Cast off the sea monkeys

It may that pool and ocean water have leaked into my brain. That combination of salt and chlorine, which, when you add Corona and multiply by no set schedule after driving 14 hours, sets your mind on simmer. Also known as vacation mode.

It may be that my brain is just slightly overfilled with thoughts. Like the legs of a girl maybe equal parts surfer and redneck, which were a little too long for her frame but all the more striking for their gangliness.

Leaked water, overfull thoughts, legs too long, whatever, it adds up to unsettled mind. It won't quite relax with the body. It has a different agenda, without the means or cooperation to get there.

Still our lives resemble dreams... realms of fantastic desire and possibility, like the kingdom of sea monkeys promised in the back pages of comic books of my childhood. -Campbell McGrath

Maybe Campbell McGrath is right and our dreams are sea monkeys, never as cool or promising or fully realized as we want them to be, believed them to be when we saw them advertised in the back of comic books.

Forty years is beyond the midpoint for dreams. There is still time to realize them, but elapsed time, energy and youth are all factors.

Our trip south is a beginning to summer. It is about family. It's about taking our girls to Disney World. Disney electrifies dreams; it blasts them from a star-loaded bazooka. It takes life's inconveniences, like waiting in line, and puts a princess or a pot of gold or wild ride at the end. We would do well to keep Disney in our minds, to hold on to and reach for our dreams.

At home I'm tired. I haven't been working out since my back spasm-induced ambulance ride. The routine isn't right. It's not fully me. The heart and soul is missing from the motions.

Your mojo can turn up in strange places. Mine gets cranking watching Washington Nationals games. Swimming with the girls or riding through the Haunted Mansion with Anna. Watching Ava rally through the Disney World heat or running a couple miles, doing push-ups and talking about life with Robin. Reading McGrath, Roger Angell, Tracy Smith and John Brandon.

Being on Florida vacation time. Looking to breath deep and fill my lungs for a return. A return to self. A return to place. A return on investment.

To go elbow or shoulder deep into and after dreams. To cast off the sea monkeys.

Caution: Looks Off Bridges

I can't say if he was in the Army. It was just a jacket. Could have picked it up anywhere. The Army jacket is the second thing I noticed.

First is that he was stopped, standing on the Frederick Douglass Bridge. People don't stop on bridges and just look off at the river. But he did. Stopped time and watched planes land at Reagan. Or the tide. I don't know what he was looking at, but he was stopped and looking.

About 15 years ago we drank beer standing on the Bay Bridge. We were on our way to a Grateful Dead show at RFK (what turned out to be their second to last there) and an accident on the bridge stopped traffic. I had never gotten out of a car and looked off the Bay Bridge. It called for a Bud 10oz.

I've been reading notebooks lately. Charles Simic's, Campbell McGrath's, Sam Shepard's and Gary Snyder's. Writing in a notebook is like stopping on a bridge. Trying to take that pause and get your soul around it. A moment where you keep yourself from just moving forward without looking. Without stopping. Without thinking.

Like the dude in the Army jacket, I stop and look off bridges. I should get a bumper sticker to warn folks.

Letter to Campbell McGrath

Consequently, you will know how to piece them together into a vision of your own design. -James Wright, "A Letter to Franz Wright"

I am not in Italy. Nor have I ever been. I take you and James Wright at your descriptions of it, which I couldn't touch if I were standing there.

Like both of you, I am a father. But again, a difference: I have girls.

I, too, have smashed my crude hammer against a wall of jewels and tried to gather up the pieces. I have wanted to collect both wall and splintered hammer and set them at my daughters' feet when they are ready (if they should have any use for a shattered hammer).

I like that your sons are with you, creating and sharing your Italy. I love that their words are your words, a distinct difference from James Wright's letter to his son, then distant from him.

"The hopes and dreams of fathers for their sons" (or daughters) and the desire to pass along something worthwhile, maybe even beautiful, of my own hopes and dreams and life.

I read your letter to James Wright and then re-read his letter to his son Franz and the words and sentiments swirl into deep blue water and I can't decide whether to watch or jump in