Straight, Square and Smooth

By the 6^th grade the person I would never become was made clear to me. I was in shop class with the assignment to create a breadboard from a slab of wood. If we lived in a true meritocracy I would still be there, that old man in the back row shaving a hunk of wood for the 80^th year.

Straight, square and smooth the teacher demanded. What’s wrong with a bump here and there, my inner voice yelled back. I discovered two things in that class. First, that I was basically inept and secondly that I have a thing for irregularity. Maybe being ept is overrated.

Think of the beauty of a deckled edge. Let the border rise and fall and damn the perpendicular. It’s life’s grooves and edges, the sputters and stumbles, the jagged right-hand margin of a poem that lends its character. I wouldn’t give them up any more than the moon could relinquish its craters. 

You can have your Wyoming and Colorado, ruler sharp, I’ll take loosey-goosey Michigan or Florida which looks as if it might break away at any moment. Do people still have breadboards? Most loaves are pre-sliced and for baguettes, I just rip and chew. My breadboard looked like it conformed to teeth-marks.

Nature has no straight lines. Antoni Gaudi said it first and his wavy architecture replicates an organic flow as if on the way to the next best thing.

There I was with my diminishing rectangle of wood that refused its next incarnation as something straight, square and smooth. I admired its grit, dips and uprisings. It was to be my road map, prefiguring a contrarian nature and a nose for connective threads, however coarse.

Of those three Ss, I must admit some allowance for smoothness as in skin (my favorite organ) or cobblestones and then there are smoothies but graveled with berries, of course. At this point of my life, it’s safe to say I will never accept that 6^th grade mandate. One man's failure is another man's ept.

Turning

Since the vernal equinox happens on my birthday in March, I have to give the fall equinox its due. It happens here like a rumor, as silently as that needless “n” in autumn. You’d never know summer is done with temperatures reaching into the nineties for the next week.

To get into the mind of the season I need to imagine the cycle turning in a change of palette from greens to rust, burnt sienna and yellows. Where are those migrations overhead, flannel pajamas, itchy sweaters, russet pears, chestnuts of childhood?

Of course we do get oranged in advance of Halloween. Pumpkins show up in ice cream, soup, pasta, pudding, pie, even beer. I could die happily buried inside Trader Joe's.  

Here in Los Angeles, we don’t have harvests or swollen gourds except for those trucked in. However, there are seasons we carry within. We flower and we fold. Each of us has all the facets, a rhythm or impulse to bend toward the light and then retreat inward. 

Another falling is the tossing away of election junk mail into the wastepaper basket. Half the country has been falling for the ill-tempered lunacies of Donald Trump. May he slough off the body politic a month from now in some massive descent. 

The Roman poet Virgil wrote, See Naples and Die. If he had lived in New Hampshire he'd have said, see maples, and die.

I’ve been to New England to watch the spectacle of ruddy sycamores and maple leaves dying in all their glory. From a distance they looked like a wildfire. It was operatic. Golden groves of trees majestic in their last gasp death-bed scene. Divas, all of them. Fall is a season of life and death.

If I were a tree I too would be in my foliage or beyond. Some of my favorite hair has fallen. My limbs are getting brittle. Even names carved long ago into my brain are fast fading. I am weathered and wind-bent in my bough. Exaltations of larks no longer nest in my branches.

Autumn is portentous of winter’s finality; the last act, 4th quarter. But it also carries the hope and expectation of one more go round. The curtain comes down, the curtain goes up again. Why not? Another opening, another show.

With luck we’ll soon have an incontinent sky to wet us. Umbrellas will open like black narcissus. I want to be caught in a downpour. Drench me. Let me be pelted and puddled. Parched earth will be heard slurping. I can feel it already in my arthritic bones.

The planet’s lease shall be renewed.

 

Earliest Memory

I can still hear those sirens and smell the smoke. I was between three and four years old watching a car ablaze from my third story window. I saw the red truck with a big hose and the flames. I’ll never forget it. Too bad it never happened.

For about eight decades I regarded this scene as my earliest memory. Then it occurred to me that I had a picture book about fire engines. Those images flew off the page and torched the parked car three stories below.

Better yet, I can mark that moment as when I felt the power of books sufficient to spark my imagination. A year or two later I learned how those squiggles on the page called words could ignite my inscape and make the world luminous.

Returning to that window I do remember a new apartment building going up across the street. There was a derrick, mounds of earth and bricks were stacked up.

The entire block was to be a series of five story apartments except for one house with chickens in the front yard. Over time we played marbles in the dirt where the chickens were partitioned off. I was introduced, without ceremony, to this tribe called children. It was an aural culture with unwritten rules passed from the ten-year-old elders to us little tots.

There was a rhythm to street games from stoop ball to hopscotch to double Dutch jump rope. We had our own benevolent leaders who knew a small something that allowed the flock to cohere, until one day they outgrew us, and the hierarchy shifted without a peep.

Written words would overthrow the oral, but language of the street still has echoes for me long after it vanished into chalk dust or flew away in the smoke, higher than a pop fly.