The air is heavy
Dripping with humidity
Got a cigarettes?
Yesterday, the temperature hit 100° with an accompanying humidity of nearly 100%. A few days ago in Phoenix, the mercury climbed to 117°. Of course, that was a dry heat, as we on the East Coast are so found of saying, so we---being of hardy East Coast stock---could easily handle such heat.
Who cares that if one had the inclination, one could set an oven at 115° and make beef jerky by drying out thinly sliced steaks? Who cares that a jellyfish would evaporate in about a minute if left to fry on a sidewalk under such scorching conditions? It’s a dry heat, see. It’s not humid like it is on this coast.
Because we as humans always need to feel that we suffer more than our comrades living in far harsher climates, the gods of meteorology have created such terms as heat index and wind chill, which supposedly accounts for the differences in temperature and humidity. It may be -53° in Alaska and here in Maryland only 23°, but with the wind chill, the temperature feels like -18°. Therefore, we suffer, too, and can relate to the plight of the Eskimos.
It’s the same with heat.
I went to eat outside at lunch yesterday (being a hardy New Englander) and noticed something very interesting. After leaving my air conditioned building and being slammed by a Mike Tyson uppercut of heat, I saw from between the dazed slits that had become my eyes another hardy East Coast gentlemen sitting in his parked car with his windows rolled down.. His vehicle lolled in the hot afternoon sun like my dog on our deck. And from within the confines of that car, this hardy individual chain-smoked...
...because, you know, when its hot enough to steal the breath from your chest, you might as well inhale hot smoke into your lungs.
It dries out the heat.
An empty bottle
Of brown-tinted glass enchants
Inspiring language
Today was my third day at work, and I have yet to melt.
While I’ve been toiling in a cubical, Ella has become quite the talker and lover of bottles.
I wake to actors
Performing radio plays
I am the speakers
After a few false starts, I have started my first novel. Never having penned a long work of fiction, I don’t know what to expect. In my head, I see (as clearly as any fiction writer does) the shape of the first chapter, how the story wants to feel, how the narrator narrates. Where it will take me, though, is another thing altogether.
When I close my eyes and ears, I hear the story like a 30s radio play that is using my internal organs as speakers. I think this is a good sign. In the past, finding the necessary motivation and excitement energizing the activity of scribbling fiction was difficult. The initial burst fueled my pen for a day or a week, but soon the story would die, buried in a half-empty notebook.
How many partial stories I have stashed beneath childhood trinkets in unpacked boxes or have hidden within folders on the computer desktop I can’t say. But, that is irrelevant now.
For, from the death of past tales is born this new yarn—a story that may be only a few paragraphs old but is definitely growing...
...and growing...
Pressed against my chest
Is my daughter limp—milk-drunk—
A burp rumbles deep
When Ella finishes nursing, I frequently take her from Mary for a burp. Limp with sweat, Ella adjusts to my arms like a sack of potatoes.
She is pliable but stiff, milk-drunk but alert, strong but weak. She is a boneless bag of contradictions, my little girl. And beneath it all, life pulses...
...While my heart bleeds tenderness.
Drawing pictures in
White sand, we outline our lives
And then Time exhales
Yesterday, I asked, “Who cares?”
Who cares that we as individuals are nothing to Time? Who cares that the struggles that seem so important to us today are but drawings in sand? Who cares that our lives are like cells in a body—replaced at our death by other cells taking over the tasks we have left unfinished?
I want to answer that it doesn’t matter. Life is about the Now. Life is living and acting. It matters not how Time and History shape our deeds for the archeologists and anthropologists of the future. More than likely, those acts and deeds will be forgotten anyway.
Who remembers why Matilda ran off with Amos in 1843? Who can say why Harold marched on the Capital in 1924? Who knows why Asher left the Jerusalem in 15 BC? Or why Leopold fled to Rome after borrowing Fredrick the shoemaker’s third best vice in 1212?
The problem is that I do indeed care. I want to remember and be remembered. My fire craves immortality. I don’t want to burn out and be forgotten. I don’t want to be an insignificant player on the stage of History. I want Time to know me.
Yet, I know that’s impossible.
And so, I just try to live.
Each generation
Peers backward, making judgments
They hear but echoes
I just finished The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. She is quite the bard. She has a way of taking a simple story and turning it upside down and inside out. With a brief epilogue, she transforms a tale, which on the surface appears to be a harsh polemic exposing the plight of women in a futurist society ruled by religious fundamentalists, into something deeper, something more profound, something far more disturbing—a story of hope broken by History’s Eye, rendering the individual insignificant.
To marching Time and his scribbling, far-sighted biographer History, the acts of the individual are nothing but footprints in dust that fade as wind blows or rain falls. Our deeds will be fogged by misunderstanding and misinterpretation; the people we are (or were) will be lost to Time, to our progeny, to our future. We will become shadows, echoes.
And, then I look to Miss Ella...and a tiny ray of optimism lights the harsh reality of things and whispers in the deepest cavern of my mind:
Who cares?
Whoooooooo? Caaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrres?
Wwwwwwwwhhhhhoooooooooo?
A Devil in an
Angel suit beckons with green
I watch my daughter
On July 11, I start working at Cadmus. Again. Returning to the Devil I know, supposedly, which I’ve been told is far better than the Devil you don’t know.
Perhaps, that’s true. But, there’s something to be said for the unknown—its mystery, its newness, the chance that this new Devil is no demon at all but rather an angel and, if not an angle, then at least something benign like a rock.
But, alas. I do indeed return to that old devil Cadmus, who over time has donned a halo and wings. Nevertheless, this devil does have its advantages: I am familiar with its more cruel practices and can dodge most of them with fleet feet; the workers under His corporate spell are generally friendly and enjoyable to be around; I will be joining a new team, whose members edit the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, so there will be some mystery. And besides, the work is easy enough, allowing my mind to draw pictures of Ella as she learns to be a person.
I think that is the biggest shame about working—being away from my daughter. But, after 8 hours lifting rock-like words and climbing mountainous prose, I know that when I return home Ella’s lips will peel with a grin and we will both laugh.
That is life.