a journal of...

A journal among friends...
art, words, home, people and places

Friday, May 18, 2018

A word about the nothing of something

It's been raining for three days now, on and off, a drizzle here and there during the day, a downpour late at night or early in the morning.  The reports gloomily predict the same for the next week, and hold up as the bright spot the mid-seventies temperature, cooler and lighter than the eighties we'd otherwise bear.


Meanwhile, I have been slowing down, sitting on the porch with my cup of hot water in the early mornings, after my swim, and then later after dinner until the dark comes, enjoying the sound of rain or almost rain and the light scent of the gardenia my kind sister-in-law Sue gave me for Mother's Day.  This morning I opened my eyes and didn't pull on my suit as usual...my swim, for once, didn't seem to matter; instead I pulled a book of Hawaiian stories down from the table behind me and began it over again, though the marker I'd left in it was already past the middle pages.  This time I read word by word, catching images my eyes hadn't taken in the first time.  When I got up an hour later, my side a bit pinched by the way I'd been holding the book, I thought of several errands I could do before I had to set out my uncle's breakfast, but my new mood talked me out of those for the moment.

It's not a bad thing to unload the requirements of one's life every now and then.  This minute I am hearing the yard-trash truck lumbering up the street below my house, and it's not bothering me too much that I haven't taken the bin full of tree debris out to meet them...nice people who greet me with a cheery good morning every week, and don't mind if I have forgotten to dump the rainwater out of the bin first.  It'll wait til next time.

So instead I've begun this post, for the first time without a title.  I'm usually centered about that, not always knowing what it will become but always with a phrase or word that seems to unlock my word-hoard, as the Beowulf translations call it.  It's not that I'm floundering here...in fact, only yesterday I had a perfectly good idea of what I wanted to impart this morning, and eventually I will get to it on this page, but first this rainy-weather wandering through the land of the slow riser.

My neighbor will appreciate particularly appreciate this, since she claims to enjoy taking the morning bit by bit, her robe tucked around her, her coffee in hand, hearing or reading the news, clearing her energies for the busier parts of the day.  My feet usually slide off the bed and onto the floor in one quick direction after another; morning is my get-things-done time of day.  Right now, on her wave length, it feels restorative.  In a minute I will go down to get my cup and sit on the porch, pondering whatever, and accepting whatever the day brings, without much guidance from me.

But back to what I originally had in mind to relate here.  Though it has nothing to do with slow mornings or letting go, I realize now that there is a sort of thin thread between them...perhaps you will see it, too?

I was going to call this post Cats and Boys.  Two days ago, coming back early from the pool, the ordinarily traffic-clogged road in front of the middle and elementary school was emptied by the state teacher's determined march on the capital, and with the lane to myself I passed a young mother on one side of the street, holding in her arms her boy child, who was intently watching a huge construction site rumbling into motion on the other side.  The mother was pointing across, and the boy...the baby boy, no more than a year at most...had his eyes fixed on the huge yellow machines rolling and crumbling and dumping and piling the (notorious) henna'd clay, in preparation for something not yet identifiable to be built.  I wish I'd had my camera ready to take a picture. 

And yet, I already have a picture, indelible. 

Are you grinning yet, those of you with boys raised on torn-up street-corners, in formerly vacant lots, along wire fences looking in at those mechanical creatures that, no matter how earthbound their jobs, fascinate small eyes for hours?  Can you feel the weight of the child in arms, held high enough to see the goings-on, to lean forward eager for the next lift of the crane or digger arm?  And who, though he might have few spoken words in his vocabulary beyond dada yet, can still manage to distinguish aloud between an excavator and a bulldozer?  That look on their faces, concentrating so hard on the slightest movement of wheel in muck, eyes roving back and forth to detect practically before it happens the next big dig.

It made me laugh out loud, remembering how many times, over two generations, we counted trucks on the road or managed to entertain a fussy boy by strolling him down to where the workmen had dug into their day.  The road pavers, cable and pipe layers, the yard trash people, the recycler, the garbage men, rolling down the street in front of the house...how, from East coast to West and in between, we'd race out in time to meet them, and once or twice even "help" the agreeable handler, no doubt a parent of a boy himself, push the button to pick up and dump the containers. 



If you need a jog of memory, here is the link to the Excavator Song, now conveniently on YouTube in case there is no construction site handy when one needs it.  It is guaranteed to stop children mid-fuss.

It's not, of course, as good as the real thing in motion.  But it has the advantage of a song which will fill your head for the rest of the day.








1 comment:

  1. For me, nostalgia at it's most hear warming! Jimmy could replicate the noise of trucks before he spoke a sentence! I can still feel Jimmy and Mikey's hands in mine, a most treasured memory. Little boys XO

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