Haunts

I wonder if we leave some part of us behind at the different places that make an impression on us. Places that become a part of who we are. Do we become a part of them as well? Is there some part of our soul or spirit that haunts (a good kind of haunts), inhabits, is incorporated into that place?

Let me explain. It has been well documented here that I take our girls to the Oxford Park. This is the park where, when it had cool monkey bars and higher swings, I grew up. When I go there now, I can clearly see us jumping towards the river from the swings at their highest possible point; I can feel the weightlessness and then feel the sharp pain from the landing on the balls of my feet. It's like younger me is still there. In a way I can feel. Maybe that's just my memory taking over, or maybe there is some part of me that has become a part of the park.

How about some science? We all know the notion that matter or energy isn't created or destroyed, it just changes form. So that there are traces of the Big Bang still floating around us. And some folks know Carl Jung's idea of the collective unconscious, which is saying something similar on a psychic level, that we are part of a larger consciousness that stretches back through time. Maybe we can tap into it.

So maybe it stands to reason that we do physically and in terms of energy, become a part of the places and things and people who help define us. It's not Halloween, but let's call it "haunting."

We all have our haunts. I've been into too many of mine in and around Oxford. I am sure there are stretches of the cross country course at St. James School where I must have left some of myself--learning to run distance, learning to breathe. The same with the C&O Canal Towpath, both for that time and for the JFK 50 Mile Race, where I thought my legs would threaten to collapse and by the finish my sweat tasted like sleep.

I am sure there is some of me, and will be more of me at Crucial Tattoos in Salisbury, as I continue to imprint images that matter onto my body. I can trace the fine black ink, where it will be on my left wrist, of the next to come.

I know there is some part of my spirit still catching its breath in John Brown's Cave in Harper's Ferry, my first experience caving. If Memorial Stadium still stood in Baltimore, and now trips with the girls to Nationals Park in DC. Speaking of DC, the Folger Theater, or our monument to monument 11-mile run from a few years ago.

I have many haunts. I take something from them and I leave something of myself.

At the moment, and maybe I always have been, I haunt and am haunted by the color blue. A little bit of the color around the moon on Laurel Street above. And maybe by Maggie Nelson's "Bluets," as she starts to give me words to describe it. Maybe blue makes me feel wildly, with too much force, but here it is:

...A voluntary delusion, you might say. That each blue object could be a kind of burning bush, a secret code meant for a single agent, an X on a map too diffuse ever to be unfolded in entirety but that contains the knowable universe. How could all the shreds of blue garbage bags stuck in brambles, or the bright blue tarps flapping over every shanty and fish stand in the world, be, in essence, the fingerprints of God?

Blue as a secret code. Instances of blue as the fingerprints of God. Maggie Nelson knows my blue. It's one of my haunts.

Spring smells like

The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is breathe in coffee beans. It's almost a ritual. Fill my nose with the smell of coffee, maybe in anticipation, or maybe to see if I can imbibe some caffeine through the nose.

Spring is a smell season. It's the smell of coffee brewing in the house. It's the smell of newly mulched and planted gardens. Of cut tulips on the table. It's the smell of whatever is on the grill for dinner. It's spring ale right after the top is popped. It's the smell of warm rain on the grass. Or if you're Carl Sandburg (fast forward to summer):

Summer mornings on the docks I walk among bushel peach

baskets piled ten feet high.

Summer mornings I smell new wood and the river wind

along with peaches.

Yeah, I know Sandburg is smelling summer, but he's part of why I got thinking of spring smells, so work with me. Peaches and new wood and river wind. If Yankee Candle made that scent, we'd have it in our house.

Smell is the step-child of the senses. If you had to give one of your senses up, which would be the first to go? Sight? Hearing? Taste? Touch? Nope. So long smell. But spring would suffer for it.

Smell wakes up in the spring after taking the winter off. Roll your windows down crossing the Bay and spring smells like salt.

For our girls, spring smells like the Oxford Park. It smells like snail hunting and collecting on the rocks along the Tred Avon River. It smells like river water splashed on your clothes while you're eating ice cream in an oldish Ford truck, with the windows down, letting all the spring smells swirl.

Confessions from an Employment Sabbatical

Forgive me, Father, it's been almost three months since I was last employed. It's not for lack of effort. I can't tell you how many jobs I've applied for. I'm told summer is a bad time to look for a job. What's a seeker to do?

I sit down at the picnic table at the Oxford Park at noon. The bells of the church next door begin to chime, playing "Amazing Grace" as I eat my lunch and read Frederick Buechner's "The Alphabet of Grace." Maybe there is a theme working here.

It's funny, Father, I think I've learned a few things during my employment sabbatical. Or maybe remembered is a better phrase. Or I was reminded. I wouldn't trade the last couple months for any job I could have had.

Here's what I've found:

Family. We've traveled more, done more, and spent more time together this summer, with my wife and the girls out of school than any other summer since we've had the girls. Since school has been back, I've been able to take them to school and pick them up, help with homework, take them to field hockey practice and make dinner. None of that happened while working in DC.

Time. Yes, it's part of "Family," it's the backdrop for everything else, but I'm not forgetting it. The hours in a day didn't tick by the same, and hopefully they will mean something different from here on.

Community. Helping family and friends move things, taking and picking up friends' children from school, reconnecting with our church community, including a former high school chemistry teacher I wrote about, and feeling my own roots here again, where I had been neglecting them.

Faith. There will be more to say on this one. I'm not fully sure what I've got here, but it's been taking a cue from Buechner, who says, "Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace." (from "Now and Then"). I've been listening to my life. What else could I hear?

There's more, Father, but let's just keep it to the big bullet points.

I get on my single-speed bike and ride around Oxford: down to the ferry dock, the Strand, by old friends' houses, out to the end of Bachelor's Point, with smells floating on the wind. I come back to the park and sit down again. The sun hits the river and the water sparkles with the sublime. A single piling juts above, oblivious.

A man is overzealously brushing his beagle-looking dog. A girl sits on a bench reading a book with the sun and the river breeze in her face. Cicadas connect the trees in a web of clicks and chirps. A small, overworked outboard motorboat pushes a makeshift barge up the river. The sun lands on my picnic table, lighting my glasses, which rest on Buechner's book.

Yes, Father, I've found a job it seems. back in DC. My employment sabbatical is coming to an end. Yes, it is good to have a job. I certainly need one. Sabbaticals are expensive. But I can't put a price on what I've found with this time. How bout we leave off with Buechner:

"You are alive. It needn't have been so. It wasn't so once, and it will not be so forever. But it is so now. And what is it like: to be alive in this maybe one place of all places anywhere where life is? Live a day of it and see. Take any day and be alive in it." (from "The Alphabet of Grace.")

Family, hometowns and the collective unconscious, sort of

I am not related to Carl Jung. But his July 26 birthday coincides with our family reunion, which has happened for 62 years in a row. So maybe he is an honorary cousin. Or at least, for me, a kindred cousin.

I like to look at Jung and family through a kind of prism that reflects each back on the other. This idiosyncratic lens extends Jung's idea of the collective unconscious and the genes/DNA that is passed through generations by your family and then adds a dash of Native American shamanism. What I end up with is this in-the-bones in-the-soul connection to family that you can both know and feel the presence of your ancestors.

Now, I'm not a new age guy. Not trying to go woo-woo on you. But when we are at a family reunion and I see our girls running and playing, swimming, it takes me back to being their ages and doing the same thing off World Farms Road at my Great Aunt Harriett McCord's house. I can see my grandfather and his generation in the same way Anna and Ava see my father. They call him "Grandaddy," the same name we used for his dad.

It's a little more than that. On Sunday the girls and I were at the Oxford (Md.) Park. I played at that park when I was little (and older), as did my dad. His father attended school on that same ground. If I sit there quietly and let my mind drift, I get caught in thinking how many generations of our family have walked that same ground. The small town of Oxford feels like sacred ground, when I frame it that way.

After a weekend that included our Parson's family reunion and a shoreline-exploring, ice cream-eating trip to the Oxford Park, I asked the girls if they wanted to swing by the Oxford Cemetery, so see where my Grandaddy and his wife, and others in our family were buried. They did. They hadn't been there before and I hadn't been there in some time.

We found and read my grandparents', the girls' great grandparents, who they never met, head stones. My grandmother died a couple months before I turned four, but I can see her clear as day--when I would walk in their house, she would pretend to be "The Terrible Tickler," a favorite character from a Sesame Street book I liked. I called her "Me-me." She was my dad's and aunt's mother, my grandfather's second wife, after he lost his first wife and baby during childbirth. Though he was a good bit older than Me-me, he lived almost 20 years longer and is who I think of when I think of fishing or being on a boat on the Chesapeake Bay. These were/are pictures and thoughts in my head just upon seeing their graves.

The girls and I walked further. We saw another relative, Doug Hanks, Sr., who I knew as "Pop," my cousin Dougie's grandfather and an otherworldly log canoe sailor. As we walked the cemetery, as when we played in the park, I had the real sense that I was comprised of these people, this place, our girls. That is, until the girls started to moan about how hot it was.

But they thought it was cool. On our way out of the cemetery, we saw a heron on the shore, which is another story. When we got home, they ran in and told Robin about the cemetery, the park, the Scottish Highland Creamery. The reunion still swam through all our heads. They don't need Jung or his collective unconscious to understand family and place. I guess I don't either. But I'm always trying to frame or get my head around the things that excite me. The things I'm made of.

Riffing off Matthew Lippman's title: monkey bars

The monkey bars are gone from the Oxford Park. I'm not surprised. I've never seen anyone get brained there, or break an arm. Or even fall. But it could happen. And we don't like hard surfaces or steel bars around our kids. Childhood is now brought to you by Nerf.

I might posit that the monkey bars were stolen by the cast of the board game Clue. I could completely see Colonel Mustard wacking the monkey bars in the billiard room with the wrench.

At one point the Oxford Police Department had two unmarked cop cars. One was maroon, one was French's yellow. Our friend Siachos deemed them "Professor Plum" and "Colonel Mustard." You can guess that stuck like long hair to flypaper.

So maybe Clue becomes an extended metaphor for small town cops and our tendency to want to protect ourselves to boredom or some form of numbness. I'm guilty too. Nobody wants their kids to get hurt. I probably wouldn't let our girls on the monkey bars (the photo above shows the exact set up the Oxford Park rocked), as much as I dug them and as much as they conjure up my childhood, of which I am also a fan.

I haven't read Matthew Lippman's book Monkey Bars yet. It might not even get its name from the archetypal public playground apparatus. But you can bet that after reading The Rumpus's interview with Lippman and review of the book, that I ordered that shit directly. As has been established, I dig monkey bars.

And I am happy to riff off of Lippman's title to let my mind wander back to the days of 20-inch BMX bike transportation, to a time of sharp edges and jumping high and far off of wooden swings out toward the water; of running in the air like fucking Carl Lewis and hitting the ground and rolling to lessen the impact; of grass-stained knees and skinned elbows and open-mouthed smiles; of laughing and not worrying.