Reminiscing with Sid

I reminisce for a spell, or shall I say think back... - Pete Rock and C. L. Smooth

I think Sid Vicious was right. Not about much, but maybe about stepping stones. I'm not sure stepping stones exist. If they do, you can't see them. Not until you get to the end and turn around. Stepping stones exist only in hindsight. Only as a reminiscence. You couldn't have known it at the time.

Calling something--a period of time, a job, a person, a relationship--a stepping stone purely negates it. Being a line cook in restaurants wasn't where I ultimately wanted to end up, but it is something that is as much a part of me now as any other job. It is a period of time full of great people, and memories, and late nights, and laughs, and people who are still close friends. It wasn't a stepping stone, it was then.

He lets this brilliant shape move through time like a needle stitching together the two moments that compose nostalgia. Then and now. - Anne Carson, "Plainwater"

Thank you, Anne. That's what I meant. Stitching together THEN and NOW. That's the only way something can look like a stepping stone. But remember what Jurassic Park has taught us, objects in mirror (past) are closer than they appear.

Maybe reminiscing is time travel and nostalgia is that sense of floating through time and space, of actually feeling those two moments being stitched together, and we wear those stitched threads like an old sweater that we can't let go of no matter how many holes it has. We can't let go of the past, we can't forget, we want it to help make sense of the now, the future.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. - Robert Hass, "Meditation at Lagunitas."

Shit, Bob, don't bring that up now. Why do we have to bring longing and desire into this? I was just trying to cut out into Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth and let the sound wash over. You can reminisce without longing, right? When we look back to a simpler time, prior to bills, prior to taxes, prior to heartbreak and death, when we look back to innocence, we don't have to flip the bird at experience, right?

Maybe we do want that simpler time. Before desire created distances we aren't sure we can traverse. Before hurt pulled us into ourselves. When it was harder to tell the difference between dreams and the every day, because we could see our dreams more clearly, every day.

Maybe it is Dream, our dreams, that float above us and stitch together then and now. To remind us. To show us, it wasn't a stepping stone, maybe you stepped off the path, maybe you are on the wrong river bank, maybe you need to look back, re-route, face forward, open eyes, open heart, sun rising on new days, new feelings, new.

But first, reminisce for a spell...

Time Traveling with friends. And Pynchon.

I've taken up time traveling. It's not a new adventure, really, I've been doing it for some time. At St. James School, we would run trails at the Antietam Battlefield. My mind would drift, wondering what it would have been like, rewinding time, what they went through... but then a turn in the trail, a friend running past, something would bring me back to the present.

As someone who reads and writes, time travel is a vocational habit. Walking through the Natural History Museum, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, my mind is anything but stationary.

In this case, time travel takes a couple forms. It is going back in time with Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. Traveling to their world through the imagination of Thomas Pynchon and his historical novel, "Mason & Dixon," and through traveling with a group of friends/adventurers to find stone markers and walk the trail that Mason and Dixon surveyed and marked, the border of Maryland and U.S. history called the Mason-Dixon Line.

On Nov. 17, nine of us set off through early morning fog (there is always fog involved in time travel) to the Millington Wildlife Area, on the border of Maryland and Delaware. A couple folks in our group knew the park and we had GPS coordinates for where there was rumored to be a Mason-Dixon marker, off trail, somewhere in the woods.

Our group includes a couple of marine biologists and a card-carrying naturalist, who is working to catalog all the living things in Maryland. It's a fascinating band of vagrants to walk through the woods with, especially for me, who is fascinated by everything I encounter on a hike or a trail run, but no very little about what it is.

Following our directions, we hiked in on a marked Millington trail, then went off trail, blazing thick, blood-thirsty briers, log-crossing a stream, and wandering until we found the stone marker in question.

Finding a stone in the woods may sound unremarkable. But a stone that was laid in the 1760s during a survey/expedition that has become mythical in its own right; a stone put there by two men whose names any Marylander has heard practically since birth; a stone whose boundary has become synonymous with the Civil War; a stone about whose setters I am embarked on a literary journey with via the fantastic mind of Thomas Pynchon, well, that to me transforms it to remarkable. Then again, bourbon may have factored into that alchemy.

This was the "official" kickoff to our Mason Dixon Pynchon adventure. As we contemplated the stone and Mason and Dixon, I read the opening passage of Pynchon's novel aloud. That may be as far as a couple members of our group get in the book. ;) But as much as the book itself, and traversing one of the great writers of our time, for me the adventure is equal parts reading, experiencing the physical artifacts of history, experiencing the natural world and landscape around us that I haven't explored enough, and doing it with a group of friends equally disturbed enough to meet at 6:30 a.m. on a foggy Sunday morning to go look for a rock in the woods.

"And her marvelous stars expand"

I was floating on a raft with a half-full beer can in my hand. When I leaned my head back the tree branches and leaves mimicked the expanse of the stars. It was like they shared a set of opening wings. Of course, it could have been the beer...

"And her marvelous stars expand."

That's a line from Pablo Neruda. It opens itself up from within, "Residence on Earth," a book/extended meditation/extended poem that he wrote over the course of 20 years (1925-1945). He stopped writing it the year my mom was born.

But the night stars expanded this morning, when I read it, 65-plus years later. And they expanded back to last week, floating in the pool, thinking that same thing, but without giving it words, just awe, and a mental note.

Maybe Neruda is a time traveler, knowing that it might take him 20 years to let go of his poem, but that with it, its utterance, he might travel across decades or centuries.

Maybe it's just a service of the stars, flinging themselves out across the sky each night, like so much sand from a child's plastic shovel,

And by realizing that the stars are so much shovel-flung sand, and giving ourselves that scale in the scheme of things, we see that, smaller than sand, we can stand shoulder to shoulder with Neruda, separated by only a half-century, which is what, really?

Yeah, Neruda is a time traveler. He uses the stars, which he steps on, as they expand. But maybe it's the beer...