All the Things I Don't Know

"Would people still be good if there weren't any polices?" 2 asked me.

We drove in silence for a few moments: me, astonished; 2, patient.

I told her it was an excellent question. I blathered like a parent.

"I was asking, would people be good, not can people be good," she said.

Signs

1. Of the times

My eye swept across a small sign stuck in the grassy median strip: Panic Contest. In the next moment of approach, I saw that it actually said: Fabric Outlet.

2. Of my age

I was driving a car in which the steering function and the throttle shared the same equipment, meaning that the curvier the road, the faster the car went. This was tiring, so I pulled off the road at an open, park-like field.

I sat on the grass and watched some gathering storm clouds of kitchen utensils. A sudden wind caught the clouds and whipped them toward the west, driving spatulas and spoons across the sky. By some trick of perspective, they were much lower and larger than they first appeared.

A giant soup dipper crashed into the second floor of a nearby house, bowl-first, smashing out a wall. The handle ripped open a first-floor sun porch before the wind caught the utensil and swiveled it around the house to join the others.

I laughed at the absurdity, and noticed that some teens walking by had seen it, too, and were laughing.

“That’s nice, that kids today can see the humor in something simple and silly like that,” I thought.

I woke soon after, smiling, this time at myself, for dreaming in language like "kids today."

For Dust You Are

The yellow crocuses 1 planted around the grave of the baby quail have bloomed in this warm spell. I'm sitting near them, in the back yard, reading in the sunshine. 2 plays her standard repertoire of 5-year-old games: restaurant, house, ballet, sporting event.

Then she slides half-way onto a chair beside me and grins.

2: I have a question for you. If you get it right, you'll get my very best trophy. Who made us: God... or Mother Nature?

Me: Is there really a right answer?

2: Yes! [expectant pause] If you think about what we are... you'll know ...

We speak at nearly the same moment.

Me: Mother Nature?
2: Mother Nature!

2: I thought about it and figured it out for myself. --I don't know if it's truth or not, but it's what I think.

I pretended I had to go blow my nose and ran into the house so I could scribble the conversation on a piece of scrap paper. For the record, I never speak about a "Mother Nature" figure; I'm not sure where she got it from, but she's been mulling over the different between the two characters for over a year now.

What was happening in her brain as she pondered this? What does she think God is that we are not?

Why I Love My Neighborhood, Again

I stepped out of my front door, set my cello on the porch, closed the door behind me, reached into my pocket for my keys, and remembered they were on the little stand in the hall.

Fortunately, I do this often enough that I keep a spare house key in the car.

Unfortunately, I've recently gotten into the habit of locking my car doors, even though it took me five years after finding part of a broken pipe on the floor one morning.

Fortunately, I could see that I had left the driver's side unlocked this time.

I smiled at the sun, took up my cello and got ready to go to N-'s house to practice a duet we'll perform in February.

In the next two minutes of loading in, I started to daydream about planting the seeds I bought last week, which led me to think about my new knowledge that regular dirt is unhealthy for some seeds, which made me wonder if M- would believe me, which got me thinking about whether it's women he doesn't like to agree with, or just me, which made me think about M-G-'s husband and how he probably agrees with her lots but I wouldn't want to be married to him anyway.

I shut the passenger side door with my cello in place, walked around the front of the car, and was struck by the hazy memory of having pressed the lock button.

Yup, I was now locked out of house and car. A quick mental inventory of our home's windows revealed that my typical break-in routes were no-gos. Miraculously, I had not left the phone inside either house or car, so I called N- to tell her I would be very, very late.

And here's why this post is about my neighborhood: I walked down the street to C-'s house, where she took me in and offered me a cup of tea. (Note to self: give C- a spare house key.) We sat at her kitchen table, drank Rooibos tea, rubbed the dog's head, and talked about jobs, the economy, our kids' schools. The sun shone through a cut glass pendant in the window and made a rainbow on the floor.

Even the small act of getting up to wash the dogsmell off my hands at her kitchen sink without interrupting our conversation made me feel happy. No need for those funny gestures, aiming one's hands in the direction of the sink while airwashing them, raising one's eyebrows, saying "May I?" as one would do in a mere acquaintance's house. The kitchen sink, sort of a personal altar, is not something to use lightly.

Eventually 1 came home from school with a key and I went along to my duet practice.

Flight

I entered the desolate stairwell at work and saw a lone little brown leaf on the floor, then had that odd feeling, when knowledge overlaps perception, for in the next demi-instant I saw that it was a bat, too dark brown to be a leaf; also, somehow I felt it was still alive.

I nudged it with my toe, and it gave a crackling hiss, feebly twisted its angular wings. It was clearly injured, and angry. I wanted either to gently scoot it out of the way or to kill it bloodlessly. I touched it again with my boot, to make sure it wasn't going to suddenly spring into flight. It hissed again. I would have been afraid if I were a small animal, and as it was, I felt so unsettled by this bat, even though I knew it couldn't hurt me, that I left it where it was and went up to the office.

Someone took a box down, turned it over the bat and pushed it off to the side. Later, after a call to Animal Control ("What I'm gonna need for you to do is to put it in a plastic bag"), I found a Dollar Tree bag and a vague determination to be decisive. No one in the office had leather gloves.

The bat was weaker. I leaned closer and saw its tiny pointed ears and flat nose shaped like the roof of a pagoda. Its wings and pillowy body were crushed indeterminately together. This flying mammal: how different from me. It turned its head back toward me, just barely, and gave a hiss more like a sigh.

It took me three or four tries to grab the small bundle of its body without flinching, my hand inside the bag like a glove. Such an ugly shroud. I tried to jostle the bag slightly so the bat wouldn't be on its back as it waited to die.

Adrift at The End of December

• Geez, I had a curl in the middle of my forehead when I wrote that last post, eh? Now, with a glass of red wine and Mendelssohn's octet for strings on the stereo, I'm not so horrid.


• I saw Across the Universe at the movie palace the other night and here's my review: Better than Hairspray.


• I took 1 and 2 to see Enchanted this morning. (Who the heck knew there was such a thing as a 10 a.m. Sunday matinee??? -must've been the oddest movie-going experience ever.) Here's my review: Better than I thought it would be.


• Actually, I thought Enchanted was a superb example of narrative a la mode: slip directly from parody into the the form being parodied. It was like The Daily Show for 8- to 12-year-old girls.


• Don't get me wrong: I like The Daily Show. But at its heart, it is Establishment.


• The rain, the rain.


• We went to the art museum today and managed to look at some things between asking the girls not to play combat hide-and-seek around the statuary pedestals. I liked "The Watering Pond at Marly with Hoarfrost" by Alfred Sisley, for its precise capturing of winter afternoon light and shade. I couldn't find that image, but here's his "Hoarfrost, Saint Martin's Summer," with what I think is morning light.

I Like You, Really I Do

M- wants to have a poker night this Friday. "Invite all your friends," he says.

Some days I just don't have any friends. At least not any with whom I would enjoy a convivial evening of drunken gambling, if we're talking about my sanctioned friends, as in: wives of his friends. (Note: these are women I like very much between the hours of 8 am and 8 pm.) Most of my friends are friends only in my imagination, which is to say, if I knew them better, we probably wouldn't be friends, by mutual decision.

Really-- I am a friendly person, not at all overtly misanthropic. People seem to like me. I don't know why I'm feeling so grouchy about this concept of "friends" right now.


I can barely touch my own self
How can I touch someone else?
I am just an advertisement
for a version of myself.

-"Angels," David Byrne, David Byrne