Month: May 2020

Rachel Wiley was not the only person in town turning thirteen on the June 21^st Saturday in question. No one counted what the actual number was but, by the end of the day, everyone knew that at least one other person in Bobbing Apple had a birthday the same day as Rachel’s. That person’s name was Jeremy. Jeremy J. James. 

Jeremy James wanted to be a pilot. The boy wanted to be a pilot so badly that he had already memorized a lot of things that pilots need to memorize. Since it would take many pages to summarize just what those things are, they won’t be listed here. Suffice it to say that there are lots of things that pilots need to memorize and already, at thirteen, Jeremy knew most of them. Unfortunately, for Jeremy, Mr. and Mrs. James did not exactly share their son’s enthusiasm for altitude. In fact, they shared pretty much none of it. They couldn’t understand how a child of theirs, another human who shared their genes, could have been born with such a craving for flight. The boy was nuts about it. As a baby, he tried to roll off beds. As a toddler, he jumped off stairs. As a first grader, he climbed into trees or atop the family home and pretended he got there by landing from above (some of the falls as a toddler had convinced him that further study was required before actually jumping out of the trees or off the family roof). As a seventh grader, he read everything he could get his hands on about the things that that were in books that pilots needed to get their hands on. 

What type of birthday present do parents give a son who is turning thirteen and eats, sleeps, and breathes the sky? Books wouldn’t do; the boy had already checked all of them out of the library or read them on-line. Neither would clothing; over the years, the young man had received more flight uniforms, outfits, and pajamas from friends and family than could fit in his small bedroom closet. Model airplanes? There was no more space to hang them from his ceiling. Puzzles? The floor had the same real estate problem as the ceiling. Posters? The walls of his room looked like billboards. Videos, magazines, movies, and other stories? Jeremy had so many that any further additions would be an insult to his collection. There was only one thing that sane parents of a thirteen year-old who was insane for the sky could give that thirteen year-old for his birthday: some sort of flight plan. The boy needed something to keep him from jumping off the surfaces he had learned to ascend.  He needed something to do instead of letter-writing to commercial pilots, private pilots, people who once had been pilots, and people whose factories might make things that pilots could use. He needed some experience, some hands-on activity that could, in some small way, mollify his passion for flight and distract him from heartfelt essays on the future of flight, factory assembly lines, and his one boy “flight factory for Bobbing Apple” letter campaign. So Mr. James proposed a flying lesson. When Mrs. James almost passed out in the kitchen at the mention of the idea, Mr. James accused her of being too dramatic. When Mrs. James retorted that a flight lesson had as much a chance of distracting their son from the skies as a birdbath had of convincing a blue jay to become a duck, a compromise seemed in order. It took a few weeks but Jeremy’s parents found one: a ride – a one-time ride– in a hot air balloon.

McGillivibe’s Glides were advertised as “low altitude slides on a cushion of soft air”. While Mrs. James didn’t believe that there was anything cushiony about the clouds that floated above the treetops, she had seen the McGillivibes’ hot air balloon float across the Bobbing Apple trees on an occasional calm morning. The ride looked smooth and enjoyable; Mrs. James had once noticed people in the basket beneath the balloon pointing into the horizon and waving. Who they were waving at in a balloon a hundred or more feet off the ground was not Mrs. James’s concern. Her interest had been piqued, however, enough for her to propose the hot air balloon idea to Mr. James as a compromise between the options of sending her son off to flight school and keeping him locked in his room with books, posters, and puzzles. She had noticed that Jeremy was changing. His extremities were stretching, as was his chin. It was only a matter of time before Mrs. James had no control over the boy’s choices. Mrs. James didn’t loiter on that realization because any thinking about the rapid aging of young men in adolescence made her weak in the emotions. She just looked up McGillivibe’s Glides on the internet and made a reservation for Jeremy to have a balloon ride on his birthday. Unfortunately – for Mrs. James at least – she rushed a bit when she made the reservation and accidentally checked the website box for the family rate, instead of the box for the individual fare. Mr. James had been due home from work at any minute and Mrs. James did not want to hear any more of her husband’s wild ideas about Jeremy taking a safe flying lesson in a real plane. Real planes moved too fast. Real planes flew too high. Real planes did not “glide on a cushion of air”. So she completed the on-line form as quickly as she could, paid with a credit card, and told Mr. James, when he shuffled in the door some moments later, that everything had been settled. 

Jeremy found out on Friday, the night before his birthday. As anyone who has ever dreamed of flying can tell you, he was beside himself. No, he was more than beside himself. He was around, below, over and above himself. The poor boy could barely sleep he was so excited. He made sure everyone was up in time, even made them all breakfast. He was in the car before anyone else, like a family dog making sure it wasn’t left behind at vacation time. He was also prepared for a small chore that he needed to complete, while he was up in the air. 

It wasn’t exactly a chore. Not quite. It was more like a mission. Something had been lost and Jeremy needed to retrieve it. While there were simpler ways of completing the mission, a retrieval from above was a retrieval that no one would expect. It was bold and daring, just like the missions that he had watched over and over again in his flying movies or read about in his flying books. So Jeremy stayed up most of the night planning the details of his mission, slept in his daring mission flight jacket, and had his daring mission tools ready, neatly concealed beneath the zipper and sleeve of his flight jacket, when the family finally joined him in the car and drove out to the field where Mr. McGillivibe was filling his balloon with hot air.

Bonnie. That was the hot air balloon’s name. When the James family arrived in the McGillivibes’ field, Mr. James parked the car facing the rising sun, so obscuring Mrs. James view out the windshield of the car that she thought, when she squinted through the windshield, that the writing on the balloon said Bonne. Mrs. James had studied French in school. Although McGillivibe did not strike her as a French name, Bonne, which means good, did. It seemed like an auspicious sign. It settled her nerves. It made Mrs. James decide to listen to music, and turn away from the massive teardrop of hot air, while the final preparations for lift-off were made. 

There is more to preparing a hot air balloon lift-off than most people think. It involves hard work and careful calculations. The right mixture of weight and warm wind is required. While Mrs. James listened to her music (some old disco songs, songs that helped her remember what things were like when she was thirteen), Mr. James, Jeremy, and Jocelyn (Jeremy’s seven year-old sister) learned about some of Mr. McGillivibe’s careful calculations. They also learned, from Mrs. McGillivibe, about the reservation that Mrs. James had been paid on-line for a family excursion. This news was wondrous to Jocelyn. It was shocking to Mr. James. It didn’t faze Jeremy, who was too preoccupied with finding a way to speak with Mr. McGillivibe alone to notice that anything was amiss. 

Depending on your perspective, misunderstanding can be either marvelous or miserable. It was marvelous for Jocelyn; she secretly shared Jeremy’s enthusiasm for the sky, and so scrambled into Bonnie’s basket before anyone could ask her twice. It was miserable for Mr. James; he shared Mrs. James’s attraction to the ground and everything solid about it and about not trying to be too lofty in one’s aspirations. But, when Mrs. McGillivibe explained that a thirteen year-old and seven year-old girl could not ride in a hot air balloon without a parent, when Mrs. McGillivibe showed Mr. James the completed payment form, when Mr. James saw Mrs. James waving through the windshield of the family car in response to his questioning gesture, he decided that his fate was sealed. He stood there, his hands turned to the sky like a beggar. Mrs. James hands flapped back at him like a parent shooing her child onto a sports field. Mr. James then did what many a father does when he finds himself stuck in a situation that will bring enjoyment for his children but misery for himself: he misinterpreted his wife’s intent. Reasoning that Mrs. James was still angry over the flying lesson that he had originally suggested for Jeremy, Mr. James in turn reasoned that the family air balloon ride was a way for Mrs. James to help the entire family understand just how foolhardy it was to fly. Mrs. James waved for bravery while Mr. James gestured for help. And so, when Mr. McGillivibe himself motioned to the trembling wicker basket, Mr. James followed Jocelyn into it. Lift-off, Mr. McGillivibe proudly proclaimed, was imminent. Payback, Mr. James silently understood, was vicious.

Anyone familiar with the basic rules of marital common sense might have immediately corrected Mr. James about his blunder. Sadly, for Mr. James at least, no one who fit the description was there to advise him. The McGillivibes announced conditions perfect for flight. Jeremy and Jocelyn bounced like puppies in the basket at Mr. James’ sides. And Mrs. James continued to wave at Mr. James as if this was the grandest surprise of the year. 

It was. But it was a surprise for Mrs. James as well as her husband. Because Mrs. James had not been waving at Mr. James, Jeremy, and Jocelyn from the front seat of the family Chevrolet. Instead, she had been swatting at a bee that refused to acknowledge that the front seat of the Chevrolet was not bee territory but was instead the terrified domain of the mother of a thirteen year-old boy about to soar, like Icarus, into the sky. 

Never park your car pointing into the morning sun. For the rest of her life, Mrs. James offered that advise to anyone who would listen. Never park your car pointing into the morning sun because your husband might mistake your battle with a bee for encouragement to climb into a hot air balloon basket with both your son and your daughter and sail them off into danger.

Which is what happened. 

The morning was glorious – at least from Jeremy’s point-of-view. Bonnie was off the ground, Mr. McGillivibe had agreed to aim its trajectory toward Camelot Court, and everything Jeremy needed for his retrieval mission was safely stored inside his flight jacket. Pilots don’t just fly without a mission, Jeremy later explained to a journalist. Not the good ones, at least. Good pilots leave the ground with a goal. Jeremy’s goal was his boomerang.

The boomerang, an early birthday present from Uncle Marauder, was genuine. It came from Australia and was brilliantly shaped and colored. The instructions that came with it explained how to hold it, how to aim it, how to throw it, and how to catch it when it returned. So Jeremy had climbed into the tree house in his backyard and practiced the hold and the aim. He knew that he should wait for a big field to practice the throw and the catch. But he couldn’t resist a short test flight. So he flung the boomerang, with “intention” (which is what it said to do in the instructions), and waited. It is easy to guess that the boomerang did not return. It is harder to guess that the boomerang caught the wind, sailed around some trees, sailed around the house behind those trees, and dropped into Rachel Wiley’s front yard. The Wiley’s front yard had a fence. Behind that fence lived a dog. And with that dog, as Jeremy discovered when he had jogged down Camelot Court to retrieve his boomerang, were Rachel Wiley and Theodora Flannery. Theodora Flannery made Jeremy speak English like he needed a lot more practice. She made his feet dance like they heard some sort of distant music. Consequently, Jeremy passed by Rachel’s yard without getting his boomerang.

That had been Friday afternoon. Aborted boomerang retrieval, phase 1. Today was Saturday. Today was boomerang retrieval, phase 2. 

Boomerang retrieval phase 2 was simple, really. The plan had come to Jeremy all at once when he had learned at dinner on Friday that his parents’ birthday present to him on Saturday was a ride in a hot air balloon. It had made so much sense that he had a hard time believing anything except that this was destiny. Here were the details of boomerang retrieval phase 2:

1. Friday night – Jeremy would rig something together, a contraption of some sort, to retrieve the boomerang from Rachel Wiley’s front yard.
2. Saturday morning – Jeremy would convince Mr. McGillivibe to steer the balloon down Camelot Court.
3. Saturday morning (later) – Jeremy would retrieve the boomerang from the hot air balloon with the contraption he had rigged. 
4. Saturday morning (later than that) – the mission would be completed.

Step 1 had been easy. Being an inventive type, Jeremy had easily rigged a contraption that worked something like a fishing rod. In fact, it was a fishing rod (of sorts), just one with the reel taped to his forearm and a sturdy fiberglass net tied to the end of some high test fishing line. 

Step 2 had also not taken too much work; Mr. McGillivibe relented, swiftly changing his attitude from curmudgeonly to conniving, when he learned (from Jocelyn) that the friend who lived on Camelot Court, the one that Jeremy said that he wanted to impress, was a girl. 

Jeremy decided to ignore what his sister Jocelyn said. It produced the desired result and, on a mission like his, the objective was all that mattered. 

So, the hot air balloon, errantly departing McGillivibe’s field with not one but three James family members, was headed for Camelot Court, the BRS2.0 (boomerang retrieval system, version 2) was inside his jacket sleeve, and the sun was on his brow. All was ready for steps 3 and 4. Jeremy could not have been happier. 

Mr. James could have been. He was clinging to the ropes connecting the basket to the balloon, as if he might hold the balloon and basket together should the knots connecting them somehow give way. He was still trying to understand how Mrs. James had been so happy to send the family off toward their doom. That thought led him to wonder why hot air balloons didn’t have some sort of safety system for their passengers. A person had to wear a life vest in a boat. Shouldn’t there be some similar required flotation device for a hot air balloon, in case something happened to the large balloon above the basket? Within five minutes of lift-off, Mr. James was so preoccupied with the things that didn’t seem right about the flight that he ignored many things that did. One of those was Mr. McGillivibe’s kind offer of a muffin and hot coffee. 

Mr. McGillivibe set the muffin and coffee on a tray for Mr. James. He patted the smiling Jocelyn on the head. He liked the thrill that the ride was already giving Jeremy and he decided, on the spur of the moment, to do something that he knew Mrs. McGillivibe would not approve of. But he knew it was the right thing to do. Here was how he knew it:

1. Mr. McGillivibe had met Mrs. McGillivibe when the two were thirteen.  The meeting had taken place after a daring backyard baseball retrieval mission by Mr. McGillivibe.
2. Today Jeremy James turned thirteen. A girl Jeremy liked lived on Camelot Court.
3. If Mr. McGillivibe brought the balloon low enough to the girl’s house, perhaps years from now Jeremy and the girl would be together, like he and Mrs. McGillivibe. 
4. Perhaps, years later, the couple would remember Mr. McGillivibe.

It was a flawed line of reasoning. Not to mention a selfish one. But it was a strong line of reasoning, from the romantic male perspective. It was a line of reasoning that resulted in one of the lowest passes over Bobbing Apple that Mr. McGillivibe could remember. 

It all worked perfectly for Jeremy and his mission. He pointed to the location of Camelot Court, which was easy for an aspiring pilot who had studied Bobbing Apple air maps for years. Mr. McGillivibe smiled and let Bonnie drift lower. Jeremy saluted and leaned over Bonnie’s side as Mr. McGillivibe (and the luck of the morning) guided the balloon into perfect position. 

Jeremy extracted the net from the inside of his jacket, connecting it to the fishing line clamp he dug out of his jacket sleeve. He cast BRS2 into the Wiley yard with precision movement. He let BRS2 slide along the yard toward the boomerang in the far corner. He got the boomerang. But he got more than his boomerang. He also got Bumpers. 

Bumpers was a beagle. Until his friend’s thirteenth birthday, he was thought to be a very ordinary beagle. There is nothing wrong with being an ordinary beagle. Most beagles are just that: ordinary. They smile, play, run, jump (not that high), smile, beg for food, sleep, eat, sleep, eat some more, smile, and sleep some extra more – just like any other dog can smile, play, run, jump (maybe a little higher), beg, eat, sleep, eat some more, smile, and sleep some extra more. Very ordinary. Very normal. Very much like a plain beagle should be. What made Bumpers different, however, what made people decide that he was not ordinary but instead very extraordinary, very much unlike a beagle or on any ordinary dog they had ever known, was a strange set of events that occurred on the morning of his friend’s thirteenth birthday. 

Rachel was Bumpers’s friend. Some people may have called her Bumpers’s owner but Rachel thought such a title wrong. People, she would say, cannot own other people so why should they own dogs? They can take care of dogs. They can watch out for them. They can even rescue them. But that can’t own them. Not really.

Rachel was an ordinary girl. She smiled, played, ran, jumped (higher than Bumpers), smiled, begged for food, slept, ate, slept, ate some more, smiled, and slept some extra more – just like other almost thirteen year-old girls. That’s what made Rachel and Bumpers such a good pair. They were two ordinary, perfectly normal friends. It is important to understand this or the events of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday may seem less extraordinary than they really were.

The morning of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday found her asleep. Since ordinary girls are often asleep at seven o’clock on their birthdays, especially ordinary girls whose best friend have just spent the night with them, this was also not out of the ordinary. Nor was it unusual that the friends had sat up stargazing before falling asleep in the bed Rachel’s mother had made for them on the screened-in porch. What was unusual was that Bumpers was not asleep. No, Bumpers was very much awake. Bumpers was with Rachel and her friend Thinky on the bed on the screened-in porch and Bumpers was wide awake. 

It is hard to say why Bumpers was awake. Later, Mrs. Wiley, Rachel’s mother, guessed that because Bumpers did not get to sleep very often on the screened-in porch (exactly once a year, on Rachel’s birthday), and because he was the sort of dog that got a bit anxious when his routines were upset, he was probably up early, watching for squirrels and the like, and that was why he decided to check to see if the screened-in porch’s door was open. Since all of the humans in the Wiley house were asleep (Mrs. Wiley was awake but she was meditating so she doesn’t count), no one can say for sure why Bumpers woke up. But wake up he did. And check the door of the screened-in door he did also. And that is how he must have discovered that the door was open.

Some beagles, even ordinary ones like Bumpers once was, are smart enough to check to see if a screen-in porch door is open. It is pretty natural for a beagle or any other four-legged friend to decide that nature, visible and audible through the screen windows of a screened-in porch on a beautiful June morning, was calling and to nudge against the nearest exit in order to answer nature’s call. Thinky said that Bumpers could have remembered that the screen door latch didn’t work very well from the last time the girls slept on the screened-in porch and that he had probably observed, in the year since, that Mr. Wiley had not fixed it. However, as Mr. Wiley later noted, very few beagles, extraordinary or not, were likely to remember something from three-hundred-and-sixty-five days earlier and to keep track of that something for three-hundred-and-sixty-five days later. True to form, Thinky was not dissuaded by Mr. Wiley’s point. That was one of the things that Rachel liked so much about her best human friend. Thinky thought for herself.

So did Bumpers, obviously. Or at least he did so on the morning of Rachel’s thirteenth birthday. He was sleeping with the girls at six-fifty when Mrs. Wiley, her morning tea in hand, looked in on the girls and smiled. The beagle was neither asleep on the sofabed nor doing anything else inside the screened-in porch at seven  because that was when Mr. Matterson, on a morning walk of his own, witnessed Bumpers’s transformation from an ordinary beagle to an extraordinary one. 

Mr. Matterson was a man of routines. He had lots of them: eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner at the same time of day; reading in between breakfast and lunch; playing his piano between lunch and dinner; watching a game on television on his own screened-in porch after dinner. The routines kept him focused, Mr. Wiley told Rachel and Thinky. They kept him moving forward. Rachel and Thinky did not understand why someone who was retired needed to still move forward but they didn’t question their neighbor’s logic. They just knew what to expect if it was before breakfast (Mr. Matterson would be walking by Rachel’s house on Camelot Court), or if they were to walk past Mr. Matterson’s house mid-afternoon (Mr. Matterson would be practicing Shubert), or if they were to bring Mr. Matterson a cake or some such desert in the evening (Mr. Matterson would be watching a game). There was a right time to drop off a cake. There was a wrong time too. Rachel and Thinky had learned the difference. 

Everyone in the neighborhood knew at least a few of Mr. Matterson’s routines. Neighbors are like that. It makes (usually) for congenial neighborhoods. The neighbors smiled about most of Mr. Matterson’s routines. But one of those routines, his morning walk, made them sigh. Mr. Matterson walked every morning, before or at sun-up. Up the road he went, on one sidewalk, and then back down the cul-de-sac, on the other sidewalk. For years he did this with Chester, his boxer. If a person was up early on a day that wasn’t rainy or snowy, and even on many of them that were, and that person was looking out the front window at the comings and goings of Camelot Court, Mr. Matterson and Chester were regular parts of those comings and goings. When Chester died, the walks did not. Mr. Matterson still made his rounds, leash in his hand, his lips still moving. Mr. Matterson had always liked to talk to Chester. Chester had always seemed to enjoy listening. That was why everyone sighed when they saw Mr. Matterson sticking to his morning routine, or when they thought about it later in the day. It made them sad to see Mr. Matterson without his dog. It made them feel heavy to think about the feeling inside Mr. Matterson when the man talked to Chester but Chester did not smile back.

By now it may be obvious how everyone later knew that Bumpers had left the screened in porch at precisely seven AM. Yes, Mr. Matterson was on his way down the street, completing the first leg of his morning rounds. He was there to see Bumpers.

Mr. Matterson did not see Bumpers immediately. No, he told Rachel later, “I didn’t see little fellow until, well, when I saw it all start to happen.” Apparently, Mr. Matterson had been looking up, into the trees. He had been noticing how many shades of green were visible in the birch trees lining the side of Camelot Court. “Do you know many shades there are, Rachel?” Rachel had not known. “Twenty-six, that’s how many,” Mr. Matterson told her. “I was counting them. I was walking along, counting the number of shades of green, going slowly so that I didn’t trip, because, you know, you can trip when you are my age and you’re walking along looking up and not watching the ground, and so I was walking along, and I was telling Chester about all the colors, describing them the way I always described them, on account of how dogs can’t see in color but only in black and white. He would have enjoyed the description, I think. Chester always did have an ear for that sort of thing.”

Mr. Matterson always enjoyed telling about the next part. And Rachel, no matter how old she got (because she got older too, in the years after the morning of her thirteenth birthday) enjoyed it too. She would listen to Mr. Matterson tell it, each year, on her birthday, or, when she was too old for Mr. Matterson to be able to still tell the story directly, she would get out the newspaper clippings, or open the internet articles, or even listen to the recording of Mr. Matterson’s voice on the TV news. 

“So there I was, making my way down the sidewalk, my feet shoving along, my eyes scanning up, and my mouth counting out the different shades of green a seventy-six year-old pair of eyes can count in the trees on a beautiful June morning, and then, whoosh, there he goes, Bumpers, an ordinary beagle, shooting up through the trees like some sort of super dog. He was flying, he was. With a boomerang in his mouth. I wouldn’t have believed it unless I saw it with my own eyes. Little Bumpers, the beagle too ordinary to ever try to do anything unusual, such as get out from behind the little fence that wrapped around Rachel’s front yard, little Bumpers was in flight! His front paws were stretched out like this, and the back ones were hanging behind, with his tail pointing like it could help him steer. He had just taken off, and he was shooting up in the air, like a rocket. It was incredible. Bumpers was flying. Chester would have loved it. He probably would have told me that there had always been something extraordinary about that Beagle but then Chester did have a way of recognizing things that I couldn’t see.”

Stay tuned for future installments of Sir Bumpers, a story originally written (and subsequently forgotten) in 2013 about a teenage girl, her amazing dog, and the interesting events of one summer day in a town not as far away as you many think.

Life grows in the seams. If you have any doubts about this, grab some gloves and a bucket and get up and close with a walkway or path of any kind. Look carefully in the spaces between those pavers you so carefully set atop of weed cloth. Inspect the cracks in cement and pavement produced by the shifting earth. Countless and nameless life forms take root, “weed-hold” you might even say, in the most unlikely of slivers, slots, and places.

The neighborhood elk take no notice of such things. We have a herd that has decided that our country high dessert road is a good one to patrol at nights. I know this based not just on the pellet-evidence that these grand and imposing beasts leave in their wake. On more than a few occasions, I have had surprise encounters under moonless nights with a dozen or more denizens of the nocturnal neighborhood. It startles the unprepared late night dog walker, I can tell you, to hear a rustle and turn to find a pack of these reckless marauders stumbling about the front yard. Their mass gives them distinct advantage against the fragile limbs of trees. Move too quickly and their abrupt retreat can permanently damage a portion of the aspen grove that cannot get itself healthy on the north side of the driveway.

If only the elk focused their attention downward, we might have an agreeable relationship. No, their domain is higher, at the shoulder level and above. They nibble and scrape away at tree life in its adolescence. Their specialty is not the short grass and weed of the ground. Which is too bad because there is plenty of that low stuff on my property and I might even leave them a bowl or two of water if our aims were more complementary.

For some reason, however, the elk enjoy the labyrinth. We constructed it years ago, first clearing and semi-leveling a large swath of ground, then laying a pattern of the labyrinth at Chartres on the bare earth, placing river stones to outline its circuits, and covering everything with gravel. That project took some time to complete; there were many weekends of shoveling, smoothing, and stone and gravel transport. But the effort was worth it. Facing east, you can enter and take a contemplative journey under sun, cloud, or stars without care for getting lost or adventuring too far from home. The elk enter from any direction they please. I’ve seen them out there, just standing, staring. Although it’s fun to imagine them walking the turns when I’m not looking, I’m pretty sure that they don’t need the exercise. Rather, they seem content to just be inside the labyrinth’s borders, almost as if they have snuck past the closed doors of a human cathedral after hours and had the place to themselves. I picture them straddling the various sections of the circle, like giants towering over the entire country, their front and back legs in different states. They have nothing to eat. They don’t need to contemplate the moon or mountains. They just enjoy the feeling of being there.

Perhaps you think that I’m anthropomorphizing; elk, you might say, know nothing about contemplative exploration and mindless stargazing. But just how do you or any of us know this? I’ve seen elk, so close that I could almost touch them. I’ve looked into the alleged vacancy of their eyes and I’ve noticed more to their attitude than a dim-witted desire to eat new tree growth. Besides, the massive creatures go to the labyrinth on most nights and the trees that previously tried to line its perimeter have long since been destroyed or removed. They don’t knock the river stones about, either. Their footprints are there in the morning, along with the pebbly remains of their digestion of my aspen trees. I can only offer that animals must be drawn to peaceful energy just as humans are. And I find it strangely reassuring that they derive some benefit from their regular visits to our house beyond their clumsy pruning. It is good that they don’t need to earn a living on this planet in anything resembling that of the human species. Elk are terrible gardeners. Sure, they can leap fences with the grace of animated reindeer. They have rotten judgement though when it comes to which tree limbs to trim or how to dispose of the results of their seemingly arbitrary arboreal efforts.

If only the elk garrison could be convinced to apply their talents closer to the ground. A nursery of grasses and weeds is sprouting up in the crevices of river stone that line the labyrinth. The wind was deposited seeds of new life atop its gravel paths. It would bring me joy if these wandering wapiti would help with the maintenance efforts around the property. Some weeding, even just once in a blue moon, would help keep things in order.

You can learn a lot from selling a house. Despite the calamity we call COVID-19, my wife and I decided to carry on with the long ago-developed plan to put our house of twenty-seven years on the market on May 1. “It’s really a good time,” we were told. “There’s not much inventory.” Inventory doesn’t much matter when there aren’t people seeking it. Nonetheless, we grew weary of all the cleaning and preparation without a defined deadline. So we bought the notion that low inventory translated into greater buyer interest and, just to show the pandemic virus that while it could keep us away from others it could not protect us from ourselves, we listed our house two days early: on April 28th.

Twenty-seven years isn’t a long time for the earth; since the skies have had atmosphere and the seas have had fish, some of the great glaciers of history slid a mere foot or so down unsuspecting ravines in such a yawn of an evolutionary moment. A few decades is ample time, however, for a family of four to amass quite a bit of material (and arguably immaterial) goods. My! Corners and cabinets gathered more than cobwebs since the dawn of our inhabitance in this house. I thought I had been doing a reasonable job over the years working towards a balance of the consumer scale by donating as much each cycle of the sun as we bought. I wasn’t even close. You can hide many things in plain site during a third of a lifetime. I managed to accomplish more than my fair share of such optical trickery.

Clothes, shoes, games, pieces of wood, unattached screws and other hardware orphans, misshapen boards, boards with good shape but no obvious purpose, paint, used brushes, stains, ties from my father that have gone in and out of style at least a dozen times, photos, receipts, previously lost socks, unopened mail, old bank and credit card statements, letters from a millennium when humans used fountain pens, holiday cards, envelopes, books, evidence of the progress of computer technology since the dark ages before the internet, documentation that I had an education, more envelopes, more books, documentation that the IRS knew I inhabited the planet, power cords, more envelopes, things without names, still more books (especially the one on music and mathematics that I always thought I’d read someday and actually understand), a scalp massager, all sorts of gadgets and tools, still more envelopes and scraps of paper and notes – I’d like to give a full accounting but think it would prove more exhausting than informative, a bit more depressing than identity-reinforcing. The savings and detritus from nearly three decades must be cautiously considered if a person is to remain sane, soulful, and accomplish an impossible and perhaps ill-advised target of listing of house for sale by April 28th, 20COVID. Courage and a surgical mask are not sufficient. A carefree attitude is required lest the sinkhole that is the first two-thirds of an average American lifetime open up and swallow the unsuspecting, semi-civilized human traveler, regardless of the soundness of his pre-existing physical and mental health.

There is more than just time lurking beneath beds, above cabinets, and under the dusty cushions of furniture. There is emotion. There is hope and disappointment, aspiration and agony. And there is the knowledge that this, all of this, all of it, with me and everyone I know, too shall pass.

A baby boomer born in Philadelphia who stands on the precipice of change in the midst of an unseasonably warm northern Arizona spring day does not allow himself to become morose in the face of such weighty and potentially immobilizing reflection: he fires up his chain saw and trims some trees. He trades the chain saw for an ax, ridding the ground of visible stumps from past trees poorly planted, chosen, or nurtured. He fills the extra large garbage container with sticks, weeds, and decaying wood. He takes a car full of old paints, varnishes, stains, and other unused chemical concoctions that would likely fail contemporary safety standards to the hazardous drop-off center at the county landfill. He donates whatever is within reach and is not saved by instinct or a clear note from his wife not to give away. He finishes his day by finding just the right screw lying amidst a box of old screws, nuts, and bolts that helps secure a hasp on the sliding barn door.

Then he sits in a simple chair, his feet in the sun. He softens his gaze out freshly cleaned windows onto a garden that grew alongside his children. He does not remember. He just watches a jay swoop from a budding tree for a sip of water in the birdbath. He watches his mind decide that it’s time he learned the names of more birds. He awaits the next butterfly that will flutter by. He lets his crossed legs cause first one then the other to fall asleep. He himself does not sleep. He simply breathes. He feels what it’s like for a spirit to smile. He marvels at the inexplicable mix of signals, energies, and souls that move within a single human form.

Time is a single point stretched across eternity. And tomorrow that point is called May 3rd. Maybe someone will call the realtor for an appointment to see this house.