Dog Days Wet

Our new buddy Brando fell into the fish pool this afternoon. As far as I recall, he is the first person, dog or cat to do so. The raccoons are afraid to go in there. Brando apparently mistook the green plants coating the top of the pond as evidence that it was a solid surface, not a watery hole.

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Is That You I See?

Note: I first published this a year ago today. It remains as true now as it was then, for me.



We've got lots of cliches about the passing of time in English. Some relate to how we forget.

We can forget how someone looks. We can forget how it felt to be with them. We quite easily, it seems, forget the good along with the bad.

It all goes away, somewhere far from here.

After a while, trying to recall, the only image we can summon is fuzzy. No matter how hard we try, nothing comes back into focus.

Maybe it's just as well, maybe the person and experiences we were trying to recall were never anything but illusions anyway.

So what's left to he who would try to see is -- nothing. Once you've been written out of the story, the story itself ceases to exist.

Stories are like plants, they can easily wither and die once no one is taking care of them any longer.

In time, the story may return in some sort of romanticized version or as a cautionary tale about the dangers of giving away too much to others. Or maybe it will just stay gone, which might be just as well.

What's left? That may be an empty field you see, a place to build a new beginning. Or it may be a truck barreling down on you to flatten you once and for all.

You can't tell. Most likely it is nothing at all, just an out of focus void. There is no field, there is no truck, there is no other, there only is you and you are alone.

So, you see, you better get used to it. That's what the world is trying to tell you now. You're on your own.

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Early Days of August

Lunch in our cafe.

Drawings by my youngest (3).

"Squidward."

Uncle and nephew.

Smiler.

Sibs.

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How the Light Strikes Us

"Grandpa, these binoculars are empty."

"I'm curious about your weapons."

"I have humoungus feet now I'm three."

Those were just three of my buddy's comments yesterday afternoon. He knows which edible plants in the garden to harvest when he visits, starting with butter lettuce this time through.

Family is the center of my life and has become the center of my identity. Once, like many successful men pursuing high-pressure careers, it would have been accurate to describe work as the center of my life, at least if you consider the amount of time spent at work as a determinative factor.

Fact is, though I loved some of my jobs, and became deeply engaged in all of them, work was never the central focus for me. Proportionality enters the picture here; where was my mind focused, at work or home or in-between?

Yet by "work," I do not mean writing. This may seem contradictory, as I am a writer, and have earned much of my keep for four decades by whatever skill at writing I may possess -- for better or worse.

For a long time now, that would be for worse.

But writing is not work to me; writing is an expression of being alive. It's how I continue to assert that I am still here, regardless of exterior circumstances, distractions, hopes, dreams, disappointments, and failures. And, as I age, increasingly what I choose to write about is my family.

So we have convergence of a sort. As his 16-year-old uncle towered over him and his Mom yesterday in the doorway of my apartment, I saw three generations backlit, as well as a vision of my life, framed by their love, each for the other.

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