Month: November 2022

3 short blog posts or one long one

The wind chimes were a present from our dear friends who witnessed our at-last exchange of vows almost 20 years after we met. The chimes hung from the eaves outside my window in the old office and provided a tuneless melody that played during these musings for most of the last nearly six years now.

For that reason — and the fact that Red can’t sleep with a tuneless melody constantly ringing along — the wind chimes had to migrate with the rest of my office to this end of the house. Alas, Red will not let me mount the 20-foot ladder that would be needed, or let me on the roof to approach from the top so I can hang the chimes from the eaves at this end. Before, I could casually reach from the deck and hang them by the window.

And so I bought a shepherd’s hook and hung them in the garden underneath the window, It turns out the melodious no-tune is just as soothing from below as from slightly above. And there’s a gale warning tonight, so it’s quite a tune.

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Summer needed a walk, so we went out on the field, up on the mound, beside the old irrigation trench, and into the woods, where she sniffed around and found the perfect stick, which she carried all the way back to the house, passing occasionally to lie down and gnaw at it.

I wondered if she would still love it after it had lain on the porch for a few hours drying in the sun. Not only did she still love it, but for the past four days, every time we go out the front door, she has picked the stick up and carried it into the yard for more gnawing.

Quite a few years ago now, I bought a pack of Uni-Ball Jet Stream Sport pens and fell in love with how they fit in my hand. It’s the most comfortable pen I ever owned. I have not written with anything else since, and I routinely buy refills so I can reuse the pens over and over. It feels weird to wield any other pen.

There I was, writing with my ever-present Jet Stream Sport about Summer’s obsession with one particular piece of wood. I know all about finding the perfect stick.

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I was browsing through an old journal and found a reference to an adventure story I was working on that I’d completely forgotten. And so there’s another item on my list of unfinished projects. Strangely, instead of raising the same old frustrations, I felt a jolt of pleasant rediscovery. 

Not: “OMG, I can never finish anything! It’s miserable!”

But: “OMG, look at all these stories I have yet to tell! It’s wonderful!”

I’m finding that wonder is more fun than misery.

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Conundrum

Where is the shelter from the storm?

Who is the healer of the soul?

What is the answer and what is the real question?

When will it all become clear, and How?

And at the root of it all, Why?

The five Ws, and the How. The story is not complete, and the puzzle is not solved, without these answers.

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The things they will search for again

© Spelagranda | Dreamstime.com

I felt dry as a brown pile of fallen leaves, unable to muster an image or a passage of serviceable words for my humble service for the day, so I do what I sometimes do to lubricate my imagination: I pulled a book of Bradbury short stories off the shelf.

The Machineries of Joy, first published by Simon & Shuster in February 1964. Mine is a New Bantam edition, second printing, from February 1983, purchased new for $2.75 sometime shortly afterward.

I read “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh” because I opened the book to that page first. Ray Bradbury, like me, was baffled by the concept of war, and this story of a chance meeting between drummer boy and general the night before the grisly battle drips with melancholy. “You’re the heart of the army,” the general tells the boy.

I needed more than one dose, and second to last in the table of contents was “To the Chicago Abyss,” which I’m sure I read before but forgot. Ironic, that, because it’s a story about remembering.

In a post-apocalyptic city, an 80-year-old man is beaten, then sought by police, then protected by Samaritan strangers, because he dares to remember and remind people of the simple pleasures of better times, like the aroma of a freshly opened can of coffee. He hopes to inspire people, discouraged by their totalitarian overlords: “For the things, silly or not, that people remember are the things they will search for again.”

Sometimes I remember the soothing balm of a Bradbury story, and I search for one again. Thank God there are hundreds of them.

For me it is a Bradbury tale. Others seek out a Beatles song or an Eliot poem or an old-time movie about a ghost in a wishing well. We need these reminders that there is beauty to be found and good that comes from human hearts.

The man in the story dug even deeper, to remind people of fresh coffee and candy bars (“Milky Ways — swallow a universe of stars, comets, meteors”). Remember good things inspires us to seek out good things while they are still there to be had and preserved and cherished.