Cheshire Cat Moons and Something

Ava and I are lying on the trampoline, watching the clouds run fast by an early daylight moon.

"Look Dad, it's a Cheshire Cat moon!" That's what we call the crescent moons that look like the Cheshire Cat's smile floating in the sky.

Ava is convinced that the moon is moving toward the clouds. People thought for centuries that the sun revolved around the earth, so who am I to tell her she is wrong? We look closer and I show her the clouds moving. And fast.

"What did you say about air, Dad? That it grows up to become wind?"

"You mean what did I write? I wrote that wind is air that has learned to speak. But how did you know that?"

"Grammy told me at the bus stop. Wind is air that learned to speak, that's right."

Her nine-year-old mind contains the wind and the sky and the moon.

Twenty-five or so years ago, someone changed the word "stuff" for me forever. What are you thinking about? "Oh, stuff." And later, stuff was explained in a handwritten and doodled letter in the mail. And that word has made me smile ever since.

My mind has been on the changing nature of words, language, how different words can mean different things to people. Like stuff. Like geraniums, which for us mean my grandmother Shoey, who spent as much time as she could in her gardens and greenhouse in Towson, and then Easton. Who planted geraniums. So we hear "geranium" and Shoey is there.

"Something" is a word with that kind of loadedness. "Remind me to tell you something later." "What are you thinking about?" "Something." "He/She's really something." "I've got something on my mind."

Blue is loaded. Tattoos are loaded. Cutting the grass is loaded. Running, cutting the grass, and the shower are the three places I do my most creative thinking.

Loaded words. A personal lexicon or vocabulary. Words imbued with personal meaning. That would really be something.

Weekend

Weekends are silent. Listen. Nothing. But I'm still up at 4:30am. Restless. Weekends are silent, except for coffee beans grinding.

Except for lacrosse and Anna's eyes big, heart pounding as she clears up the sideline and passes to a friend.

Weekends are silent. No Microsoft Excel, the fu**ing scourge of all programs. I cringe when I open it. Be quiet, Excel, it's the weekend. No listening for traffic. No morning radio shows.

Weekends are silent. Except for the aluminum crunch of beer cans opening, and contemplating the blue of a Dale's Pale Ale can--does the blue change as the can empties?

Except for the bounce of the trampoline and girls screaming earlier than neighbors might care for.

The other day I wrote this in a notebook. Bouquets of blue. Or maybe I didn't, but it seems like I should have, blue being on my mind and all.

If the weekends are silent, then I have only what Merwin says, "I have only what I remember." There is no record.

From what I can recall, silence is golden. Maybe we need more of it. When I run without music, I can hear my feet hitting the pavement, feel my heart beating, like Anna's must. I speed up over the last mile, trying to leave nothing, spend it all. My breathing is becoming ragged, shorter, strides faster, arms restrained, low, shoulders working with legs, running hard until I cross the tree in our front yard that marks my finish line.

Weekends are silent. Until they fill themselves with sound.

Worthy

What am I worth? I am damaged. I damage. I get it wrong. Even when I get it right, I'm not sure. I'm selfish. I have self-doubt, which isn't as big as my insecurities. I maybe can't trust and maybe that makes me untrustworthy.

I am not worth anything. Not a single thought.

These are the tough moments. The dark night of the soul moments. When love feels one-sided. When the hole I've dug feels like an abyss. When I can't find Black Sabbath or Metallica or Korn or something loud on the radio to refocus and live in sound.

And what I would not give to hear you speak. Anyone speak. Give me something. Something to play over in my head to replace what's there now.

Sometimes we don't know our worth. Sometimes our worth resides in others. It doesn't matter if we are worth our children, our families, because they are there. We are a part of them. If we don't feel worthy, we better act it, because they need us to be, to be there, to be worthy for them.

Anyone born feeling worthy, who never questions it is probably an asshole. An existential crisis is food for the soul, it makes it grow. Even the soul, in order to stand up, to know what it feels like to be high, has to get knocked down, to feel low. Sometimes it would be nice to pick our lows. And maybe order our highs off a menu.

Not being worthy never seemed to bother Wayne and Garth. They made it work. James Worthy, the Laker great, is certainly Worthy. My favorite baseball player is Jayson Werth, but he spells it differently so he has figured out how to avoid the problem.

Maybe that's what we need. To change the spelling. To rethink the problem. Change the meaning. We've established that I am stuck on blue these days. Remake it.

"How was your day?"

"It was blue."

And to know what that means. And that it means different things to different people. What shade? Hhhhm, good question.

Ultimately our worth is what we make it. Both how we feel about ourselves, about life, and what the people we love, the people who matter to us, what they feel about us. Sometimes they can buoy us, can remind us of our worth when we are low. We need those people.

Or maybe we just need to get "worthy" tattooed on our wrist, or somewhere we can see it, a scar, a takeaway, a reminder that we are.

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.

I hope they wear shawls

No one wears shawls anymore. Maybe they do in Venice, I've never been. John Singer Sargent would be bummed if they didn't. So much of "Street in Venice" depends on her shawl.

When you are a writer and your first job out of college is working for an art museum, you start to think, and write, about art. Sargent is one of those guys that struck the right balance for me in style, substance, emotion, palette. And like some of my favorite writers, he went after every day life. He didn't miss the moments where everything comes to a head. That singular moment where it's all happening, but it's up to you to figure out what.

The girl with the shawl. The cat to the right who can't take his eyes off of her. Her walk, the way she kicks her skirt. Where she is in the street, her pace, the idea that she is going to be out of view soon, so if homeboy wants to say something, to get her attention, he better do it. But he can't, he just stares, struck.

I don't think he has a chance anyway. She is clearly thinking of other things. Maybe she's just left being with her guy. Maybe she's contemplating if it's time to get out of Venice, go somewhere new. Maybe she needs a drink.

Red wine is good for warmth.

Venice seems like a place you'd drink red wine. I don't guess the craft brew movement has caught on there.

Maybe she's got a Josh Ritter song stuck in her head.

It's only a change of time.

Maybe her shawl isn't doing it's job, it's cold and her heart can't keep time's changes. Maybe she makes these walks more than she wants to.

Each time I start shaking, shivering, have to breathe.

It's the shawl though, the skirt hem. I lose Venice for them. I lose the guy's gaze. It's what's on her mind. Whether it is life, whether it is love, whether it is want.

I still want a chance. More than anything.

I've never been to Venice. I don't know how people dress there. But I hope they wear shawls.

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.

On Air

Air is possibility. We don't even notice it until it adds voice and motion as wind. When air becomes active. When I run I can't drink in enough air, filling my lungs, clearing them, repeat. When the big shit in our lives happen, when heavy or tense or anger or sad happen, we instinctively take deep breaths, looking for air, but not naming it.

Before we got too smart, the ancient Greeks, pre-Socrates, had the Universe broken down into air, water, earth and fire. The elements. Now we've named everything so fancily, we can't even get our minds around it. But we can breathe.

I'm being bird stalked when I run these days. Mostly by male cardinals. For a couple months now, every time I run, I get swooped by one. Almost always when I've forgotten they are watching me, and a fastball of red, or maybe it's a sinker, I don't have a batter's eye anymore, swings by, standing out against green trees and air. Once one lit for a second on a fence right next to the rail trail, nodding as I went by, and I smiled at him. Birds have air figured out.

Air is part of what my heron tattoo is about. The heron inhabits both air and water. Maybe he looks at home in both, or maybe not quite in either. I wanted to make sure both elements were part of the design. Herons inhabit and invoke both.

Wind is air at its most vocal. Air that says, don't fu** with me. The big bad wolf has nothing on wind. I lie in bed and I can hear the wind talking to the trees, unsure who speaks louder in that conversation. I drive over the Bay Bridge to work and feel wind push the car, which when you're that high above the water, that slight reminder says enough. Be kind wind. Be kind.

Brenda Hillman writes the elements. She is working through books on each. Her "Pieces of Air in the Epic," moves through air. She reminds us how cut off, out of sync we are with air:

Wind will rend the suburbs
With information seeking nature

or more depressingly:

They were mostly raised
in tanklike SUVs called Caravan or   Quest; winds rarely visited them.

When we're inside, packed away in our house, or seat-belted comfortably in our cars, we forget that air can be wind. That we absolutely need it to live, to breathe, but it doesn't need us. What if we get so comfortable, so cut off, that the winds rarely visit us? That would suck. No, that would blow.

Hillman brings us back with writing. I think Air is why I run. Elemental Air, filling my lungs to bursting, on the final mile home, Jimi Hendrix's "Stone Free," in my ears, heart pounding, talking to Air. In conversation. I'm not sure who is speaking, who is listening, who is breathing.