Around Here

the last of the lobsters have fewer aspirations asleep until the day after my ultramarine dream yoga is avoided on principle the voluptuous tourists coughing awake an intangible dawn ashes Pepsi all fall down

This little sonata of red white and black reminds me of the colors in a checkers game. I've noticed that close friends, especially the women, often somehow manage to color-coordinate.

Liz tagged along to the post office yesterday. On the way back, she jumped off at Brew Babies, which reopens for the season next week. Maybe she's doing some pre-season reconnaissance.

This home made little red swing has seen better days, but perhaps it's happy to be retired. I came across it on my ride. Its delicate construction suggests that it was made for a small child. But rather than being used up and broken, it seems to have been simply abandoned instead. My favorite swing as a kid was a rope that someone had hung from a massive old tree on the bank of a creek in the woods. "The Rope" as it was know by the neighborhood kids was a favorite hang out, no pun intended, a touchstone of local kid society. Trysts took place there, and fights, first cigarettes were smoked, first kisses stolen or given, and many a tale was told in the dappled shade around its totemic knots. And many a thrill-ride, launched from the bank, ended in the creek. I came across this variation of the theme a few years ago on one of the canals in an undeveloped precinct of the city. The trunk of the gracious old tree from which it hung was ribbed, far up into its leafy depths, wit...

Eco Preserve, an old favorite on the Caloosahatchee River, is where I go to unwind and taste the four flavors of meditation: sweet, sour, salty, and bitter. The boardwalk threads through a 365 acre state wetland preserve. There's a bit of wildlife, but what I like is its densely detailed, yet unchanging walking-in-space walk. It's a good foil for rambling along in one's thoughts. A leaf pierced by a reed when it fell to earth, or was driven by a fateful gust... so too our hearts,  driven and felled. Floating pavilions in the cove await kayak and canoe Flowers drift in the wake of a memorial. "There are heroes in the seaweed, there are children in the morning; they're leaning out for love, and they will lean that way forever, while Suzanne holds the mirror..."

I was hanging out with my friend Ted not long ago and he asked if I still rode my motorcycle. I told him I did. He mentioned that his son was looking for a bike to get around the city with. I told him to have Michael call me. Two days later, Dragonfly was hitched to a flatbed trailer, and I was waving goodbye. A couple of days after that, I was driving home in a rented van with a spanking new Honda Ruckus . I named my little bad boy Firefly. I found the matching shades at Walgreen. My new torque wrench at Sears. My adolescence right where I left it. I may be a tad scarce around here for a while. :o)

I hadn’t seen my old friend Martin in several years, not since his lover Fred died of a heart attack, at thirty-nine, in the parking lot of Ford’s shopping center in Northville. I had flown in on that cold March day, two months after Fred’s death, to celebrate with Martin, and the remnants of our old tribe, Martin’s spare and lovely memorial to our dead friend. There was snow on the ground. The dozen spring iris, sapphire blue, which I had sent ahead, Martin had stuck in the snow on the blank open lawn under the massive old willow, where we had gathered to reminisce and pray. Later, after the last of the guests had waved and retreated behind smoothly rising car windows, Martin and I were to enjoy a few days of indolence in rooms heated with fragrantly burning cherry behind March-frosted glass. A country gentleman, whose lifestyle the momentum of heritage, and a slowly dwindling family portfolio, managed to barely sustain, Martin wove the deeply frayed edges of his circumstances, on the...