Shouldn't…but Do

A smooth, chalky white stone.  Chipped hard on one side.  Not so much sides as surfaces.  Surfaces  worn smooth. Egg sized and scratched with what could be iron.  Pale sedimentary lines, it has seen some pressure.

Fields of stone baking behind the concession stand and car park.  Landscape writ in stone, never know what you will find.  Fossils, gneiss, limestone, granite.

Under the bleachers the stones are cool.  Someone else has been here.  Stones  neatly aligned on a metal lip provide introspection for five or 50 year old.

Something in these million year old minerals.  Laying there quiet, barely earning a glance.  I pick another,  mica winks at me beneath a scuff of algae.

Words in a sentence, these stones lay here – with depth,  age, quickened by millennia into essence – brilliance without edge.  Beauty understood only by those who know the language.

Unmoving, each has traveled  farther than any of us.  Each stone, each story, quickened hard.  Unmoving, a million years down, a million years to go.

In the past I would have taken those stones home, added memory to my own landscape.  Today I left them – not my story to change.

Fast pitch, fast swing.  Seeking a strike, seeking a hit.  Two sides, same coin.  It goes your way or it doesn’t.

A recent New York Times article profiled wealthy Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin.  Mr. Saverin, age 30,  relinquished US citizenship last September to relocate to Singapore.

The article notes Mr. Saverin’s desire to encourage young entrepreneurs to embrace the Facebook world, “where people are at the center of everything.”

Categoric statements about the center of anything are dicey.  The premise of Facebook is not people, it is relationship – its creation, maintenance, destruction, and exploitation.  Once visible, relationship  becomes a shifty, changeable, Heraclitus river.

History memorializes the clinging waste of human ego-centrism, the mortality of persona.   The Ptolemaic system had its time, now gone.

Travel far enough and the center found is the differentiating edge of something else.   Embrace the Facebook world?  Maybe not.

While the word is yet unspoken, you are master of it; when once it is spoken, it is master of you  – an Arab proverb

Makes a good case for silence.

Doorbell just rang.  I do not know how many of you remember Walking Man – but there he was, on my doorstep.

Walking Man has been walking for years.  A solemn, silent presence in my neighborhood and on my walks as I  tread the same streets as he.  Years passed and despite the silence, now and then I got a smile, then a greeting – and some time ago, I learned his name and began striking up conversation.

Walking Man turned out to be a highly intelligent high school senior.  His interests are not like others, he knows it, but that is okay.  He walks.

Today he hand-delivered an invitation to his graduation open house and I was as proud of him as I could be.  His hair was shorter in the picture on the card, his eyes could be seen and I commented on their blue blue color.

Graduation.  Walking Man is off to university, hoping for some scholarship money still to come in.  School is expensive, but it is where he needs to be.  I will go to his open house with my children and we will see off this nice young man who once was a stranger.

He is a good man, I hope he has a good life.  I will miss him.

A deft twist, pull, twist, wrap, snip.  Movement through space as elegant as any performance artist.

Stitches.  Note to self:  If you tell your child to aim the baseball at your mitt – do not put the mitt in front of your face.

I saw the clouds and saluted the sun.  I saw a big tree and an old man. I saw a vole jawbone.  A rusting but ready field tiller atop unhewn soil.  I saw an ornamental plum, half filled with leaves and  neon purple blooms.  I saw cars and sky, I saw a gas-powered model airplane spewing a blue plume across a field where light was falling fast.  I saw families, and baseball, I filled some pots, I planted some seeds.

It hums – this world.  Extraordinary, vibrant, the world out there.  I have been looking the wrong way.