I saw a note I wrote around this time a year ago about the return of the red-winged blackbird, a summertime visitor in these parts, and sure enough there they were a day later. That unique chitter has become one of my favorite signs of spring. I haven’t seen a robin yet, but they can’t be far behind.
“I will probably find daffodil sprouts soon,” I wrote in my journal, and sure enough I found them sprouting away yesterday morning.
It was a busy weekend at the day job, and I was still pretty tired Monday morning. I felt too sleepy for a burst of creativity. Or is it when weariness creeps up that an impish story jumps out, the tale of a magical land and the quest for a long-lost McGuffin, and the boy and the girl who trip over it in the forest, never realizing — until almost too late — that ancient sects and secret societies have been searching and waiting for it for centuries? The DaVinci Code meets Peter Pan.
Oh, I won’t grow up, and after 71 years, why bother? And now I have memories that are 60 years old — falling on the asphalt playground and breaking my wrist, not realizing it was fractured for a week; finding Spider-Man #4 in the pile of new comics at the Milton (Vt.) IGA; entering the 880 in the school’s field day and learning the hard way that you can’t sprint 880 yards — but I was in the lead for the first quarter of the race. I can still hear my teacher shouting “Pace yourself, Bluhm!” not sure what he meant by that until my lungs kind of exploded.
I was a goofy kid, somewhat normal, somewhat not. I think, all told, we all are. No one is perfectly average, and if we were to discover that we WERE perfectly normal, we would be alarmed and see what we could do that was not perfectly average but uniquely ours.
All the places I’ve been and things I’ve seen — and all that I have not — wash over me in a kaleidoscope of fond memories and if-onlys. And still, Lord willing, miles to go.
