Linz, Austria (http://www.sternwarte.at) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6756468
-
Bourbon Over Ice
San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office is a cash-only bar: exact change, please. I learned this when I went to pay the fee for release of my car from impoundment which was towed during Labor Day weekend because of expired registration tags. The evening after I got my car back I thought of the sound the clerk’s stapler made when she clacked my paperwork together, how similar it is to when ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass begin to crack apart as I pour bourbon over them, their modest explosions like a bullwhip in the distance you did not quite expect. -
Pallbearer
After she asks about her great-grandson, hearing the details of our baby’s growth – if he started to crawl, which foods he likes – my grandma says in a tentative voice she hopes I can still be a pallbearer at her funeral service when she dies. Ninety-five years old, death weighs on her – frankly, it’s been on her mind a long time – and though the message is only implied, the thought of me with other family walking beside her casket on its way to burial must be a comfort to her. But it’s a lot to carry all at once: the joy and wonder of raising our son, the prospect of losing my grandmother who has been a presence in my life since I was a baby myself, wrapped up in a blanket on her lap, unaware of the role I would play many years later.
-
On Top of My Dresser
The memento I used to keep of dad was a photograph of him and me when I was little, walking down a hall in the high school where he taught English rows of lockers on either side of us like parts of the mind where memories live. My small hand in his, we were silhouettes against daylight through the glass door exit. One day I realized I am older now than he was when this picture was taken which made me kind of uncomfortable so I decided I would replace it with a whelk shell bigger than my fist and the color of a storm-tossed, foamy sea we discovered while out for a stroll at dawn on a beach in North Carolina. The morning we found it, as the sun rose above the horizon, a dolphin pod swam by close to shore, several of them leaping from the water with apparent joy - the splash of their bodies against the surf the rhythmic spray of their exultant breath still resonates inside that spiral shell when I hold it to my ear and listen.
-
Divorce Boats
That’s what our guide called the tandem kayaks our tour group used to explore the ocean - an epithet, he explained, that comes from how the boats split labor between partners: the person in the bow paddles forward while the one at stern uses the rudder; both can see the course ahead, but the two must cooperate on speed and bearing. It’s a risk whose downside has been the end of many: to trust each other, and not resent how neither controls all progress. Quite a trial of marriage, yet couples go out to sea this way each summer returning still joined, if not also wiser. -
Baby Rattlesnake
I reacted to the baby rattler before I was even aware of it - a phenomenon of instinct, I guess, when the body can recognize a snake prior to the mind having any time to perceive it - and without given conscious instruction my arm moved itself up to block the path of my pregnant fiancé so her foot would not tread upon the little serpent as it hastily writhed across the trail in front of us. After we both had a chance to calm down and the rattlesnake had gone on its way, she commented to me that the small ones are more dangerous than the adults: their venom more potent, their release of it lacking control. A lucky advantage for people, then, how this primal thing deep inside the brain, vestigial from early development, which relates to what is reptilian is able to jolt our limbs in motion with utmost speed.
-
Quiet Joe
I went to daycare at the house next door to my parents' in a small Vermont town. The husband of the woman who watched us always smoked his pipe while he mowed the lawn. An adult now, when I smell tobacco or fresh-cut grass, I think of quiet Joe, taciturn in the midst of our antics: kids playing, the family dog barking and his wife’s raised voice above all the rest keeping everybody well in line, a shout we heard from one end of the house to the other - even across the yard if we happened to be outdoors, beyond the reach of her firm yet capable hands. -
Birds-of-Paradise
In the median of a parking lot birds-of-paradise crane their slender necks up to the sky, catching rain as it falls with orange flowers like wide-open beaks eager to be fed straight from heaven’s mouth.
-
Which Way We Sleep
It is a little-known fact that babies asleep in their cribs will shift themselves into alignment with earth’s rotation: tops of heads face west, tiny feet point east. Getting older, we become attracted to either one of the opposite poles: north and south each beckon our loyalty while our weary bodies lie in bed. But the truly young can appreciate the continuum of cyclical motion, the rise and fall within each period. One wonders how this planetary torque affects the nature of dreams, depending on which way you recline when you slumber. -
Nourishment
My wife nurses our son on the couch so she can see the hummingbird feeder through the sliding glass door to the balcony. Every few minutes, a shimmer of them arrives in a group to flit and hover about the red plastic tray of nectar. Not realizing there’s room for more than one, they brawl in midair - beaks like rapiers clack with a shockingly audible din. She can’t resist a soft, delighted laugh as our baby calmly drinks from her breast while this iridescent skirmish goes on: a dazzling, miniature fireworks display with sudden flashes of green and fuchsia right outside the living room where she sits. These tiny expert fliers battle for a chance to lap up sweet nourishment then zoom away, returning to their chicks nestled in high branches of trees nearby.
-
Seraph
At the Armenian History Museum I saw a brass platter that was embossed to depict the face of a seraph with three pairs of wings around its head. In the ranks of angels, I imagine this one’s voice as an archaic trumpet made from the very same material whose limpid tones mingle well with a choir but that speaks in a tongue beyond language. I noticed how this piece did not show the heavenly being with body or hands – a contrast from the flying cherubs who often appear with the Trinity. While the putti’s busy fingers anoint, play stringed instruments, support His robes, and part clouds to make way for the spirit, the seraphim are all hearts ablaze with the blessed heat of holy announcement. Though I went there on a dim winter’s day and the platter had only a soft luster, I thought of that polished metal in bright sun, the long-haired visage wreathed with fire.
From the Firefly Galaxy 