The Gardener
Santa Clara, CA 95051
theroot_
SUNDAY THUNDER
Some writings are etched in stone -- if only I could do this in a drawl, adopting good ole country boy slow, hazy days. Maybe imagine it in the key of F# major, ad lib. Or any way you care to play it, keeping in mind I'm this good ole, old California guy.
Two nights from now the moon will be full. This has an effect my readers have called dire. The oddity this time round is not being upset.
Socrates advised: know thyself. Well and good and so? One way or another, change happens regardless of what I know.
“Everybody must get stoned,” for instance, in the good ole 60s. And I did. But after all, what the hell . . . it just didn't really work out. So a little traveling music, please. Let's do a slow fade, like a black and white photo finished in a tray of exhausted fixer. As for hallucinations, there's never been any film sensitive enough to get them.
So it's peace at last. Sunday. Susan in the front yard with her wild flowers, culling out the wildest. A white sedan appears. It's slowing by the curb, but she doesn't look up. Soon there's another. Then another. In fact a line of them, honking! One has a sign on the door, Just Married. Susan wears ear buds, listening to music while she works.
The entourage files around the corner, filling the Court. Doors swing open and the celebrants spill into the street. Some are spacing out, pandemic style. A basketball thrown in there might not flip back, like a pinball machine on tilt.
To further jostle this sense of kilter, suddenly I recall a letter written in 1957, to my sister, while I was stationed in Japan. A colony of ants had been busy under the asphalt walk between our chow hall and the microwave shack. A small mound was going up. It reminded me of Mount Fuji, having a hole in the center. Their degree of organization, I said, was remarkable, considering how each seemed to move randomly. She replied, saying how the description was entertaining.
And how is this relevant? Don't ask me. I'm just the scribe. Though it would have been easy to make a story out of it.
Twinkie arrives to sit on my cushion in the backyard. I've been telling her that birds who visit are my friends. She likes being in the afternoon sun, getting all warm and melted. It was like this before, yesterday afternoon, when the hummer showed up, amazing Susan as it zoomed in, she said, like a dive bomber. And now here it is again, hovering, bobbing up and down and clearly visiting just us, not its feeder a few feet away. Instead it wants to amaze Twinkie by staying right over her head, about three inches behind her ears. She doesn't move a paw. It's not easy to amaze Twinkie.
Here's that mini-helicopter sound again. All's calm, and not much really to write about. Twinkie has plopped her paw on my writing arm. She's purring and no, I'm not going there. It's not a drawl.
I close my eyes, listen to my nose, and there is a silent symphony playing from before I was born.
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The Gardener
Santa Clara, CA 95051
theroot_