I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.
I wish I'd written that, but credit goes to a fellow named J.B.Priestly. I think we would have been friends, at least, I hope so, judging by what he's written.
The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. you go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
See what I mean? Me 'n' Priestly, not you and Priestly, necessarily, but me. Finding him has been a pleasant surprise, a benefit of cruising the internet.
He can go to the dark side.
Be yourself is about the worst advice you can give to some people.
And
Marriage is like paying an endless visit in your worst clothes.
But then there's:
To show a child what once delighted you, to find the child's delight added to your own - this is happiness.
This last is especially bonny as Dorian Alexander, my grandson, soon to be five, has come into Spring with the rest of us. Spring has finally fully bloomed in our tiny corner of the Hudson Valley, and, while there may be corners as beautiful, there are none more beautiful. The lilacs are out now, and the mountain laurel is on the way. Tulips and daffodils bloomed yellow as egg yolks. We looked inside the tulip to see it just as beautiful - a deep bucket with ebony parts, its pistil and its stamen, its filaments and anthers. Dorian doesn't know they are sex organs, and I only just remembered. He and I check on the trees we planted - the white oak, the peach, the weeping cherry - to see how they fared the winter. They did, so, while the oak grows so slowly as to give pause, the others are in full bloom. Sam Beckett would have been proud of the cherry - "Always weeping." The back meadow was a counterpane of purple violets, cookie sized, bright golden dandelions, and white apple blossoms, and now the hoary headed seedpods remain to delight that little boy - parachutes for pixies. Lessons to be learned. Flowers pollinated by the wind. How the seed flies, lands, roots, carries on. I sit my chair and watch him romp half naked through the tall grass. "Gran'pa, c'mere," so I labor to my feet and follow him. There's jack-in-in-the-pulpit. His eyes. Not mine. Now mine. You have to stoop to see it. I don't want to stoop. My joints behave as if they have been stuck together with Crazy Glue. They grind like the morning coffee mill. They turn over slowly on a cold morning.
"Gran'pa, c'mere!" He wants me down by the brook where I promised him salamanders with spots and tails that come off, but it's rushing too fast. Should there be an accident - face it - I might not be able to help him. Mortality. Smack in the face. Last summer his fingers got caught under a rock in the stream bed, and I couldn't get down the bank fast enough to help him (My daughter beat me to it). My all time, favorite scene ever in a movie was between Robert Vaughn (an over the hill gunslinger) and Yul Brynner in "The Magnificent Seven". Vaughn stares at three black flies on the table then suddenly scoops them up in one hand. He's got them, smiles, hesitates, opens his hand. Two flies emerge. "Was a time," says Vaughn," I'd've gotten all three." Well, Dorian Alexander, was a time I might've gotten one, so, please, Little One, do us all a favor: be careful.
A memory. Perhaps I am two, no more than three. It is a warm Spring day in Maryland, and I am rolling down a hill with a little girl my own age rolling beside me. My mother must have been there but she is nowhere in the memory. We rolled and rolled, and what I remember most was the smell of wild spring onions that abounded on that hillside.
No comments:
Post a Comment