If it’s the beaches.
If it’s the beaches’ sands you want
Then you will have them.
If it’s the mountains’ bending rivers
Then you will have them.
If it’s the wish to run away
Then I will grant it.
Take whatever you think of
While I go gas up the truck
Pack the old love letters up
We will read them when we forget why we left here.
From The Beaches, by Scott and Seth Avett
HE HAD NO IDEA WHERE HE WAS. He had no idea where he was going. He just walked.
After a few minutes the buzz in his ears had subsided and he began to hear the sounds of the city, the noise of the streets. The taxis revving, the heavy groan of diesel engines moving trucks and buses. From a distance, a siren sang into the night. A horn blared next to him. He turned to look and a cab driver shook his fist and yelled something in an unknown tongue to another cabbie.
He walked on. The rubber soles of his hiking boots made no sound on the concrete. There were other people, but the sidewalk was far from crowded. He walked straightway but there was never a moment when he had to sidestep to avoid an encounter with someone else. They seemed to employ a kind of urban sonar that initiated almost imperceptible course adjustments as they moved toward their destination. No one spoke as they passed. No smiles. No eye contact. It was as if the city, for all its celebration of life and culture, shunned the random discovery of another individual.
Though the stores were closed, restaurants and watering holes teased with a hint of celebration and inclusiveness. But he knew that people like him, those who by either natural tendencies or situations that had been forced upon them, were more comfortable sitting to the side and observing. People like him, were they to expose themselves to the illusion of grand party, would again learn the hurtful truth that no one really cared.
No one really cared.
The night was cooling. He zipped up his jacket.
He had been walking for more than an hour but it wasn’t the time that he noticed. It was the quiet. If the street was the river of life in the city, he had hiked to its headwater. Or maybe a tributary. A slower body of water, more peaceful. When hiking in the forest, he would often find a rock beside the river and let his mind drift with the placid current.
He stopped. Ahead, a small group, men and women, loitered on the stoop of a walk-up. He looked behind. A couple of people walked in the opposite direction. He must have passed them but he couldn’t remember. Across the street, a warm yellow light flooded onto the sidewalk from the neon sign of a pub. Edie’s. No. Eddie’s. One of the ds had lost its glow. Either way.
He was tired. He needed to rest.
copyright: joseph e bird, 2016
photo copyright: joseph e bird, 2014
It was another snowy night.
Larry Ellis lives in the same neighborhood I do. The scene last night was much like the photo above. In the middle of the snow storm, he looked out his window and saw a young woman walking down the street, all alone in her world of white. He wrote this:
She walks through the snow as if walking through time
The storm had covered all, erasing the present
Yesterday’s litter, this year’s rust, the cracks in the pavement
All gone under white
The streetlights, the porchlights, the moonlight and starlight
All combine tonight
Every line is straight and even, every wall upright
.
And she comes walking through as if from the past
As if from another world: maybe this perfect, soundless world
She walks alone and seems unworried
Unaffected by this that has kept every car in its garage
And has closed the schools and churches
.
Is her coat, so perfectly fitting
From another day?
Does she walk to some grand house
Now long vanished
That has reappeared in the throes of this storm?
That house where yellow light from tall windows
Makes bright rectangles on the snow in the lawn?
Will there be someone at that door to meet her
Someone to take her coat?
Candles and wine on the table
And a fire in the hearth?
Copyright 2016, Larry Ellis
The story of Trevor and Sheu-lo had started with a conversation about apples. There had been no flash of physical magnetism, no sparks flew, no glint in the eye, no wry smile, no hint of seduction whatsoever. None of the elements that had made his encounters with Dani so gut-wrenchingly wonderful. Yet as their conversation had moved from Fuji apples to Bob Dylan and Eminem, something happened.
“It’s the Casimir effect,” Sheu-lo had said weeks later after they had finally abandoned the pretense that they were colleagues, nothing more. She had made the comment over dinner in a dimly lit restaurant, where music never played, an irony that Trevor found appealing.
“It’s a scientific principle. Casimir was a physicist who experimented with electromagnetic fields. Everyone knows about positive and negative fields.”
“Opposites attract,” Trevor said.
“Right. But Casimir discovered that there is a small attractive force that acts between two uncharged plates.”
“Not opposites?”
“Just two plain, metal plates.”
At first they had maintained their worlds separately, but they soon overlapped. And though they were spending many evenings together at Trevor’s insistence, they had limited their physical involvement. There were lapses in discipline which played on Trevor’s guilt on different levels. The feelings that he had for Sheu-lo were built on a foundation of respect.
There was no dramatic proposal, no elaborate ceremony.
They were married in Max’s church, attended by their families.
That morning, I drove in the bright sunlight on ribbons of pavement that lay gently on the snow-covered hills against the deep blue sky.
Ray Lamontagne sang about trouble.
I sipped good, strong, black coffee.
I was by myself.
I like being with others, but I also like the times alone.
To sort it all out.
On the edge of Appalachia, the hills disappeared.
Across the Ohio River, the stacks pierced the sky and bellowed white cotton.
One hundred years from now, they won’t be there.
They weren’t there one hundred years ago.
That’s what those kinds of day will do for you.
Bob Dylan, from My Back Pages
Larry Ellis just sent me this link earlier today. See if you can name all the folk icons. Cool stuff.
Warning: Watching these videos may indirectly cause broken ankles. From my friend Donna over at MyOBT.
That feeling that draws you home.
Wherever home is.
This is what it is. Expressed by Sharon Lyn Stackpole.
Pass it on.
I woke up today with this song in my head.
Joseph E Bird 