Thoughts On A Spring Day

 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. 

Torschlusspanik

There's a German word for it - torschlusspanik - meaning there's not enough time, meaning the fear that the time to act is running out. A last minute panic. In ancient days it meant hustling back into the village before the gates closed and locked a poor pilgrim out for the long, cold, dangerous night. Growing older puts the emphasis on this: do I have enough time to do what? To finish doing what? To get it all done? To get what done? So, growing older and laboring under the impression that there wasn't enough time left, all of a sudden, I need as much time as I can get. It's - as the great Yogi Berra said - deja vu all over again. My son, his significant other, and my grandson are moving back home - Here! - Our house! - Home! Back home. Just when we thought it was safe to float a little. Just when we no longer needed eyes in the backs of our heads. Just when we thought we were finished struggling with a little boy's shoes and socks. Just when we thought we were finished with eternal sniffles, constant colds, outright flues. Just when we thought...I don't know what we thought. It wasn't unexpected. We felt it coming. Still. What now?

We first bought our house forty years ago - mid career, pre-kids. The deed dates back to 1828,  a big, old, white sided Catskill farm house with a hand stacked stone foundation. Nothing fancy, but big, and we bought it with every dish, fork, spoon, knife, towel, and sheet in stock, even some of the furniture, the beds and dining room chairs and tables in particular. It had been operating as a hunting lodge with thirteen bedrooms each with its own sink with a spring on the faucet that turned it off automatically. What the hell are we gonna do with all this house I wondered and said so aloud? I think my exact words were, "What the f***..." etc. However, it came with 104 acres attached to the Catskill State Forest Preserve. Forever Wild. Sold. We knocked out rooms. It became livable. Guests came and didn't want to leave. Lots of them. Many left hiking boots, skis and snowshoes behind. They'd be back. Come the Fall my hunting buddies and I would criss cross back and forth then come back inside to a hot beef stew made by Jamie. She was never a farm wife but the best companion imaginable. Summer. Fall. Winter. The house was full. Not so much in mud season but full otherwise. And then came GreenePlays. As if we didn't have enough to do. Jamie, I, and the sisters Brooke and Lynne Adams began a theatre in a barn devoted to new plays. Forty actors and crew living in our house night and day. A cook from Texas who shuddered in the morning chill. A crew that co-opted a large storage room as a dorm and nicknamed it the Rambo Room. Even a production that moved to NYC. Back to my original question: what're we gonna do with all this house? And now we're gonna do it all over again.

I can only say, "Wish us luck." I am eighty-two and Jamie was just seventy-six, so we're in for another ride, a new beginning. Deja vu all over again. Are we excited? Thrilled? Feeling blessed at having a daughter right next door a jump across the brook , and son and grandson within the walls? You bet, but limitations are obvious, and I'd be lying if I said, "No problem." The combined aches of mine and J's feel like a cold wind blowing through a scrap metal bone yard. The fourteen stairs from first floor to second are inching towards Everest. Milky Ways and speed are no longer ways to pour on the energy. Gotta stay healthy, alert, steady, eat well, drink water...Tomorrow I need to go to the elementary school to begin the process of enrollment for kindergarten. Pick up the packet from the principal's office. The principal's office! Jesus, I haven't been in high school for three score and more years, yet I'm still rattled by the thought of going to that damn principal's office. Chester Katemcamp was his name. My first principal at the elite high school I attended.

And should we get a new puppy, too?

The Tale of the White Faced Hornet

OK. I admit it (and, if you guys out there are honest you'll admit it, too): One of country living's greatest pleasures is the ability to piss outside. I don't have to drop 'em. No need to squat. Just unzip, shake loose, let go. Pure, unadulterated anarchy. It helps that there are trees that whisper, and, I am lucky, to have a brook that whispers back. Sound like heaven? It is, a little piece of it, anyway. Surrounded by two hundred and fifty thousand acres more. Of course, that's all relative. When we lived in Montana we had two and a half million acres as our backyard. 

And speaking of Montana as well as peeing outside...

The Tale Of The White Faced hornet

Lenny Bruce said that if you live in Montana you can't be Jewish. Not true. I lived in Montana as did a smattering of other apostates throughout the territory. However, when a friend of mine was killed, we scoured the state looking for a rabbi and couldn't find one. We did locate a 90 year old orthodox man in Helena who consented to officiate at the funeral. He was a dapper fellow, very sharp and affable, lively, and he knew his stuff. "Yis gadal..." You know the one. So did he, and whatever other prayers were appropriate. As far as I can remember, the only Jews there were the dead man, the rebbe, and myself. Get this. When the old man learned I worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood, he got extremely animated and asked if I could get him an agent. He himself had a screenplay. And what a screenplay! Oy. Such a wonderful screenplay! A hit! A blockbuster. A ganze megillah. Could I find him an agent? He told me he'd send me his screenplay the minute he got home. Like a shmuck I said I'd be looking forward to it (after all, he did travel a long way to do me a favor), although his chances of getting an agent were slim and none. I never did get the screenplay, so that was a problem solved all by itself.

The deceased had been a dear friend - the dearest of same. Jamie and I had just gotten married, and his present was to be a float trip down the north fork of the Clark Fork river. His truck (We warned him his front end needed work) rolled and killed him the day before we were supposed to take off. He had a habit of not paying his bills, so one wondered? Nah. What'm I thinking?

What's this got to do with peeing outside? Nothing. But, it came to me, so I wrote it. 

Peeing outside in Montana was an exquisite experience especially in the morning when the fog lifted off the mountains and the nocturnal animals were scurrying back to their daytime lairs. You might see bear, a porcupine, coyote, cougar, mule deer, a herd of elk...We actually had a herd living on the property, although, big as they are, we rarely saw them. One day we saddled up for a trail ride up Ward Mountain. A good piece up the mountain I saw a cow way up ahead and said to Jamie we'd best tell our neighbor her cow had got out. However, the closer we got we saw it was a female elk and that we had ridden directly into the center of a herd of wild elk. The fact that we were on four legged, dark skinned animals allowed this, however, once they got wind of humans on horseback, they melted back into the forest as if they'd never been there at all. Eight hundred pound animals. The magician waved his wand, and they disappeared.

So, morning in Montana. Time to go. The sun is rising. The earth is warming. Apples from the front yard tree are falling. Like a dummy I choose this very tree under which to tap my bladder. Why a dummy? Apples were rotting on the ground thus attracting insects among which were white faced hornets, like little death heads. I didn't see them, but they saw me, at least, one did, and zeroed in on a drone attack. Now, let me tell you I've been stung before, even by a jellyfish, but nothing so excruciating as a rat trap snapping shut on the head of one's shvanz. Jamie heard me scream and rushed outside to see me grabbing my crotch and hopping around the yard in pain. "A hornet stung me on the head of my dick," I hollered. Her response? "A shame about the pain but the swelling is wonderful." 

A sense of humor is necessary for a long marriage. Forty three years this year. We're still laughing. Maybe not as much as we used to, but a daily chortle never hurts.