And sometimes...

And sometimes there are a Frank and a Will just when you need them.

I was driving along early in the morning, that quick dash to get ahead of a busy day
and then a thunk and a steady drumbeat not coming from the radio and the messy rumble of a flat.
I limped the car along to a side street, pulling into a lot full of truck trailers. I was only about a mile from home and considered for a minute riding on the flat. In the lot, I saw a tent tucked in between some cars and trucks and a dog tied up in front of the tent. He eyed me and I eyed him back. 

I wish I could say I knew how to change a tire. There was that one keystone cop-ish time I tried to help my husband as we both bumbled about, tangling with lug nuts that just didn't want to let loose.
So it remained on that back burner to-do list: "learn at last to change a tire!!" like "learn more Italian" and "reorganize the kitchen drawers," those items that somehow never quite make it to the top of the list but should.

I called home and then I remembered my husband was out talking a walk. I was about to call Triple A when two guys  pulled into the lot. They were heading into work, cheery as anything on an early Sunday morning. Before I could say a word, the man who later introduced himself as Will said, "Got a flat?" and his buddy Frank said, "We'll change it for you."

Turns out, Frank said, I ran over a long thin wrench that was lying in the road. It wedged in and tore a massive hole in the tire. "Would ya look at that!" he said. "What are the chances?" It took some doing to get it out.

And of course the spare was flat; happens all the time they said; the spare loses air waiting around in the trunk. They filled the spare with air; they pulled off  the flattened tire and got the spare on. I had seven dollars in my purse. I said I would be back with more. They didn't even want to take the seven dollars.

"Nah," Frank said. "We like helping people. It's what you do, you know?"   

The Words We Keep

She was sitting in a bookstore in New York, in the toy section, with a little boy who played at a Lego table. On her arm was a tattoo with words that wrapped themselves around her biceps and down her arm. I’d never seen so many words on an arm and they were delicately written.  I wondered what the words meant to her and why she’d decided to keep them, probably forever, there on her arm.

I was just breezing into the bookstore to buy a present. I bought the book, took the elevator down and turned around and rode back up.  I had to ask her about her tattoo. Was it a story? A song she loved?  So I asked.

She smiled and said, “They’re poems.”  She’d written one for her mother.  The other poems were for her sisters.

We keep words in so many places, notes tucked inside books, quotes on a fridge, cards with words we love in a favorite box or a kitchen drawer, words on our walls. Words that anchor us for a couple of minutes or make us laugh or remind us. She can look at her arm and find her mother there and her sisters too.

                                                 The old barn door drew me in.
                                                   

Poems on Wednesdays

I arrived a little late to the poetry party but I am so glad I decided to go.

I’ve hopscotched around the world through poems. Found and lost myself in poems. Felt a little less alone. Tried on other points of view. Felt the cold of a winter and the loneliness that lived there; danced with daffodils and listened to the crickets in a poem.

For a while, I kept a poem in my purse, folded up somewhere there at the bottom of the tumult but there.     

One day at a bookstore I found the March 2004 edition of Poetry. Inside were a few poems by Atsuro Riley. Even his named sounded like a poem.  The first one, “Picture” started like this:

“This is the house (and jungle-strangled yard) I come from/ and carry.”

The five poems were thick with imagery, taking me to a South I didn’t know.  Told through the point of view of a young boy, we see his Mama, “mainly: boiling jelly. She’s the apron-yellow (rickracked) plaid in there.”

He takes us to his front porch: “Our (in-warped) wooden porch door is kick-scarred and/splintering. The hinges of it rust-cry and –rasp in time with/ every Tailspin-wind…”

Rust-cry! How does Riley know to put his words together in this way? How does someone make such lovely, lively mayhem with the same stack of half a million words everyone has to pick from? He crosshatches words and backbends others. He dares.

He ends one poem with these lines:

“Ex-anchored for example/

Yesterdaddy./

Zags.”

His poems tell stories I am still puzzling out.

   

Traveling

 12,554 miles.

I haven’t gone anywhere.

Yet I’ve gone everywhere.

I first got on the bike in May 2005 and I couldn’t get the pedal around once.

My knee was miffed. Round as a pancake as it was after surgery, it was hard on the eye and it seemed to know it, so it decided not to bend.  After many days getting on the bike with the pedal not budging, one afternoon at physical therapy I started to cry. I tucked my head down as if that would somehow make me invisible but an older gentleman who’d been walking on the treadmill paused on his way to a weight machine. “It’ll go `round eventually.”  When it does, he said, just keep going.

It did. And I have.

We bought a stationary bike, carted it upstairs and there, when the sun is near rising, I hop on.

A few months into it, I wondered how far I was going. So I copied a map of the U.S., mapped a route and kept track of the miles. Four miles a day.  After five weeks, I made it across New York into Pennsylvania.  It took me two years and a month to make it to the Pacific. After a while I didn’t map the route anymore but I penciled in the miles. Four miles, five miles each morning, now six.

I didn’t see the pretty back roads I would have loved to have meandered by. Didn’t ride the just-waking streets of Chicago or stop to admire a sudden field of sunflowers just around a bend, didn't smell the sweet tang of just-cut grass.I didn’t see a river threading its way through a hillside or a small town as the evening lights start to twinkle on.

But a few minutes into each ride, something always shifted. With Joni Mitchell playing or Chaka Khan, Wye Oak or the B-52’s, my mind would flutter off elsewhere. The world would wash away and I’d start traveling.

This week, it turns out, I’ve gone 12,554 miles. A grand number built on four and five and six. I’ve discovered there really is something to what Lao Tzu, the Chinese philosopher,  said so many, many years ago:  a journey of a thousand miles does begin with a single step, or once around with a pedal.

                                   ~                                             ~                                           

282 miles - London to Paris

32 miles - the Greenway bike path around the island of Manhattan

1,599 miles - Key West to the tip of Maine

655.8 miles – the length of the Pacific Coast Highway

13,171 - the span of all of the parts of the Great Wall of China

1,290 miles - Victoria Falls, Zambia to Mt. Kilimanjaro

312. 4 miles - Lisbon, Portugal to Madrid, Spain

2,981 miles – Connecticut to San Francisco

Tangible

I heard a radio guy talking about Derek Jeter the other day. In a conversation with a caller, he was saying that Jeter didn’t have the best arm, the quickest legs or the strongest bat. Yet he will one day be called a baseball immortal.  

What is it then that makes Jeter so good, if not his arm, his bat or quickness?

The intangibles, he said.

The intangibles. I am a big fan of intangibles but the tangibles seem pretty clear to me:

Derek Jeter loves what he does.

He works at it every day.

He listens to himself, not the naysayers or the know-it-alls.

He’s a team guy. As he reaches milestone after milestone, every once in a while he will admit he was “a little excited” to move up a rung on the all-time hits list. But then he starts talking about the team and what his teammates did.  Every time.  

He’s clutch. When the game is on the line and he’s up at bat, he has said he knows he can get a hit.

He believes he will win. What a way to make your way through the world. Will I win? Yes.

And when he says it, the funny thing is, he’s absolutely humble. He just knows he has something inside himself he can draw on.

He leads the team in his own quiet way.

He is never effusive or ebullient,

just rock steady and reliable as a new dawn.