Queuing up on the autobahn in Germany on our way back from a weekend in Erfurt. Autumn chilling the stunted fields, undressing the trees. Ahead, the blazing lights and sirens of an ambulance nudging through. We wait for minutes that leak into a frustrated hour. Bored drivers and passengers trudge up the verge for a peek, waving each other on to come and view the cause of their stalemate. Their cars and lives going nowhere.
I jump the road barrier and bolt into a wood to relieve myself by a tree. Looking down I notice a vast line of ants, teaming back and forth in busy millions. I had drowned hundreds before I realised. A guilty god, I redirect my torrent of random deluge and ask the ants to forgive me. No individual loss for them, just replacement. There’s a sudden excitement beeping from my wife and I rush back, unaware I had hitchhikers on my shoe. My wife is waving at me, all smiles and tidal urgency. Her waving reminds me of every other time she waves at me from windows: her frantic arm pebbles me into worrying if this is the last time, if this parting pain is the most important current in the universe, reminding me to love her more than I can manage - when the water subsides. The police wave us on, wanting to get traffic moving, the show over. We drive off slowly and skulk past the wreckage of an overturned removals van, the junk of life scattered on the road. No sign of the driver - perhaps already whisked away. No blood signs, just broken promises of delivery. We stay quiet, thinking of the times we have moved, the luck we’ve had. Within seconds, impatient cars roar past. The lack of a speed limit a lesson already forgotten. Back in the woods, the ants ignore the damp soil, the fallen comrades, the inexplicable footprints of God, and keep on marching. One ant appears in the car later on, antennae twitching with questions. Too late to return it to the clan, I let it wander off on a pointless search for meaning in the dark corners of the car.
0 Comments
When I was a teenager and young man autumn was my favourite season. My romantic soul was drawn to the melancholy of the declining days, the chill slipping into the spaces left by a fractured summer. The poetry of the winking street lamps and the sky sunk in a gloominess that suffocates the too early evenings like an old London smog.
I would take walks around the neighbourhood, wrapped up against the cold and peering enviously into the warm yellow homes of neighbours. Returning home to the warmth, a hot drink, a sense of childhood sustained for one more year. The sense of loss was a strange shiver of happiness. Fast forward - as life appears to do - twenty years and I am forty years old and enjoying spring for the first time. The punch of new greens in the parks, the sharp green blades of grass and suddenly unfurled leaves - a fresh reminder that life returns. The tulips and daffodils spearing through frosted earth; a gift of colour after months of austere blandness. A new romance for the middle age of life when you sense the sad truth of autumnal melancholy. Now a few years older I am less in need to fix my loyalties to a specific season. I am more interested in the subtle moments between seasons as they bleed into each other. This year, in late spring, in the Graubunden Alps, the crickets sang as the evening emptied. They taught me in each chirrup: the males beckoning Natural Selection with their rubbing legs. A similar repeating moment of cicada music in the shade of two parallel rows of hundred year old chestnut trees lining the Medieval wall of Lucca, Italy. The mountains have been teaching me with their stony wisdom; their beauty towers throughout the seasons, the decades. I have heard the music reflected off the lakes: the slow strings of time and tectonic percussion. The mountain valleys spell ancient words with their cursive peaks. As you grow older you appreciate the beauty is all the seasons, in all the little moments you have, in all the music and colours, in all that is gained and lost. For book worshipers in America, the ultimate temple for adoration is Powell’s Bookstore, in the Pearl District of Portland - the largest independent book shop in the world. The hardware-store exterior appearance, unchanged since the 1970's, belies the treasure trove within. Entering Powell’s is akin to a medieval laborer entering a Cathedral: you gasp in awe at the towering walls around, filled with visions of angels and glittering glass.
The books talk to me, hundreds of them; they are lost souls looking for a good home and I want to adopt them all. Within minutes I have transcended into the airy, wonderful otherworld of wordcraft. All those saintly publications on the shelves telling such epic stories of love and life, redemption and fulfillment, longing and acceptance. I want them all. I want my name on them all. Half an hour later, I am overwhelmed and need to sit down with a coffee in the reassuringly unhurried purgatory that is World Cup Coffee and Tea, right next to the Graphic Novel section - perfect for the Peter Pan men, like me. At this point my head hums and my eyes flicker. I hear my own terribly distracted ego wishing to write the future books that will appear on the shelves - a dream that has festered for years. Now I am more like the medieval flagellant, beating himself with a whip made of half-written projects, fetal ideas and unrealised notions clamouring to be heard. I have to unfold my wings and flee heaven. It's not so easy getting back down. I pass back through the cloudy sections and I'm distracted again, drawn in, blanketed by the brilliance of the books. I pull sharply away and beat my wings hard. I'll just buy one, no, two books today, maybe three. No nothing – I angrily reject all the purchasing ideas. Leaving the shop, I immediately fall back down to earth, to the sidewalk, to the field to toil away. I spend the rest of the day nursing myself, groaning at reality, hearing the faint echo of all those desperate souls. I will now look forward to returning, to suffering the whole bitter-sweet experience all over again. When I was in the upper grades of primary school I never reminded anyone about my birthday for fear of that most dreaded of all school rituals: the Birthday Bumps. Somehow, somebody remembered, perhaps thinking back to one my one and only birthday party in June years before, held in a desperate bid to make friends. Having the Bumps on the exact day of your birthday didn’t matter; you have a birthday at some point, so the right month was good enough.
The Bumps is when your whole class chase you around the Year 6 huts, blocking off the exits, blocking their ears to your pleas. There’s no escaping your turn. This includes all of your friends: either directly as part of the baying group, or indirectly as they loiter on the sidelines watching, wincing Your classmates grab you and throw you to the ground, ignoring your begging tears. Then they toss you high into the air, as many times as you are old, so the older you are, the more it strains your arms, legs - the more humiliating it is until you are dropped, knee height, enough to hurt. It’s supposed to hurt. Everyone slinks away laughing as you gasp in winded silence, your friends looking back, guiltily. Where were the teachers? One or two on duty for a huge playground with many blind corners and oblivious to the ritual - complicit in coffee cup ignorance. You molt tears and totter back to the classroom, bumps bulging over your body. You hate the day you were born. It wasn’t always this way. When I was six or seven my parents acquiesced to my demands for the working class birthday treat of its time: a party at our local McDonalds. I invited all the popular boys, hoping their magnetism would attract me some friends. All the boys gobbled up the junk and embarrassed me by asking my parents to buy more. When no seconds arrived, there was argumentative swapping of Happy Meal toys and demands for Ronald himself to appear with a cake. I hoped I had done enough to make friends. My exhausted parents vowed never to have another birthday party for me. |
AuthorA poetic-essay style blog with a limit of 365 words. 365 like the days of the year - my name being one of those days! Archives
March 2020
Categories |