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Cutting your own hair is easy. Except, of course, for a few challenges. First, you have to figure out how short it should be, and resist changing your mind mid-exercise. Then you have to sort out how to move the scissors in the mirror so that your hands are traveling one way when your eyes tell them to reverse course and go the other. Finally, if are fortunate to have hair roots evenly distributed across your scalp, you simply can’t see some sections of your head very well. For those parts, you need to work by feel, trusting the evidence you see in your fingers and in the sink after your handiwork regarding the accuracy of your aim.

It would be easier, you might be say, to have someone else do this, someone trained in such things, someone unencumbered by the obvious shortcomings of self-service hair styling. That would be the perspective, a wise one indeed, shared by my wife and daughters. Just because we live during the time of a pandemic, just because we have moved houses during that time, and just because I am nervous about finding a new hair stylist who is likely touching lots of hair on heads of people not always taking the pandemic seriously – those are not good reasons to abandon six decades of practicality and take the trimming of my own grey locks into my own sometimes unsteady hands. They are right. You are right. But I am stubborn. And I have a pair of scissors that used to belong to my mother. Those scissors could not let me down.

I suppose I have been stubborn my entire life. The descriptor, however, is not one that family have often used to describe me. “You are such a Gemini,” Mom used to say. “He’s a real Gemini alright,” my wife has oft echoed. The statements were always made with a mix of love and gentle jibing, as if the qualities of my personality, should they be tossed into a kitchen blender, might yield a semi-pleasing if not slightly bitter result.

All that changed last week when my youngest daughter announced that there are now thirteen signs of the zodiac. Apparently, scientists have known for years about the thirteenth constellation but only recently have elected to do anything with that knowledge. This is perhaps what happens when people are stranded in their houses during a pandemic and have too much time to themselves. After weeks behind closed doors, one or more have decided that the world, long accustomed to the calendar notion of twelve, needs to face the fact that it has been wrong about still something else, that the cultural desire for comfort in the customs and traditions of twelve should be exposed for what it was, is, and has always been: incorrect. So somewhere, somehow, somebody let the information leak about the not-so-new constellation. And just like that, I am no longer a Gemini.

“You are such a Taurus,” my wife and youngest daughter told me a few nights ago. “So stubborn.”

In my daughter’s defense, she acknowledged (with a wink) that some of the online descriptions about Taurus did not fit me. But others apparently did. Besides, both she and my wife enjoyed how the shifting zodiac calendar moved them to signs and constellations that seemed to better match their own self-images. “I knew I wasn’t a Leo,” one said. “I never felt like an Ares,” the other added.

Please don’t misunderstand: I am all for truth and the importance of change, despite the pain associated with such change. I am also not opposed to either astrology or to its application in our world and do not necessarily object to the addition of a new constellation or sign (Ophiuchus). And I realize that I am, not unsurprisingly, behind the times, the information of this emerging astronomic evidence having filtered down to me relatively late in the global news cycle. Still I will admit that I was a bit unsettled to learn that lots of people have known about this for some time. Beyond that, I was at least a touch offended to be told that I needed to relinquish my title as typical Gemini and accept, gracefully and without argument, the new moniker of Taurus. I like twins. I don’t like bulls. I’ve come to enjoy looking for advice about Geminis in horoscopes. I personally think the name Gemini is just pretty cool.

Nonetheless, the world tells me that I must adapt. Adapt then I shall. So this morning I boldly embodied my willingness to embrace change in my bathroom’s walk-up, no appointment necessary, hair salon. It was clear from the start that I was going to make a mess of things. A Gemini might have changed his mind. Not a Taurus. I cut. I cut some more. I turned fingers and hair to and fro in contorted maneuvers to clip and snip myself to a countertop covered with grey. I worked quickly, finishing the job before anyone could look where I was and talk me out of it. It feels good too, the product of my stubbornness, when I inspect it with my own hands. My fingers don’t get stuck in aging wires of uninspectable brittle white as I run them over the back of my scalp. Those fingers have lost the ability to judge distance accurately and I can’t help them with mirrors and eyeglasses. Absent any objective information to the contrary, they are therefore happy. And I guess so am I.

All that’s left is for me to now let someone else view the results. Perhaps the people who know me best, the ones who have forced me to accept that I was never who and what I thought I was, will take pity on me given that I’ve enveloped myself with the mantle of newfound and newly accepted Taurusness – and they will help me fix the uneven result I’ve made. That was, truth be told, my real goal all along. Please don’t tell them though, or at least wait until they’ve evened me out.

Somewhere in the afterlife, Mom is shaking her head and smiling. You can guess what she’s saying.

Timing is everything. That’s what they say, although who the “they” is that says it is anyone’s guess. Regardless, the phrase certainly applies to the morning events on Camelot Court. Here’s why: About the time that Bumpers was racing into the Wiley front yard, the robin chicks’ mother was flying into the screen window of Rachel’s screened-in porch (unlike Mrs. Benny Benini, the Wileys used screens). It is impossible to know why the chicks’ mother did this, except to say, as some astute biologists from the local university later observed, that bird mothers, like any mothers of offspring about to take flight, can get distracted, and, when they do, their actions get misunderstood. Mrs. James got distracted; now her family was engaged in midair calesthenics on Camelot Court and she was driving the family Chevrolet in hot pursuit. The chicks’ mother, perhaps excited about the morning launch of her babies, got distracted by the sight of Bumpers. The robin had been seen, on more than one occasion, hopping around the grass in the exact location that Bumpers had dashed. She had also been observed to leave said location, in the past, with worms in her beak. Rachel and Thinky have theorized that, on the morning in question, the robin flew towards the corner of the yard, thinking not about the worms but instead about her chicks’ upcoming flight. This was the day. All signs were a go. The chicks would need a good breakfast before things got underway. Musing on such considerations, Mrs. Robin, according to Rachel and Thinky, didn’t see Bumpers and his boomerang bounty until the last second, and so she had to veer, erratically, off her flight path, causing her to fhplump into the screen of the screened-in porch before she could come to a post-veer stop. Rachel and Thinky’s explanation is as good as any. It also explains why they woke up when they did.

“What was that?” Thinky said.

“Whtwaswhat?” Rachel mumbled.

Technically, Thinky had been asleep before the flphump. Her eyes were closed. But she wasn’t full asleep, as she liked to call it. She was only some asleep, the kind of asleep a thirteen year-old girl is when she is sleeping over in the screen-in porch at her best friend’s house and she has already heard the thump (not fphlump) sound of the screen door closing behind the escaping posterior of a beagle named Bumpers. 

Rachel was asleep. She was much less than full asleep when Thinky started listing the possibilities for why she had heard the flump. She was full awake when Thinky decided that the fphlump must have been caused by the robin staring at them from the Wiley front yard. She was on her feet and running when Thinky screamed that the fphlump was connected to the flump and that Bumpers had just taken off after the robin.

It was very lucky that the girls stayed up late the night before, stargazing from the steps of the screened-in porch. Otherwise, they might not have been so tired and they might have changed into their pajamas before they went to bed. But sleepover luck was in their favor: they had fallen asleep in not just their clothes but their sneakers as well. “Too much teenager talk,” Mrs. Wiley would later say. “Made us ready for teenager walk,” Thinky would reply.

They were ready for more than walking. Which was fortunate because Rachel, expecting, when she heard Thinky scream “taking off”, to see Bumpers bumbling around the yard in pursuit of a bird, instead saw her beagle friend bumping up the side of the trees, knocking leaves and who knows what else (Mrs. Benny Benini did) off their treetop perch. Rachel bolted out the door, jumped the family fence, and started down the street after the family dog. Thinky, however, hesitated. She saw what was above Bumpers. She saw what looked like Jeremy James suspended from the arms of a man who himself was suspended from the basket of a hot air balloon. She would not have believed it was Jeremy James except that Jeremy’s sister, Jocelyn, was looking over the edge of the balloon basket, waving. 

Jocelyn was friends with Thinky’s younger sister. Jocelyn was too nice to steal Rachel’s dog. But Jeremy…. 

What a brazen boy!Thinky thought. First, he hadn’t had the nerve to say hello yesterday and instead had looked like a thief when he’d passed in front of Rachel’s house. Now he had gone and hired a hot air balloon, and an acrobat, to help him steal Rachel’s beagle. Such behavior, Thinky decided, was inexcusable.That boy needed to be stopped.

Thinky was not the only one to watch Jeremy James soar above the trees on Camelot Court and decide that his behavior needed stopping. Mrs. James, driving the Chevrolet faster than her normally civic-minded intentions allowed, had managed to turn onto Camelot Court not long after Bonnie did. Having seen her family drift toward the east, she had gone out after them, perplexed by what she would describe as Mr. James’s sudden cleverness. Look who wanted to be pilot after all! She had suspected that Mr. James was somehow responsible for Jeremy’s obsession with flight. Jeremy had to inherit his flying-crazed gene from someone. Now, at the first opportunity, Mr. James had climbed into the cockpit of a balloon with Jeremy. Worse than that, he had brought along little Jocelyn.

Once she’d recovered from the shock of seeing the balloon drifting off with her family, Mrs. James had focused on the chase. It had been easy keeping up. Because there was only a single road leading from the McGillivibe’s field back toward Bobbing Apple, and because the balloon was going more up than it was away, Mrs. James had actually gotten ahead of it. She then tried to figure out which direction they would head. When she saw that direction was east, that made her wonder. Was this some kind of escape? Were her husband and children trying to move back east, to Mr. James’s family, and his prospects for a better job? If they did, she would be alone in Bobbing Apple. What would she do? Should she go back to school, maybe on the internet, and finish her degree? Only when she saw Jocelyn wave at her from Bonnie’s basket did Mrs. James sufficiently settle herself to realize what was really going on. This wasn’t an escape. This was a demonstration. This was part of Mr. James’s plan to show the people who were closing the factory that he was a man who could soar.

Mrs. James couldn’t really blame Mr. James for that. The factory boss was a sorry excuse for a boss. He was petty and he was unkind. He was not very forthcoming about what would happen to people like Mr. James when the factory closed later that summer. He also did not wear starched shirts and at least Mr. James always showed up for work in a clean and starched shirt. A supervisor, not matter what the level, needed to look respectable. He needed to show that he took his job seriously, even if the factory bosses and its owner did not listen to good ideas and were going to lay that supervisor and all his workers off.

Mrs. James scanned the sky, trying to spot Mr. James in the basket. When she saw him, facing the south, she knew that she was right. He was facing the factory, looking toward his future. He had put aside his fears and was standing up to his obstacles. A wave of pride helped Mrs. James’s foot find enough pressure to keep pace with the balloon. A series of turns helped the James’s Chevrolet hone its way back home. Mrs. James grinned. Mr. James was piloting the balloon over their house. This was his sign to Mrs. James that he knew where his home was, where his roots were, where his heart lay. She pictured Mr. James, one hand at his side, another extended in front, a figure of action and determination, a father and factory supervisor guiding the balloonist down Lancelot Lane and toward the factory. They would land on the lawn of the factory. The factory bosses and owner would have to take notice of a man who could land a hot air balloon on the lawn of a failing factory. They would have to listen to the ideas of a man who could help the factory and town become part of the future instead of a relic from the past.

Misplaced pride can get the better of the best of us. It can muddle our thinking and mess our plans. In Mrs. James’s case, it made her turn on Camelot Court, instead of Lancelot Lane. It caused her to look up rather than in front. It temporarily made her think that Jeremy and Mr. McGillivibe were rescuing a dog that had fallen out of the hot air balloon rather than one that had been removed from its yard by it. Most importantly, it blinded Mrs. James to the fact that Camelot Court was a cul-de-sac and hence resulted in a collision between the James Chevrolet Caprice and Mrs. Benny Benini’s brand new trashcans.

Today is a hot July 4th. I am not complaining; we moved to a lower altitude to escape the winter cold in environs closer to the sun. Still, even when the humidity is low, the afternoon of a rain-free July day can make most Arizonans feel like they might be on the evening’s dinner menu. I have spent my afternoon alternating between sitting outside, sheltered from direct sunlight by the alcove in front of our house, and lounging within, stretched atop the couch where I am a target for collaborative extension by our calico kitten. Her name is Petal and she knows that I used to be allergic to cats when I was a boy. I know she knows this because she seems magnetically attracted to me. On a day such as this one, when I am adjusting to the conditioned air of the house interior, I don’t have the energy to explain to our new family member that a distant version of myself used to experience eye itching and nasal congestion around her kind. So she dutifully settles first atop and then beside me, either dismissive of my medical history or supremely convinced that her own mix of protein and fur could never cause harm to another. Either way, I acquiesce to her confident affection.

Our world seems alit of late. If not actually from wild fires, which alternately rage and recede in the brush and the news, the pandemic and the all-too-public peddling of political pandemonium has everyone feeling overheated. The time doesn’t feel stable, safe, because, well, for the most part, the situation does not meet the criteria for such descriptors. And, even when we might individually manage to snag a snippet of respite from the smoldering upset that has taken hold of our land and psyche, the intemperance of a neighbor or fellow troubled traveler inserts itself, boldly and unapologetically, into that tiny bubble of solace. Just last night for example, while strolling comfortably atop the soft grass of a local golf course, sipping at the sensations of nightfall with my wife, daughter, and two friends, a steady shower of golfballs fell without warning from the sunless sky. It seems that some misguided but clearly intentioned soul had decided to leave the comfort of his porch and practice launching drives from a tee-box on the course some one hundred and fifty yards or so behind us. Although the lush grass nurtured by reclaimed water was capable of absorbing the return of each ball to earth without much fuss, we, not similarly designed or buffered, had to beat a hasty advance beyond the reach of this fellow’s aim. Which, I fear, was what he had in mind: we were walking where he fixed to give a golfball flight. It seemed little matter to him that one of his missives into the dusk could dent a human more than the earth. Part of me confesses that because we were wearing masks, out of respect for the pandemic and each other, he may have decided that we were fair game for his flailing free-for-all into the night. We left him, rather quickly, to his fuming, and we did so without fanfare. A man with a driver and a bad attitude is someone to be avoided.

A cursory review of the past could easily identify distinct periods of history when the human species has been gripped by existential fever and turmoil. Most often this state of frenzy has been self-induced. We are, almost as a matter of routine, susceptible to bouts of agitation for the sake of agitation itself. With regularity, we need an enemy, a cause, or a crisis, something to rail against, a pyrexia to which we might fall prey so that, by way of response, we can cool ourselves with some manufactured wind of change that sweeps, often at our own fanning, over the collective sweat on our brows. Perhaps because of boredom, or maybe just to generate some kind of attention, some acknowledgement that life and its hidden rulebook are frustratingly opaque and obtuse, we lash out, bubble over, erupt with a latent lava of misgiving that is, given our experience over the centuries, neither unexpected or unsurprising. The British tradition of afternoon tea typifies the physiologic yearn for catharsis, a small but palpable demonstration of the human need to ingest heat, deliberately and as a matter of routine, circulate it, and then let it release. Through doing so, our bodies, overheated to begin with, are duped by the evaporative cooling that accompanies the predictable yet satisfactory radiation, hence achieving a self-fabricated sense of comfort. Unfortunately, our species also acts, with regularity, as if it has an instinctive penchant for a similar social experience. We may study the phenomena of war and upheaval at school. We can read about it in books. But we still seem to need to intermittently launch ourselves at each other, through words, fists, or hurled objects. We remain prone to a regular fits of feistiness and fever.

This is not to say that all heat is created equal; there is unacceptable injustice in our land, unforgivable disparity, ugly structural inequity and inequality, and preventable trauma. Some sins in our history must not be neatly compartmentalized and ignored. Our collective tolerance for systemic bigotry and racial intolerance is a true disgrace, a shocking stain, egregious evidence of our communal moral failing to live up, with consistency and accountability, to our ideals, nay to our values, and admit, acknowledge, and subsequently address our historical and continuous missteps, transgressions, and shortcomings. The fount of this fever lies visible. Its treatment requires more than a polite social sweat. A proper defervescence is demanded, raw, honest and sustained, if “we the people” are to heal, to form a more “perfect union”, to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. Our path to true personal independence runs, naturally and as a matter of course, through the river of our mutual interdependence. My liberty relies on yours. Another’s suffering is and should be a veritable source of our individual discomfort – physical, existential, and spiritual. No one should live free from perspiration and disquiet while the fire of injustice burns among us.

And so, on the anniversary of our nation’s founding declaration, and during a time of great national discomfort and disillusionment, I pray that we learn to focus our latest ague on its sources, and target our anti-pyrexic measures with clear intent, historical honesty, and cool compassion. As a boy, I was drawn to this day, July 4th, much like my kitten Petal is to me: the notion that we are connected, are created equal, was and remains affirming, inspiring. It feels good to be part of something bigger than oneself, something intertwined. It is reassuring to believe that you and I are inextricably bound in something more than words, that your welfare – and its protection – is a reason for my actions, and vice versa. While I have not always aligned my daily decisions with such a higher aspiration, the heat of our current moment reminds me of what is possible. Common purpose, if we let it, can help us avoid both infection from novel virus and re-infection from destructive social virulence. We need each other. We need our planet. We need to embrace the true causes for this latest season of discontent.

A more “perfect union” remains possible. You and I are not simply citizens of a politically-organized nation with borders and boundaries. Yes, in the U.S., we are the lived embodiment of a pledge to our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. But we are also each other’s keeper. Let’s set our thermostat to that higher regulation.

Sometimes we run away from things. Sometimes we run towards things. And sometimes we just run.

In the spring of 1980, I was living on the upper west side of New York City, just off the campus of Columbia University. A junior at a college in another state, I had gotten an internship in mid-town Manhattan and, in order to save some money, slept on the floor of my brother’s walk-up studio apartment on 115th street. For a non-urbanite, the city was an exciting place to live; there was no shortage of opportunities to learn about cuisine, the arts, music, and the diversity of the human condition. There was, however, limited access to exercise facilities. And I was a person who needed to exercise.

Running helped keep me sane. I wasn’t the happiest of twenty year-olds, a young man with a mind that ran incessantly and a body that didn’t seem to fit its clothing or surroundings. My collegiate junior year, thus far, had been stressful, leaving me out-of-shape, overweight, and unfulfilled. So I took to the streets and parks of NYC, in search of respite through distance running. It didn’t work. With all the traffic lights and intersections, it was too difficult for to find a stride and a rhythm that relaxed. A run, in fact, almost made me more unsettled.

But one day, by happenstance, I noticed something about the upper west side of Manhattan between 115th and 110th streets. The traffic lights, while not timed, did have a certain rhythm. At a brisk pace, and beginning just when the first traffic light turned green, I could reliably run five city blocks without needing to stop. And five city blocks, I decided after a little investigation, was about a quarter mile. Ahha! If I couldn’t get myself into a distance running routine, I realized that I could devise my own “track” work-out on street named Broadway.

If you’ve ever run “intervals” on a track, you know that it can be challenging to run a series of single lap sprints without a running partner. There is nothing to chase, no one to keep pace with, and you always end up where you began. Striding on the busy streets of Manhattan brought more visual stimulation than an oval track. It also had some inherent dangers (things called cars, taxis, etc), requiring a heightened vigilance. But, despite the advantages, there was still the problem of motivation. Beating the lights and bettering my previous times down the five block linear track still left something to be desired.

Until one glorious day when I found the perfect running partner, a jackrabbit made for urban street pursuit: the city bus. With stops at both 115th and 110th streets, and a schedule that regularly supplied new chrome-bumpered hares, the exhaust-spewing public conveyors, I discovered, were ideal training companions. It took a work-out or two for me to get all the timing kinks resolved – bus arrivals weren’t uniformly in sync with the traffic lights. Within a week or so, however, I sorted out the details. And, quite mysteriously and wonderfully, I found a perfect urban training partner.

You may think it is difficult to beat a bus in a race. It is not. In fact, even with a beautiful stream of green lights and traffic moving at a nice clip, I quickly learned that the bus wasn’t too challenging a competitor. So I gave it a head start. And that – now that – added some spice to the whole scenario.

Picture it: a guy jogs in place at the corner of Broadway and 115th Street. A bus arrives at the corner, exchanging passengers with the pavement. If the traffic light is red when the bus is stopped, the scene is set. The light turns green. The bus starts. The runner moves into the street and waits for the bus to reach 114th street. Then bang! The runner is off. With a walkman in one hand, circa 1979 headphones pushed over his ears, and a bouncing cord connecting controls and sound, the sprinter focuses on the advertisement plastered to the bus’s behind and drops everything else from his view. If he is lucky, a taxi doesn’t stop between him and the bus, or a silly pedestrian doesn’t jaywalk, or some other obstacle doesn’t unexpectedly break his concentration. He isn’t timing himself. He isn’t running for the stares of New Yorkers on the Broadway sidewalks or the bus interior. He is simply racing the motorized machine with massive tires to 110th street. He is chasing something that may not know it is being chased.

Usually, he wins. But not always. It doesn’t matter though. Win or lose, the runner slows at the corner of Broadway and 110th, turns, and lightly jogs back up the sidewalk to 115th street. On the return trip, he considers the density of the traffic, wonders whether there is a difference between engine capability based on the year that the bus was made. He’s pretty sure that, over time, some of the drivers have noticed him, have realized that he waits for them at 115th street, and have decided to take up the spirit of the Broadway sprint because he can feel some buses accelerating more than usual like an athlete who senses being passed and finds another level of effort from deep “in the tank”. Also, from time to time, a driver smiles, smirks, or waves. Some see him. He sees them.

You haven’t lived until you’ve sprinted down one of life’s Broadways – not because you need to, not because you are late or you are unsafe or because you want to catch a ride from a bus when it stops at 110th street – but instead because you find joy in the experience, you fill with exhilaration at moving with the same speed as technology, you yearn to release thought to the flow of movement that is a busy city street in Manhattan. And you survive the moment.

Our sprints in life are not always about winning or losing. They can be about being. They can be about achieving breathlessness for its own sake.

Sometimes we run away from things. Sometimes we run towards things. And sometimes we just run.

In the spring of 1980, I was living on the upper west side of New York City, just off the campus of Columbia University. A junior at a college in another state, I had gotten an internship in mid-town Manhattan and, in order to save some money, slept on the floor of my brother’s walk-up studio apartment on 115th street. For a non-urbanite, the city was an exciting place to live; there was no shortage of opportunities to learn about cuisine, the arts, music, and the diversity of the human condition. There was, however, limited access to exercise facilities. And I was a person who needed to exercise.

Running helped keep me sane. I wasn’t the happiest of twenty year-olds, a young man with a mind that ran incessantly and a body that didn’t seem to fit its clothing or surroundings. My collegiate junior year, thus far, had been stressful, leaving me out-of-shape, overweight, and unfulfilled. So I took to the streets and parks of NYC, in search of respite through distance running. It didn’t work. With all the traffic lights and intersections, it was too difficult for to find a stride and a rhythm that relaxed. A run, in fact, almost made me more unsettled.

But one day, by happenstance, I noticed something about the upper west side of Manhattan between 115th and 110th streets. The traffic lights, while not timed, did have a certain rhythm. At a brisk pace, and beginning just when the first traffic light turned green, I could reliably run five city blocks without needing to stop. And five city blocks, I decided after a little investigation, was about a quarter mile. Ahha! If I couldn’t get myself into a distance running routine, I realized that I could devise my own “track” work-out on street named Broadway.

If you’ve ever run “intervals” on a track, you know that it can be challenging to run a series of single lap sprints without a running partner. There is nothing to chase, no one to keep pace with, and you always end up where you began. Striding on the busy streets of Manhattan brought more visual stimulation than an oval track. It also had some inherent dangers (things called cars, taxis, etc), requiring a heightened vigilance. But, despite the advantages, there was still the problem of motivation. Beating the lights and bettering my previous times down the five block linear track still left something to be desired.

Until one glorious day when I found the perfect running partner, a jackrabbit made for urban street pursuit: the city bus. With stops at both 115th and 110th streets, and a schedule that regularly supplied new chrome-bumpered hares, the exhaust-spewing public conveyors, I discovered, were ideal training companions. It took a work-out or two for me to get all the timing kinks resolved – bus arrivals weren’t uniformly in sync with the traffic lights. Within a week or so, however, I sorted out the details. And, quite mysteriously and wonderfully, I found a perfect urban training partner.

You may think it is difficult to beat a bus in a race. It is not. In fact, even with a beautiful stream of green lights and traffic moving at a nice clip, I quickly learned that the bus wasn’t too challenging a competitor. So I gave it a head start. And that – now that – added some spice to the whole scenario.

Picture it: a guy jogs in place at the corner of Broadway and 115th Street. A bus arrives at the corner, exchanging passengers with the pavement. If the traffic light is red when the bus is stopped, the scene is set. The light turns green. The bus starts. The runner moves into the street and waits for the bus to reach 114th street. Then bang! The runner is off. With a walkman in one hand, circa 1979 headphones pushed over his ears, and a bouncing cord connecting controls and sound, the sprinter focuses on the advertisement plastered to the bus’s behind and drops everything else from his view. If he is lucky, a taxi doesn’t stop between him and the bus, or a silly pedestrian doesn’t jaywalk, or some other obstacle doesn’t unexpectedly break his concentration. He isn’t timing himself. He isn’t running for the stares of New Yorkers on the Broadway sidewalks or the bus interior. He is simply racing the motorized machine with massive tires to 110th street. He is chasing something that may not know it is being chased.

Usually, he wins. But not always. It doesn’t matter though. Win or lose, the runner slows at the corner of Broadway and 110th, turns, and lightly jogs back up the sidewalk to 115th street. On the return trip, he considers the density of the traffic, wonders whether there is a difference between engine capability based on the year that the bus was made. He’s pretty sure that, over time, some of the drivers have noticed him, have realized that he waits for them at 115th street, and have decided to take up the spirit of the Broadway sprint because he can feel some buses accelerating more than usual like an athlete who senses being passed and finds another level of effort from deep “in the tank”. Also, from time to time, a driver smiles, smirks, or waves. Some see him. He sees them.

You haven’t lived until you’ve sprinted down one of life’s Broadways – not because you need to, not because you are late or you are unsafe or because you want to catch a ride from a bus when it stops at 110th street – but instead because you find joy in the experience, you fill with exhilaration at flying with the same speed as technology, you yearn to release thought to the flow of movement that is a busy city street in Manhattan. And you survive the moment.

Our sprints in life are not always about winning or losing. They can be about being. They can be about achieving breathlessness for its own sake.

We tend to think that much is inevitable in our lives. The rising of the sun, the expression of our talents, acceptance of and by others, our mortality. However, there is nothing certain about any of those things. The unavoidable is not deterministic. We cannot be assured of anything.

“Death and taxes”, some like to say, “those are life’s only certainties.” It is a cute expression, dipped in western wit. It is wrong.

I can feel your uneasiness. Ok, you might be thinking, taxes may be negotiable. Observe, for instance, the postponement of tax submission in the U.S. during the 2020 pandemic. Or consider the circumstance of job loss. And a person could move to an island in a distant part of the globe and subsist off savings and the land. But death? No, you might argue, death awaits all life. It is a surety for every species. Anything that is born must die.

Spirit. That is my response to the argument that death – the cessation of biological activity – is an ending, an extinguishment, an experience fit for the criteria of “certainty”. Have you never encountered a child or young person who spontaneously expresses, usually in the most simple of terms, something fundamental about the world and the feeling of living in it? What child does not, at least intermittently, embody the instantiation of being, of wonder, of – dare I say – soul?

Today is father’s day. Early this morning, while dreaming and yet awake, I heard the voice of the universe and its Creator remind me that nothing is inevitable, not even death. During one of those moments of consciousness that occasionally envelops us with the sense of pure “now”, of supreme “here”, I was aware that I was not just this body, that my life was not uniquely this form, that the past and future were not some places outside the realm of experience but rather components of the present that is so much richer, so much more alive, so more more “present” than the experience of life based on sunrise and sunset, you and me, birth and death. As I sit here, welcoming the arrival of words that my fingers release to the air like butterflies spontaneously born from hidden cocoons, I marvel at the fortune of fatherhood, at the sacred opportunity to nurture spirit that does not arrive because of me yet grows, thrives, and soars in partnership with me, if I am open to that possibility. My children came with spiritual pedigrees; my wife and I encountered that heritage, at the deepest levels of our “selves”, from the moment of our daughters’ births. The girls, in fact, named themselves, or were named, in some inexplicable way, by the dreamworld. They did not begin life as accidents of biology and recombinant nucleic acids. They arrived with histories, trajectories of insights and imperfections, spiritual flows seeking fulfillment. If you have been favored to be a parent, whether of a child who is “biologically” related or a marvel of the universe you have adopted or brought to your side, perhaps you have shared this experience, this sadly infrequent but miraculously magical sense of wonder that God and her creation chose you to be help guide this voyager through the streams, channels, and rapids of human life. The journey is not easy; it is not always smooth; it is replete with joy and sorrow, silliness and suffering, sanguine moments of buoyant heart and perfectly balanced points of soul.

I am blessed to be a father. I am blessed to participate in the unfolding of my, your, our children’s collective expedition into timeless growth and development, into their own parenthood and nurturing, into the unseen but deeply palpable love available to all of us through something we call a “lifetime”.

Nothing is inevitable – I heard that message loud and clear this morning, when I wasn’t even trying to listen. Don’t accept the common. Don’t relinquish yourself to the usual. We are not physical frames with singular beginnings and definable ends. All is possible when we are purposeful. Nothing is impossible when we seek poise inside the spiritual.

“Everyone knows that teenagers only use a small portion of their brains. It doesn’t take a scientist or a fancy experiment to prove it. Simple daily observation works just fine. Just look at Mr. McGillivibe.”

 That’s what Mrs. McGillivibe told the reporter from the Bobbing Apple Buzz when the young woman asked Mrs. McGillivibe why Mr. McGillivibe decided to glide Bonnie so low down Camelot Court. “I don’t know who he thought Bonnie was courting,” Mrs. McGillivibe said, “but it wasn’t Sir Camelot, I can tell you that.”

Mrs. McGillivibe’s remarks were aimed at Mr. McGillivibe, not Jeremy. The boy was, after all, only just turning thirteen. But Mr. and Mrs. James, based on their experience thus far on Jeremy’s thirteenth birthday, would have thought the remarks pretty a propos of their son as well. Things happen inside a teenager once he has a thirteenth birthday, things inside that teenager’s body that the body does not often understand. Many of those things happen in the brain of that teenager’s body. Most of those things are beyond the teenager’s control. But many of those things, especially the important things in the relatively unused portion of the teenager’s brain, make the teenager resemble Mrs. McGillivibe’s remarks to a, well, “T”.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Jeremy to have called the Wiley house and asked for his boomerang back? Or maybe even have knocked on the Wiley front door? Or rung the doorbell? Thirteen year-old girls don’t bite. Most of them don’t even scratch. 

Jeremy had thought about ringing the doorbell (calling on the phone was definitely out of the question). But when he had wandered over to Camelot Court from Lancelot Drive, he had found that there was more than just Bumpers to contend with. There was Rachel’s friend, Theodora Flannery. Jeremy was pretty sure that Theodora did not like him. But Jeremy still liked Theodora.

The world can get complicated, can’t it? One minute, a boy is almost thirteen years-old, is running down the sidewalk on Camelot Court, is jumping at leaves in birch trees, is thankful for the good luck that his new boomerang decided to fly around Rachel Wiley’s house rather than through one of its windows, and the next minute that boy is staring at not just Rachel, a girl who is easy to get along with, a girl who has the same birthday as he does, but at Rachel’s best friend, Theodora. And then Rachel tells Theodora, out loud, that it’s OK for the boy to be on the sidewalk outside Rachel’s house because the boy lives in a house behind Rachel’s, one street over. And Rachel calls her friend Thinky. 

Thinky. The name made Jeremy forget why he had jumped and hopped down Camelot Court. It made him forget about his plan to get his boomerang. It made him go down and around the cul-de-sac, past Mrs. Benny Benini’s house and two shiny metal trash cans stationed at the end of her driveway, past Mr. Matterson’s house and the sound of Schubert, up the opposite side of Camelot Court and right back to Lancelot Drive and a late night planning the boomerang retrieval mission. BRS1.0 was already designed and tested (for a tree retrieval) before Mr. and Mrs. James announced that Jeremy was bound for the skies in a hot air balloon on his birthday. It did not take too much additional work for Jeremy to convert BRS1.0 to the balloon-ready BRS2.0 version.

BRS2.0 worked brilliantly. It worked so brilliantly that it didn’t much care that it snagged a beagle and a boomerang rather than just the targeted boomerang. The fishing line was really strong (1000 pound test or something like that). The fishing reel taped to Jeremy’s forearm had a first class catch. Even the clear Teflon netting, something Jeremy had once ordered from the back page of a helicopter magazine, was up for the challenge. BRS2.0 was engineered to withstand a certain resistance, in case the boomerang was snagged. The boomerang could have been wedged in the ground. It could have been stuck under a tree root.

It was actually stuck in Bumpers’s jaws. Little matter, because BRS2.0 scooped Bumpers by the back-end, not by the snout. And it was a clean scoop. It lifted Bumpers into the air like a superhero dog out for a morning spin above the treetops. 

BRS2.0 did something else. It withstood the pull of Bumpers on the netting, the fishing line, and the reel. Fishing line knots held tight to the netting. The reel held tight to the line. The twenty loops of tape held the reel tight to Jeremy’s forearm. Jeremy’s forearm held tight to his shoulder, his torso, his legs, and even his shoes. So, like a counterweight, when Bumpers went up, Jeremy went down. That is to say that, as Bumpers and Jeremy’s boomerang flew toward the balloon, Jeremy and the part of BRS2.0 taped to his forearm flew out of the balloon toward Bumpers and the boomerang.

Fortunately, for Jeremy (and all concerned), Mr. McGillivibe had not always been a hot air balloonist. Before he had decided on the quiet life of ballooning, he and Mrs. McGillivibe had pursued a very different type of lifestyle, one that, though it still required suspense above the ground, did so from the comfortable heights of a large tent.  No, Mr. and Mrs. McGillivibe had not been house painters. Yes, they were the famous trapeze artists of the Vaulting Vibe Family Circus. 

How does this in any way prove fortunate for Jeremy? Easy – especially for Mr. McGillivibe. When the reel took Jeremy’s forearm, shoulder, torso and legs over the edge of the hot air balloon basket, Mr. McGillivibe took hold of Jeremy’s ankles. Years of practice made him very effective. He could swing upside down on a bar and catch Mrs. McGillivibe (when she was a bit lighter) with his eyes closed. It was like his hands had their own sight. Feet and ankles flying through the air? Mr. McGillivibe’s hands grabbed them. So there was no thinking required when Jeremy’s shoes faded quickly from view over the edge of the hot air balloon basket. Mr. McGillivibe’s hands tossed aside the controls of the hot air balloon and dove over the balloon basket side in hot pursuit. Those hands knew better than to grab at Jeremy’s shoes. They went for the ankles. They locked on those ankles. They pulled Mr. McGillivibe over the edge of the hot air balloon basket too.

Not a problem! If Mr. McGillivibe’s hands had their own sight, then his feet and ankles had their own hands. Those ankles and feet instinctively looped themselves around two of the ropes holding the Bonnie to one side of her basket. They kept the BRS2.0 system intact.

A good thing, too, as any thirteen year-old who has studied physics knows. Because forces get pulled along something called vectors, and vectors are not something to be trifled with. The vector of force connecting Bumpers to Jeremy, call it arrow B-J, was definitely strong enough to reconnect Bumpers, and the rest of BRS2.0, to the ground (vector big G). Now that Mr. McGillivibe’s hands were connected to Jeremy’s ankles, and the man’s own ankles and feet were connected to the ropes holding Bonnie’s balloon to her basket, a new vector, call it arrow B-B (Bumpers to Bonnie), was in effect. Bonnie, being the more massive object in the vector, easily dominated that new vector. She stayed up, and so did Mr. McGillivibe, Jeremy, and Bumpers. If Jeremy is to be criticized for his failure to use only part of his teen brain in the planning of his boomerang retrieval mission, he is also to be praised for his engineering of BRS2.0. It sustained forces well beyond the requirements of any normal Australian boomerang retrieval.

At that time, of course, BRS2.0’s remarkable engineering mattered little to Mr. James. What mattered was that his son was no longer in the balloon’s basket. Gripping the ropes that suspended the other side of the basket from the balloon, and facing south, towards the edge of Bobbing Apple in which his factory was located, Mr. James had just convinced himself that things might turn out OK. The ride was smooth. Bonnie was not that high off the ground. Survival from a balloon flight was possible. The jolt to Bonnie’s basket from the counterforce of the new B-B vectorshook Mr. James from his calming reverie. The sight of Mr. McGillivibe’s shoes and ankles entwined in Bonnie’s ropes burst his optimistic bubble. Mr. McGillivibe was sightseeing from the wrong angle. Jeremy was sightseeing from somewhere unseen.

“Where’s Jeremy?” Mr. James hollered at Jocelyn. The girl made a face like a pensive rabbit. She pointed over the edge of Bonnie’s basket. 

The effect on Mr. James was immediate. He felt violently ill and wickedly weak. Trying to overcome the pull of the basket floor on more than his knees, he staggered into the center of the basket and reached up, hoping for something to hold onto. He found something. A lever. Extending one hand toward Jocelyn, Mr. James bravely pulled himself up with the other. The lever, however, came down under his weight. A burst of flames shot upward. And the balloon, and the basket with it, responded.

While the upward movement felt nauseating to Mr. James, it felt rejuvenating to Mr. McGillivibe. The former high-wire acrobat had been yelling, at the top of his lungs, for someone to make Bonnie go up. Admittedly, he had been doing so from inside the jacket that had fallen over his mouth and face, so the sound was better heard inside his jacket sleeves than in the air above Camelot Court. But he didn’t need sight to tell him that a man and boy hanging over the edge of a hot air balloon made for a tail that could drag along treetops and housetops. And he didn’t more than a teenage physics to know that a hot air balloon with additional weight will fall if it isn’t given a reason to rise.

Mr. James’s knees and stomach gave Bonnie a reason to rise. When they fell, he grabbed, and when he grabbed, Bonnie rose. 

Mr. McGillivibe whooped like he used to do in the circus. Jeremy hurrayed like he thought a good pilot hanging in midair beneath a rising hot air balloon should respond. Bumpers, in turn, barked.

The bark was what got Mrs. Benny Benini’s attention. Standing in her bathroom, enjoying the smell of the morning while brushing her hair, Mrs. Benny Benini was interrupted from her own reverie, a reverie that went something like this: I don’t know why I bother to brush this stiff nest of wire. It doesn’t look any different when I do. Mrs. Benny Benini liked to stand in her bathroom early in the morning. She liked to pretend that she was brushing her hair when in fact she was really watching to see when the robin chicks would have their first flight. There was a nest in the top of the oak tree just outside Mrs. Benny Benini’s open window. In that nest were two robin chicks. Each morning, those chicks seemed closer to flight. Today the chicks’ mother was no longer sitting on the edge of the nest. Mrs. Benny Benini was pretending to brush her hair, thinking about the ridiculousness of the act, when what she was really doing was watching, from the reflection in the bathroom mirror, the events in the robin’s nest at the top of the oak tree. One morning, she had seen the chicks hatched. Another morning, she had seen seen them fed. Yesterday, she had been sure that they were going to fly. Today, they were perched on the edge of their nest, looking down. 

So the bark, above the treetops, about the same level as the chicks, was unexpected. It does not need to be mentioned that the dog likewise fit into that category. 

Bumpers can hardly be blamed for assisting the chicks in their first flight. Boomerang in his mouth, he must have found it hard enough to bark let alone avoid the nest and the tree beneath it. It could be argued that Bumpers’ yelp was actually a cry of “look out”. It was argued, much later, by Rachel, that the beagle had borne his lift-off without much fuss. All Mrs. Benny Benini knew, however, at this very moment, was that the Wiley dog, boomerang in mouth, jumped out of the branches of the oak tree, and scared the chicks off the edge of their next. Bumpers did not hit the nest. No, he rustled the branches next to and near it. The ripple effect was sufficient though for the nest to shake and for the chicks to jump. Then Bumpers was gone, the nest was empty, and Mrs. Benny Benini, startled, dropped her hair brush onto the table beside the sink. The brush hit the lavender spray, a direct hit, just to the top of the spray bottle such that a puff of lavender, and the clatter of the hair brush continuing its descent, distracted Mrs. Benny Benini from the sight of Bumpers flying at her window, front paws extended. We can’t be sure that Bumpers saw Mrs. Benny Benini grasping at the air behind the path of her falling hairbrush. We can be sure that Mrs. Benny Benini did not see Bumpers. We can also be sure that Mrs. Benini, bending into the suspended spray of lavender, saw something completely unexpected on the floor of her bathroom just next to her hairbrush. One of the robin chicks had landed inside her house.

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.