The Winding Woods

photo by ayacata7.

It isn’t always straight forward, the way we find our way through the woods. It isn’t always by light of morning but sometimes by light of moon, when the owl’s hoot and silent wingspan fills dark spaces between the trees, and when eyes aglow follow our trail, quiet, waiting.

It isn’t always plain to see, the town that comes beyond the hill. The ramshackle huts with smoke drifting skyward, or the laundry drying on the dead brambles, or the twisted sheen of the madmen gathered near the well.

It isn’t always what we thought it would be, this love of the girl we travel to see, this milkmaid or seamstress or nursemaid’s scullion. At times she hides a blush behind her hand, while others she screams with pretty little fists that beat your chest, hollowed and tight like a drum. Then the stolen moments, fleeting for the memory to cup, and ugly moments that will never end and neither drink nor sleep will see it fade, and once she is gone there are all the moments that never were, but that we play upon and mould with hands now empty. Linger upon days that could have been, if we had found our way by different paths, for the woods know best, in their weathered bark and aged span of limbs, which is the path for me that day, and the next, and the next.

Hidden Doorways

photo by frogmuseum2

After he bought a 1920’s Cape Code style home, he felt impelled to install hidden doors, miniature windows looking onto bonsai gardens, figurines of elves and gnomes perched in the many nooks and crannies particular to older homes. Things fantastical, mythical, or just a little kooky. He remembered a visit to his aunt’s house once as a child, with overgrown apple trees crowding the windows with their limbs. Looking out the kitchen window, he could see a wiry bird’s nest on the crook of a branch, with a half eggshell and a rubbery looking chick popping its head out. He stared and stared, but the chick never moved. “It’s fake, isn’t it?” he asked doubtfully. “Oh no,” his aunt said. “It’s real. See, he just blinked.” His older cousins backed up her story. “Oh, it’s real alright,” they snickered. He checked on the baby chick every morning to see if it had moved yet, until finally his brother said “Don’t be a dumbass, its rubber. Can’t you see that?” But his aunt immediately came to his defense, “Oh no. It’s real. See, it moved its wing,” and she winked at him, as though the fact that it was real was their little secret.

On the last day of their visit, he was watching the chick from the window and said to his aunt, “The momma bird never shows up to feed it. It’s going to die.” She sat him on her lap and said, “I’m sorry, honey, but it’s not real. It’s a tree ornament that I put up there in the Spring.” It wasn’t until after she fessed up that he finally saw it move. Everybody laughed at him.

He wanted to put something at the base of the giant elm tree by his driveway. Maybe a tiny wooden door in the trunk, and a white picket fence. He wanted to plant ivy at the side of the house so that it would crawl up the chimney brick, and he could lodge elves in the brambles, peeking their heads out of the leaves. Maybe in the guestroom, in that little cupboard door cut into the outer wall to get at the insulation, he could place a hand-bound journal written by a made-up child that lived in the room twenty years ago, documenting all of the weird creatures that come out of hiding during the night. Now, all he needed was a nephew or niece to make it real.

Eleven Years Ago Today

photo by moonjazz.

Every now and then, I’ll think I’ll post a past entry from my journals – one, five, ten years ago to the day. Like this entry, March 11th, 1999:

I am so good at deleting, better than at writing. I just wrote several lines about a coworker, then turned back and deleted them because it was so much telling. I realized that a true writer would have painted a picture of this person and let the reader make judgments like "he was awkward in social situations." Why not write the scene of him standing at the foot of my cube, looking over my papers, standing with that poker face of his, not revealing a thought or expression, just a stone wall face with the sharp cut of his nose and standing there like a guard before the gate.

Where's the creativity, hiding back there in the shack at the far end of a field gone fallow? Back when I was ten or twelve, my friend and I would run out across the tall grass to a wooden shack. Pull dead weeds and sticks and stuff them into a coffee can, then strike a match and watch it burn. The smell of burning grass, the sudden crackle of the flames, the smoke chugging out of the can like the smoke stack from a steam engine. In the shack we would find wrinkled clippings of naked women from Playboy magazine, the clippings handled so many times by grubby adolescent fingers that it'd grown soft, almost like cloth. Out there we also stashed away the compass and hunting knife that I stole from my dad’s top dresser drawer.

I pause, stare into the art prints on the walls of my den, music softly playing, the flickering of the candle on the desk, staring off into space and realizing that theme and meaning in a story must be drawn between the actions, must be plucked from the observances and the events, and I look off into all the shapes around me and try to depict the patterns, and wonder if any can really be drawn, wonder what truths I can really claim to see. I realize after a while that it is a waste of time. Why try to write, when I know that I don't have any truths for my readers. Perhaps that's why I don't have any readers. The act of writing has become merely masturbation, a self-absorbed indulgence of my sensibilities.

Bang! The starting pistol goes off and I launch myself out across the field, past the shack and over the smooth waters of the pond and up into the air above the woods. Then dive down into the dirt and the grubs and the Indian burial stones trod on by the tennis shoes of boys out to find beer cans in the weeds. I drank beer out in the woods until I was thrilled with liquor and stars, wavering in the rings of friends, crushing cans and tossing them away and grabbing another. Then off into the night in our cars, creeping down quiet suburban streets, past the darkened houses where the girls we loved slept.

I pause. When I write, I write for myself. My children play outside the door to the den, trying to draw me out to play, but I am playing here, in the space just above the keyboard, where my fingers dip and weave through the air like a dressmaker or a potter or the baker kneading his dough. It was something in the beauty of the words all scattered across the screen, forming shapes by the paragraph breaks and the curve of the letter "c". The languor of the dipping letters and the crossed T’s like a lifeline on the palm of one who had died too young.

Conversations with a Dead Dad

photo by ARTeTǝTЯA ( Too much busy elsewhere :( ).

Forget about it, Son. Forget about work and all the meetings there. Forget about the re-orgs and what your employees think of you. Forget about the newspaper this morning, and headlines of earthquakes and tsunamis, of political lambasting and financial collapse. Come on over, come here to me. We’ll rest up a bit. Breathe deep, calm yourself. Look at how the sun melts the snow. It almost smells like Spring, doesn’t it? Your favorite season, I remember. It’s not here yet, though. There will be plenty of winter nights to light a fire. You remember how I always put on too many logs, and your mom would complain how hot it was? Nothing is more nostalgic for you than the smell of wood smoke. But those days weren’t without their stress either. Even hearing my voice again makes you nervous. It’s ironic that I should be the one to comfort you now, when back then I was anything but. Even now, when you hear that voice filling you with self doubt, it’s my voice. When you think your ideas are stupid, it’s me that shoots them down even before you utter them. But forget about that now, son. Forget about the jolt of fear when your school bus would drop you off and you would see my car in the driveway, home early from work. Forget about the sound of my raised voice calling out for you when I found something you broke. Forget about my temper. Come on over, come here to me now. Breathe deep. Calm yourself. See the sun. Hear the wind in the trees. Smell Spring just around the corner.

Dear Mignon

Dear Mignon,

How could you grant a mere boy of fifteen a fantasy for two weeks at the end of summer, and then leave him for school in California? You were eighteen and had all of the big men on campus after you; the jock down the street, the man with a handlebar mustache at the club, and even my twenty-two year old brother who asked you to go away to a cabin with him for a weekend. But you picked me. I was so naïve I didn’t even consider that you were coming on to me; I thought you were just being nice. When did we first kiss? I remember it took a long time to get to that point, and you must have been wondering what I was waiting for, how I could be so dumb to miss all of the signals. You were house sitting for your uncle across the street from me, and invited me in when he was away on a trip. We sat on the large puffy sofa in the dark cool of his basement. You offered me a beer. I said yes. I had never drunk a beer before that, only sips of my Dad’s when I would get him another can of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Then you gave me a massage. I laugh now, thinking about that. How did you maneuver us from sitting on the sofa to a massage? I wonder what you thought when I didn’t kiss you, or offer to return the massage, or anything beyond my thanking you for the beer, and the massage, and crossing back over the street to my house.

We played tennis. Some boys from a baseball tournament sat along the fence to watch you running for the ball and the way your breasts bounced when you ran. They asked if you were my girlfriend, and I said no. They started catcalling, but I didn’t know what to do about it. You glowered and turned red. They eventually went away.

I remember now the first time you finally broke through to me and left no doubt as to whether you were interested in me as more than a friend. We were at the movie “Fright Night”, and you leaned your leg against mine. You held my hand for a while, and pulled my hand closer to you so the back of my hand rested against your bare thigh. I wasn’t watching the movie at all anymore, only your thigh and my hand. Then there in the dark you let go of my hand and slid your palm across my leg, and felt me getting hard. I remember walking out of the movie theater with a raging erection and thinking everybody could see it, but I couldn’t stop smiling.

You taught me to always open a door for a girl, and to always be gentle. You used to press your nose against mine and look right into my eyes; you were just a blur except for your eyes and smile, and you would flutter your eyelids like butterflies. Your uncle’s red Camero and a church parking lot. I didn’t have a clue where kids went to park and that seemed as good a place as any.

That last night we were to spend together before you moved out to LA to chase your dreams of becoming an actress, you told me that a person never forgets their first. As you drove me home the radio was playing Phil Collins “Against All Odds,” a very fitting soundtrack to my night. I remember thinking how every time I would hear that song, I’d think of this night. Phil Collins. Jesus.

Then you were gone. I remember feeling how lucky I was to have spent those last two weeks of summer with you, and that’s what made me angriest later, after it hurt to read your letters about your part-time job in a shoe store while you waited for callbacks from your latest auditions, and then letters asking why I wasn’t writing you back. I had to convince myself that I didn’t feel anything at all. Another lesson you taught me.

Heedless Speckle of Stars

He sleeps easily now, and that bothers him. What right does he have to sleep so soundly? He never admitted with what relish he suffered in his younger days, those restless years of spiritual searching and his tired affectations of a struggling writer. He thinks back on his various experiments: fasting in the woods like a suburban shaman to see visions; subjecting himself to sleep depravation for three days to see visions; following a spirit of a young Navaho boy across the desolation of Utah. Great arches of stone formed a natural amphitheater from which to cup his screams and fling them skyward. Heedless speckle of stars.

He tries to stay awake all night like he used to, but can’t resist turning on the tv and falling asleep to Jay Leno. What more can you expect from a corporate middle manager? He thinks about buying a tank of ether and a mask and resorting to artificial means of hearing voices. He wants to see hallucinations whipping about the room, imaginary children playing in the hedges, recently escaped from Our Sacred Heart of the Feeble Minded. He looks dejectedly at the sterile rooms of his apartment. What kind of atmosphere do you need to lure the muses? They need a welcome mat, a comfortable abode in which to spend their long weekends, a place that feels like a bed and breakfast for the beyond. He pictures himself small-talking with them in the late morning hours, sipping tea and nibbling on pastries. What would they talk about? Probably how bad the traffic was coming out of Olympus, or the humidity, or his hammer toe.

He wonders what a muse looks like: silvery white, like a sculpture of Michelangelo’s that has learned to flex its limbs? Jade eyes in a marble face? No, his muses had always been the dead idols...Rimbaud, Artaud, and Morrison. He felt closest to Artaud; they shared the same despair. Morrison was his college comrade, his drinking buddy, his idol of excess raising hell and dancing on ledges. Rimbaud was the brilliant prodigy, the cocky boy of sixteen that invented a new language, and then disappeared into the jungles of Africa never to be heard from again. And who has become his muses now? Steven Covey? Scott Adams? Who comes to mind first when he sees the name Homer?