queasy to look at them and more queasy to touch them. But that is a bad habit, my reluctance to clean the drain, and I’m trying to describe a good habit, this washing and slicing and eating of a peach. After I knock the stem stub off, I pay special attention to the prime meridian as I call it, which is that equator-like line that transverses a peach. It starts out as an indentation, near the stem, but often becomes convex as you follow it around the body of the fruit. I try to scrub out the indented part, in case any dirt or germs or chemicals – pesticides – are lodged in there. Sometimes I think microscopic insect eggs could hide in that spot, or even, say, the dismembered leg of a mosquito. It’s important, I’m saying, to be thorough.

Once I’ve covered the trouble spots, I rub the globe with my fingertips, almost as though I’m trying to rub off the fuzz. I have to admit, I’m not crazy about the fuzz. Food, I think, probably shouldn’t be fuzzy. But if I give it about 30 seconds worth of fingertip massage, the fuzz is either removed, or slicked down sufficiently to appear gone, which is good enough for me.

I use a paring knife to cut the peach, which might be one of the few times I use a gadget for its actual purpose. Well, technically, now that I think about it, I’m not actually paring the peach. I don’t peel it. Since the fuzz has been matted down, I eat the skin along with the flesh. I don’t ever think of it as skin and flesh, however, as that might make me even queasier than the remnants of old food in the sink drain. So it’s not paring I do with the paring knife, but simple, precise slicing. I start at the stem and follow the line of demarcation – what would be, on an actual globe, the equivalent of the prime meridian –around the body of the fruit, slicing deep enough that the edge of the knife blade hits the peach stone. Once the blade hits the pit, it is very easy to smoothly rotate the fruit in the palm of my hand, keeping the knife firmly pressed against the pit. When the incision meets up with itself at the stem, I lay the knife down and take the peach in both my hands, giving a gentle twist. The fruit opens into halves, one of which cradles the red, pocked pit. That part is temporarily put aside, and I devote my full attention to half number 1, which is quickly divided into equal slices – one, two, three, four. Each of those slices is then divided into 3 or 4 bite-sized pieces. Those pieces are placed on top of the waiting bowl of cereal. The milk has not yet been added so as to avoid sogginess.

Half number 2 takes slightly more care, due to the presence of the pit, but essentially the same procedure is followed. Often one last slice will continue to cling to the pit; at that point, a slight tug will dislodge it and the slices can be trimmed to their appropriate size and -- somewhat more carefully -- added to the growing heap of cereal and fruit in the bowl. If the peach is large enough, two additional steps may be required. First, several sections of peach may need to be eaten during the process of composing the bowl. Second, in securing proper placement of the peach pieces, one might recall the maneuvers involved in the game Tetris, and attempt to strategically place the pieces to ensure that no peach topples from the bowl. Such toppling is not tragic, but should a piece hit the floor it is lost and must be disposed of -- I am not a believer in the "5-second rule," especially when it comes to fruit. The lost peach must be relegated to the trash or thrown out the back door to join the unofficial compost heap located, roughly, 20 yards over the ridge that borders the backyard. The proper way of introducing the peach to the compost is by flinging it, although flinging a bite-sized piece of fruit is considerably less satisfying than flinging, say, an old egg or overly ripe avocado. Bananas, too, are quite satisfying as they produce the illusion of a boomerang effect. They do not actually circle around, but one could imagine they might if one knew precisely the right speed and angle with which to throw it.

Once the peaches have been arranged atop the cereal heap, milk is added and eating commences. I try to ensure that every spoonful of cereal is mated with a piece of peach. Depending on the initial size of the peach, this may be possible, but often one runs out of fruit at about the 75% point and finishing up one’s breakfast can become a slightly bleak affair. It is important, on those mornings, to maintain perspective and not allow one’s spirits to sink over the loss of peach.

There are, after all, fresh tomatoes for lunch.

Where in the World

This isn't a new piece. Just lonely for my friends and ruing the end of summer. Enjoy.

Light catches the paddle of a weed. A hummingbird perches on a low branch of shrub outside my window. The blue spruce, which worried us in the spring with its sagging lower limbs and dried needles, no longer languishes. The open arms of the tree take a hit during our long winters; it’s as though the limbs attempt to hold up the snow, a heavy burden that collects on its boughs and causes them to droop. By summer, however, the tree has rebounded and its glaucous needles are gloriously blue, its branches sheltering a few sun-struck weeds and a smattering of grass below.

Early summer is dreamy here on the shores of Lake Ontario. The peonies are still flamboyant, although defeated, their pink petals accumulating like lingerie in the ivy. The irises, similarly, have shed their labial purple petals and are morphing into papery brown husks. A few flowers linger on the bleeding heart, but they, too, are getting in their last licks. The new stars of the yard will be the roses and the hydrangea, the latter of which will persist into fall.

It’s summer, and my friends are gone. My human friends, I mean, not these flower and avian acquaintances who are delightful, for sure, but harbor the quality of substitute. In summer, my friends visit other shores; they travel, they vacation. I’m not quite as ambitious as Emerson, who said he’d walk a hundred miles for a good conversation, but I do crave contact when they’re are gone. That’s probably why I watch the hummingbirds, listen for the zipper sound of their arrival, a sound that becomes the background noise of my days, as though the buzz of their wings is always right at my shoulder. They like the nectar I’ve mixed for them; it’s a little heavy on the sugar and I think I’ve become the equivalent of the neighborhood crack dealer for the hummers. I’m not sure whether they’re sparring or flirting at the feeder; the hummingbird social scene is a literal blur. But they dart and dodge and confront and zoom and hide and reveal and when one seems to gain the upper hand and temporarily stakes its territory, it sends its long quick tongue deep into the glass globe that holds the sugar juice and drinks, drinks deeply. I admire these dervishes, colorful as flying paint; they seem like tough little creatures as they charge, meet eye to eye, wing to wing, in some repeated dance of delineation that seems to say this is mine or I want you.

The hummers and the roses and the peonies are reasonable companions, I’m saying, but it’s a companionship based on observation that inevitably turns into imagination. There’s only so far I can go in my scientific zeal before I turn poet and begin to anthropomorphize too much, sentimentalize, over-imagine. The natural world tends to send me into some rather lofty realms where I imagine a mutuality that likely doesn’t exist. The hummingbirds don’t notice me, for the most part, and when they do, they flee. I am not their friend. The trees, the flowers, the wind, the grass – if there’s a consciousness, if there’s any relationship between these features of the yard and me, it’s a mystical one, a spiritual one. Sometimes I sense that relationship, but the sensation is problematic, as I believe in no god.

It’s complicated, you see, and so is this longing I feel for my friends. I miss the flesh and blood of them, the substance of them. I miss their words. I can’t really talk, in any satisfactory fashion, after all, to the robins or the spruce. And although I can listen, and do, and can learn from such listening – The first duty of love is to listen, so says Paul Tillich – it’s human language I crave. Vowels and verbs, words strung out in interesting ways, like lanterns lining a dark walk. I miss, simply put, talking the talk.

And, to be precise, I’m not really referring to in-person conversations with my friends. I’m talking about their writing. I miss hearing from them. I miss their letters, their emails. When I wake up in the morning, although I am blessed to hear birdsong – what could be better? – I wake with this thought: “Maybe someone will write to me today.” Those words, that hope, gets me out of bed. Not the warblers, not the chittering of the hummingbirds, not the rush of wind or the sound of rain on the broad leaves of the hostas... The prospect of the written word – that incites me to rise.

I sometimes joke with friends that when one of us dies, I won’t want to know, exactly. Instead I’ll want to think, a little sadly, with some degree of denial that’ll look like perplexity, “Ah, Jo stopped writing. I wonder why…” That is my anticipated euphemism for the deaths of my friends: so-and-so simply stopped writing. “Have you heard from Marianna?” I’ll be asked. “No,” I’ll reply, slowly shaking my head and looking off into the distance. “She stopped writing…”

There’s a corollary to my hunger for words; it’s not just that I need to see writing on a page, words on a computer screen. It’s a little hard to explain so I’ll be direct: I need to know where my people are. The degree of urgency might require emphasis: I need to know – need meaning I will panic, will feel anguish if I don’t – where my friends are on the planet. I want to know what country they’re in, what city or town they’re in, I want to have some faith that their normal routines are intact, want to know whether those routines temporarily incorporate the local surroundings. Are A and B having breakfast overlooking the beach; will X shower after a run; is L brushing back her hair, idly, while daydreaming through a novel, and so on. When I know the customary location of a friend is about to change – when they travel – I become anxious. I can’t sleep. I want their itineraries. I want, as I half-jokingly requested of friends heading off on a trip this week, for them to strap GPS receivers to their ankles and feed me the signal while they’re gone.

That doesn’t happen, of course. My friends leave, or I leave, and for a few days or weeks we are, as we say, out of touch. I don’t hear from them and, therefore, cannot listen. And maybe that means the second duty of love is to endure silence. To wait. Or to turn, temporarily and perhaps insufficiently, to a kind of alternative conversation. I’d like to decipher the maneuverings of the hummingbird, I’d like to understand the night calls of bats or the soulful trembling choreography of the trees. Vocabulary is everywhere. But when my friends are gone, all I hear are wings, and although I recognize no god, I recognize – I listen to – these angels.

On the Day of Your Brother’s Funeral

Saw a man yesterday in a white convertible driving down a country road. No passengers but for three acoustic guitars in the back seat, upright as gravestones. The man's dress shirt rippled in the wind and his arm was propped on the door, crooked at the elbow, as though he were a carefree tour guide showing the instruments around town. “To your right are the college ball fields,” I could imagine him saying, with maybe a few gentle pings as response. “Up ahead we’ve got a great view of Lake Ontario…” A stronger strum replies. As they make their way down Bridge Street, a song develops. The man starts singing, and the guitars improvise their small-town blues. In the cemeteries, even the ghosts of the dead are pleased, and the sky assembles into elegiac cloud banks. Somewhere in the world brothers and sisters say goodbye.

From space, Earth is just a blue ball dipped in glitter.

Counting the Gulls

It’s a perfect summer afternoon (mid-60’s, breezy, miles of architectural cloud formations) and I’m taking a walk after spending 4.5 hours in what my school calls an “intensive English Language Program.” That description translates like this: I spend six weeks teaching a fairly enjoyable series of summer school classes – two consecutive three-week sessions – wherein I attempt, as best I can, to tutor enthusiastic and highly motivated second-language speakers in some of the idiosyncrasies of my first and only language. (“Professor, why do you say “get in the car” but “get on the train?”) I love this gig, but by the end of every day I’m hoarse and weary and just a tad embarrassed about how many times I fall back onto the “English has many exceptions to the rules” response when they ask me yet another unanswerable grammar question.

As I pass a big green field – fifty yards, give or take – I decide to count how many seagulls are sitting or standing in a loose cluster at its center. They’re not easy to count – the local gulls have no interest in the clean lines of, say, marching-band formations – but I appreciate precision and so I gamely add them up and arrive at the number 122. I wonder if it would be alright to change that sum to 117, should I later decide to use the gulls, somehow, in a piece of writing. “One seventeen sounds better,” I think, although that’s clearly subjective. I question whether the tiny fact alteration is exactly the kind of tweak I sometimes warn my students against – the beginning of the proverbial slide down the annoyingly alliterative slippery slope – or if, rather, it falls rather obviously into the “creative” side of creative nonfiction. Losing interest in that question almost more quickly than it takes to ask it, I begin to wonder why I prefer odd numbers to even. What have even numbers ever done to me? What have odd numbers ever done for me?

The gulls have maintained a steadfast aloofness despite my wandering about, but now I must cross the field. I’m careful to stay far enough away that I don’t disturb them, but as I approach the halfway point I begin to feel mischievous. I want to wave my arms, I want to shout, I want the gulls to heave up in a great mass of gray-white cacophony and squawk in their shrewish and raucous manner. I want to report that it was like seeing oddly edgy angels arise from the meadow, but it’s not a meadow, the gulls are nothing like angels, and I remain, however foolishly, however much it limits me, enduringly devoted to what I believe, in my heart, to be the truth.

I took a walk on a beautiful day. A few common clouds rimmed the sky. The gulls pleased me. There were about 120 of them, white loaves scattered on impossibly green grass. For a while, I was happy.

27 Things My Father Taught Me

How to ride a bike
How to fix a bike chain when it fell off the only bike we could afford
How to swim
How to dive
How to hold my breath without holding my nose
To love the ocean
That the ocean could heal anything
The importance of the right tool for the job
The importance of improvisation
How to put a sick pigeon out of its misery
How to watch t.v. and sleep at the same time
How to properly throw and catch a baseball
How to paint
To rinse the sand off our feet before getting in the car after the beach
The joy of driving fast
The importance of health
To appreciate a good sandwich
The importance of education
How to ride a horse
The importance of family
How to tell a good bedtime story
How to get one’s heart broken
How to leave and not look back
That much is worth laughing at
The elusiveness of luck
How to grieve
How to endure

Summer Time

I’m convinced that time moves more slowly during the summer. I just spent a good hour watching two spiders in the corner of my study. No idea what they were actually doing, but among the possibilities: completing a web, boxing, playing, mating, philosophizing. They were right up close to one another, using two legs each to feint and jab, stroke and pat each other. Now they’ve backed off and appear to be at rest, utterly still and upside down. Actually, one is a sound sleeper, totally motionless, belly to the sky, while the other seems to be doing a dreamy ballet, two of its legs slowly stretching and contracting. This morning I watched another spider in the bathroom, at the ceiling. That one seemed to be trying to make out with its own shadow. Its body would bump and re-bump against the ceiling, over and over, until eventually it dropped on a strand of silk, either frustrated or sated. Who knows, maybe spiders really can mate with their shadows, maybe soon there will be ghostbaby spiders all over the house. Maybe that’s what I feel sometimes, those inexplicable shivers or tickles or faint caresses that seem to have no source. At any rate, I think I spent an hour with the spiders, but for all I know it was the entire morning, or a mere ten minutes. I keep losing track of what time it is, what day. No surprise -- half the time I don’t know what year we’re in, even though right now we’re smack in the middle of ’09 -- I’ve had six months to figure it out. Some mornings I lie in bed mulling over a lot of nothing, realizing that twenty minutes have passed and I’ve accomplished little more than determining which window a bee was buzzing at.

I should be grateful for these lazy passages, the lengthening of an afternoon or the enduring stretch of a given hour. Five decades have passed so fast… it’s only right that some benevolent deity or lucky twist of fate or circumstance of my own aging brain allows the perception that little parcels are exceptions, certain periods of time don’t fly, don’t fly, but unfold with the luxurious grace of a spider’s delicate leg.