Birds on a Wire

The birds were making music
and for a minute they looked
like music,
busy notes on a staff.

On An Early Evening Walk

Sometimes life feels off-kilter.
And sometimes you feel lucky to be alive.
Today after work I took our usual walk by the
beach and what I saw did make me feel lucky.

The sky had that hint of pink at the top.

Then the blue of the sky deepened and the moon came out.

A grandpa and grandson walked and talked together.
Couples walked by; some held hands.
Two men were fishing.

Even the smallest and the rustiest things were beautiful.

It was that kind of night. 

Paper people from notes and pictures sent from children around the world to St. Paul's Chapel at Ground Zero. Faded now, on a recent September morning, the faces couldn't help but cheer so many of us who paused to look and to remember.

Where to?

Content

After the summer was over, when the pumpkins still needed a couple more weeks on the vine, on one of those Sunday afternoons my father might say, “How about a mystery ride?” He didn’t even have to get that last word out and the four of us would be running toward the car, his old, reliable International Scout.

The ride itself was part of the mystery. We took back roads. We’d end up at a pond we’d never seen before with a huge tire swing, where we could take our last swim of the year or at a farm tucked away someplace and we could feed the cows handfuls of hay. Once, in the middle of winter, we went on a ride up along Route 8. The hills were blanketed in snow and he found a park with trails we could explore and a few grills meant for summer picnicking. He dusted the snow off and we roasted mini hot dogs and marshmallows on sticks.    

Often our rides led us to a carnival which was what I would be hoping for all along. We would spy the outline of a ferris wheel  just beyond the bend in the road and we couldn’t be contained. A carnival!  My brothers would race off for a haunted house or some rickety little roller coaster. My sister and I would head for the Tilta-whirl. We threw darts at balloons and never seemed to win prizes. We’d watch our chins fall to our knees in the fun house mirrors. 

I passed a carnival the other day and I thought about my father.  I wondered how he’d found those knock-about, homespun carnivals on the far edges of the state and how he knew about the windy river.  I thought too about how those mystery rides could shake away that Sunday night feeling, the wistfulness that can roll in just as night falls. 

We’d barnstorm into the house, our mother waiting to hear about all this latest adventure. We were sun-warmed, dirt-stained or snow- covered, so tired and so content.

28

I love the sound of 28.

All the days and months and years that make it up.

This morning I looked at a picture of us. We were 23 and 27, just married and beaming. In other pictures from that day, 28 years ago today, I am laughing.  He’s made some witty aside or just been flat-out funny. I have been laughing ever since.  

All these years later we have a history and treasures: our children, our family and friends, our little place by the beach, and a life laced with laughs.  On even the saddest night, he cracks a little joke and the world rights itself. 

On a City Street

Words left near Union Square on a Monday morning.
"The only credential the city asked was the boldness to dream.
 For those who did, it unlocked its gates and its treasures,
not caring who they were or where they came from."
                                             ~ Moss Hart.

Empty Nest

I hadn’t realized just how much I loved the noise of motherhood, when the sounds of

the band would kick up from the basement as they played their songs and I made dinner or when their friends were over late and the laughter tripped out of the den and down the hall and filled up the house.

A lively kind of hectic.

On Sunday Morning

For Free

Visiting New Haven the other day, I walked past this small sign.
I kept on for half a block and turned back.
So what's free? The wrought-iron fence? The plants?!
Whose good-humored gesture was this?
Or maybe it was a gentle reminder:
Be. (free)

                             
                                                                  9/11/12
           

If a Bird Flies Due South...

The question went something like this:

Five eighths of the pizza’s weight comes from its toppings. The pizza weighs ______.

Cheese makes up two thirds of the toppings. How much did the cheese weigh?

It was a stumper. Fifteen minutes passed as we drove from one town to another, an aunt and three nephews, and we were still working on the problem. The school year was just a couple of days old and there was pre-algebra homework to do, a bit of fraction/multiplication and division review. They were good at math but the summer’s pixie stick dust had settled in as it always does in July and August and it hadn't floated off yet. 

I don’t get it, my nephew said.

I wanted to say, honey, you’re in the wrong car. I shuddered a little thinking of math word problems I’d known. They always seemed to involve cars moving across interstates at 52 and 58 miles an hour, one from Des Moines, the other Cleveland and we were to determine who would get to Big Pine first. Inevitably a bird flying due south overhead from Burlington would somehow factor in. There we’d be, my pencil and me, figuring and figuring as night closed in.

I wanted to be a math gal; don’t get me wrong. I spent a good part of my junior year in high school trying to untilt the seesaw that was my SAT score. My math teacher couldn’t have been kinder. She’ d stay after school to help a number of us who were flailing about. She cheerily insisted we would get it. I loved her optimism. The score went up but only through sheer will. I never did quite get it.

College started and I had my eye on a dream:  I would be a physical therapist. I dove into anatomy and physiology;  I couldn’t wait for biology. Physics, though, loomed large. I'd taken a  math class to get ready. My professor had office hours once a week and I became a frequent guest. 

I can still see him walking toward his office one afternoon when he spied me from the far end of the hallway. He started to scuttle sideways, like a hermit crab at the sound of footsteps. He was looking for a side door to dash into, a quick get-away. There wasn’t one.  Come along, he said and let out an audible sigh that trailed behind him into the office.

I kept at it but it didn’t end like Rudy. I had a 68 or 69, a whisper under a C-and for all the attempts, it remained a  D+. I never did get to physics.

One morning, that same semester in English class, we had to read something we’d written.  I can still see the guy who was sitting behind me as I got up to leave at the end of class. He had his baseball cap pulled down so low you could hardly find him.  I liked the sound of that, he said, or something like it.

That? I’d asked.

That thing you wrote.

Really.  Well alright.

                                                    ~      ~      ~

Back in the car we were still trying to figure out the cheese pizza thing. My nephew wanted to know if he'd ever use algebra. "Trust me," I said. "You will. Besides, you like pizza." He worked some more on the problem.

A week later I asked how the math was going. "Fine," he said.

What the Wind Left Us

So when does it get better?
A bunch of years ago, a student was going through a rough time that wouldn't let up.
I told him things do get better and it sounded like little more than a cliche.
When? he wanted to know. How?
How do you know anyway? he seemed to be saying.
The thing was I didn't know and yet I did.

I thought of those questions all these years later
as I walked by the beach yesterday when a storm started to kick up.
The waves pounded the seawall over and over. The seas churned.
The water matched the gray, brooding sky. The sun stayed away.
The wind pushed back.

Morning came today.
Sands had shifted. Rocks and shells were strewn along the sidewalks
and the boardwalk. But the sun was out and the wind left soft
pink petals along the way.

Gathered

                                              They were brown leaves from a
                                               distance. Up close they were
                                               a party of sparrows.                                         

In Fall

Curious

I’ve grown fond of Curiosity, the Mars Rover.

I know Curiosity is the size of an SUV and weighs about 1,900 pounds.

But somehow it seems like a friendly and brave household appliance, tooling around Mars’ dusty surface, 33 million or 157 million miles from home.

I started rooting for it in early August when the NASA folks talked about the “seven minutes of terror,” those moments when the rover would either make it through the top of the Martian atmosphere (at a brisk 13,000 mph) and land well or it wouldn’t . All that work, all of those years thinking and planning and sketching and designing and redesigning and pushing on by all those scientists and engineers hinged on seven minutes.  

I also thought of some of the appliances I know well, the washer that does a kind of samba through part of most wash cycles, the computer that sometimes decided to take whole afternoons to boot up. I didn’t have much faith. How could this work?

Yet it did. Within minutes on the ground, Curiosity was snapping pictures and letting us see.

Today, it was testing out its bionic arm. Soon it will scoop up soil samples. Eventually it will drill through rocks and analyze them.  

It will roam on.

So, I check in now and then on NASA’s website to see what Curiosity is up to.    

I like how its “eyes” seem to blink back at us like a sweet Labrador Retriever and how it makes me look skyward often.

I find myself seeking info on Mars. (I didn’t recall from my school days that Mars can be 35 million or a couple hundred million miles away depending on our rotations around the sun. I didn’t know a Mars day is called a sol – such a pretty name -  or that each morning Mission Control “wakes” the little guy to a song just like it used to do for the space crews. One morning, it was Louis Armstrong’s “When You Wish Upon a Star,” another sol it was Florence and the Machine’s “Cosmic Love.”)

I like what it reminds me, of what comes from collaboration, from deliberate mathematical and scientific thinking and from outsized creative imagining.

It reminds me to be curious.  

Patterns

At Walden Pond

     
       

Walden Pond has become a kind of touchstone

for us. The first time we visited, on a lark,

it was late summer and the pond was fringed

with families. Kids were jumping and splashing

in the water; laughter echoed off the rounded trails.

Still in all the evident delight, a kind of peace

settled over the pond.

A solace resides there and each time we go,

we find it.