All You Need to Know...

* Photo by Ian Miller, of "Seat Protector" fame.

The Worst Seat

I got to mass late today. I had to sit in the worst seat in the house. The one behind the big, square pillar. You can't see the priest from there, so the voice of the gospel seems to echo out from the small, square mausoleum at the back of the altar, the little box that holds the body and blood of Christ until his return. We won't need it then, I presume.

Not seeing father allowed me to notice other things too, like the crucifix that shines silver and gold, pulled and stretched into shape like taffy at the county fair, like the Christ of the midway, hung between the fried dough and the fresh squeezed lemonade, right there where I am.

Behind the pillar.

At the fair.

Seat Protector

Oh Ian, young Ian, so cautious you are in the early summer of your life. I hear you in the stall next door; the crinkling of your seat protector gives your position away. Just five feet from you but worlds away I void into the void, free, unworried, liberated in my torpid mid-life. "You don't know where their cheeks have been!" is your excuse, but I understand. I am a man, with four-score years of sitting under me. I too have relied upon such frail devices in my youth. But no more. I want ALL that life sends my way, young man. I want to live on the edge, give on the edge, sit on the edge, and shit on the edge of life's seat, to risk ALL for these sweet, seated moments of freedom! Come, join me young man, and put your flimsy paper youth behind you.

Spring

Cherry blossoms pink, and tender as baby's breath. Fresh cut grass.

Birds chirping and chattering love songs in the trees.

Dogs begging for scones, caught between howl and bark, the no-man's land of "maybe," eyebrows and ears alternating between up and down, now standing, now skulking, now sitting...

"Maybe, maybe, all the world's a scone,
and as long as he's chewing it's STILL maybe!"

Yes, a piece, but I'll keep all the orange icing for myself, beloved cur.

The breeze is soft, laden with the edges of rain in some far off place that is not here, and the boy cat chases the girl cat from behind the garage and out amongst the dandelions spotting the grass, the ones that ducked their heads under Jen's mower blades last night. It is good to be in charge of...

...Spring.

A Nice Memorial Day

I hope that you had a nice Memorial Day
I hope that you cleaned up your car
I hope that the sales were all more than ok
And I hope that you cut your whole yard

I hope that your sun shone on Memorial Day
And I hope that your breezes blew soft
I hope that your nice family's picnic was fun
And their laughter helped hold you aloft

I hope that your little white balls all flew straight
And no roughs found their way to your games
But I hope for a moment you paused while you played
And I hope you remembered our names

A weekend-plus-one is the prize that we won
For the deaths we embraced long ago
And I know that it's hard to remember what for
But the boys and me thought you should know

That when you plant plants deep on Memorial Day
We'd like you to think of the roots
That were torn from the earth on that terrible day
When we fell in our worn combat boots

The Best Things

The best things in life fade slowly away.
They die unannounced and unintended:

The last night of passion with a beloved spouse;
Your little girl's last jump into your arms when you come home from work;
The last hug from an aging parent;

It is a mercy, I suppose.

Who could bear it if we knew?

Meditations on Air travel

Rain beads up and drizzles down the window like falling tears, as if the plane itself mourned for the crowded condition of humanity and for the hidden fool that's decided a fart would somehow, in somebody's world, be appropriate for this situation. I don't even know how he or she manages to lift a cheek, so squeezed are we. I got nothing else to do but sit here and think on this gray metal death trap.

I've eaten my pretzels.

The air is solid white. There's no vision, only light, and a wing. I am directly over the left wing, so close I could touch it by leaning out my porthole window.

It's keeping me alive, this wing...

We've been flying low over the clouds for three hours now, and it has been a revelation. In places resembling massed white brains and in others snowy mountain redoubts, I can see now that the cloud tops are where God hides the things he has waiting for men! Innumerable clefts and valleys unseen from below store up his wrath in small, white-shaded packets, scattered across an endless cloudscape as far as the eye can see. No wonder human history is such a long charade of tragedy. God's supplies dominate the battlefield. He can outlast us! If I could somehow crawl out onto that long, bent wingtip and vomit down into those gnarled crevices I surely would, on behalf of all the farting crushed and suffering.

So here's a word to the wise, all you philosophers, theologians, economists, generals, and politicians: now would be a good time to surrender! You cannot possibly win! I've seen the armada, vast as the continent itself, and beyond.

You cannot possibly win.

The Emergency Broadcast System

"This is a test of the emergency broadcast system." Remember those days, when the tv would go blank and you'd hear that atonally high-pitched, unnervingly extended electronic beep? I was just sitting out front on a wet, sullen Saturday morning, having coffee with the slugs. It's easy to see where they've been: you can see their slime trails shimmering on the sidewalk in the haze. Examining those trails I suppose it's reasonable to assume that you can also tell where they're headed, and I wonder:

Is that how God looks at me?

Jennifer slept out at the lake with the kids last night, and all the world smells like a saturated leech field. It's been a very wet July. It's been a lot of other things too. I was reading from the Psalms, #50, actually, when I encountered the following: If I were hungry I would not tell YOU! The world is mine, and the fullness thereof. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving, pay your vows unto The Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me.

"...call upon me in the day of trouble. I will deliver YOU, and you shall glorify ME." Okay, God, I will take up that challenge. This IS the day of trouble. That horrible, atonal beeping you hear is me, praying. I have written 5 very specific things on pages 40 and 41 of The Book of Psalms. They should not be unduly burdensome for you. As you deliver me, I will glorify you by writing of your specific deliverances in this blog. That seems pretty straight forward to me. Deal?

Deal.

Searching For Cell Service

It took 29 hours, but it happened, sure as fragrant blue smoke rises from my pine fire to settle out over the Sacandaga River: Levi is bored in nature. Bored by nature. Bored with nature. Bored of nature. How can I tell? He is flopping on granite, working algebraic solutions in the smoothed dirt of our campsite. Yesterday at this time it was all perfect. Today he misses his friends and his cell phone. He chooses Spaghettios over hot dogs on a sharpened stick.

The river below rolls on, grinding boulders into rocks into stones into pebbles into sand, ever "Shushhhing" us in its long journey south. I am content to be "shushhed," even after 29 hours, but I am 48 and my voice has been overused and abused for the last 30 years. I want to be "shushhed," to be soothed and quieted by this maternal spring. But Levis is only 14 and hasn't yet even found his voice.

The river can only do so much in a day...