Wandering Hither and Yon

Wayfarers All

“O, we’re not off yet, if that’s what you mean,” replied the first swallow. “We’re only making plans and arranging things. Talking it over, you know-what route we’re taking this year, and where we’ll stop, and so on. That’s half the fun!”
“Fun?” said the Rat; “now that’s just what I don’t understand. If you’ve got to leave this pleasant place, and your friends who will miss you, and your snug homes that you’ve just settled into, why, when the hour strikes I’ve no doubt you’ll go bravely, and face all the trouble and discomfort and change and newness, and make believe you’re not very unhappy. But to want to talk about it, or even think about, till you really need-”
“No, you don’t understand, naturally,” said the second swallow. “First, we feel it stirring within us, a sweet unrest; then back come the recollections one by one, like homing pigeons. They flutter through our dreams at night, they fly with us in our wheelings and circlings by day. We hunger to inquire of each other, to compare notes and assure ourselves that it was all really true, as one by one the scents and sounds and names of long-forgotten places come gradually back and beckon to us.”

Kenneth Grahame in The Wind in the Willows

To Florida, To Florida, jig-a-de-jig

To that dopey doberman.
To throw a ball for the long suffering Chesapeake.
To get Jack Attacked.
To muck the horses.
To Publix.
To Tony’s Big Oak.
To Billy’s Tap Room
To the Old Crow Bar-b-que.
To High Tides at Snack Jack
To the popcorn at Target.
To cigars by the fire pit, with a not-so-wee dram of Laphroaig.
To spend the holidays with those that I love,
and wish that time would stand still …

Home again home again, jig-a-de-jig

“She’s a fucking bitch. She just loves bitching about everything. She’ll bitch about this for awhile, and then I’ll throw her a carrot and she’ll bitch about that.”

Oh, the things I hear while lounging in bed.

Keiko
Kakes
Bakes
Shaken-Bakes
Coffee Kakes
Keiko-Bako
Keiko-Bako-Shako
Keiko-Bako-Bits
Little bits of bacon
Mrs Bits of Bacon
Mrs Bits of Bacon Pie
Bits of bacon pie
Noodle Pie
Pie of Noodles
Mrs Bits
Mrs Bits of pie of noodles
Triple Triangles
Trips
Teutonic Terror
Get out of the pond, you Water Pig

How many nights had he sat there,
under painted constellations,
muttering to himself:

“Oh wheeling and revolving of things!”

A year’s perhaps, maybe even a century’s?
And still he squandered those delicate vials
all filled with the wonder of starlight on snow,
and the beat of a golden dragonfly’s wing,
and mixed them with abandon
into his silver crucible.

How many souls had he summoned,
from books written in strange meter,
pressing the wise, the lost, and the loved,
who stood, for but a brief instant, before him,
blinking and bemused.

Yet neither the crucible nor the dead
would return that most elusive ghost:
a memory of a brief smile,
caught in a sideways glance
when his heart was young.

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure invaded my senses
…
And suddenly the memory revealed itself.

Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time

As with those cliched madeleines, my friend’s brief reference to an animal park visited in childhood sent me spinning back into my own childhood.

In the late 1960′s, during our frequent weekend visits to my Grandparent’s house near Baltimore, Md, my Brother and I would sometimes be treated to a day at a tiny amusement park called The Enchanted Forest (history). I still remember my excitement as the family, packed into my Grandparent’s two-tone gray and black Oldsmodile 88, pleasantly filled with the rich heavy smoke from my grandmother’s cigarettes (a smell I always loved as a child), would drive along the then rural two lane highway that cut through those still undeveloped woods. It really did seem like a forest to me back then, both dark and mysterious. And then the sign would appear, with the giant King sitting atop it, pointing the way into the gravel parking lot. As you left the car, heading towards the castle entrance, you would be able to smell the scents coming from the snack bar, all deep fried and delicious. The park itself, by today’s standards, was pretty pathetic, but at that time, to me and my brother (and others, apparently), it was magical. There was a safari ride, where “safari” looking jeeps, pulled carts filled with families through the “Jungle”. You would drive by a native village, populated with scary looking headhunters (and probably not very “pc” representations, either). And at one point in the “ride”, you would start to cross a stream in which resided some robotic crocodiles, but the jeep would mysteriously come to a stop, and they would move menancingly towards you. The driver of the jeep, dressed in khaki, would draw a gun and “shoot” the plastic reptiles who would then recede back into the water as you lurched foward. The “Ali Baba” exhibit is another that still stands out in my mind. You went through an “underground cave” (if I’m remembering correctly), and looked at various scenes from “Ali Baba and the 40 thieves”. I remember a lot of gold coins and jewerly, and swarthy looking men, dressed in middle eastern garb, scimitars drawn, sitting atop their ill-gotten gains.

Days spent there would always end too quickly for my brother and I (perhaps a metaphor for our childhoods in general), and I can hardly imagine the patience my parents and grandmother must have had to follow us around that park, probably multiple times, each secretly hoping that we would soon tire out and could be whisked quietly back to that long lost oldsmobile to sleep contentedly as they drove us home.

Crows
sit
cawing
from a pine
as the sky darkens
and threatens an October rain.

Dead
leaf
falling
Cool mornings
of dappled sunlight,
A Red Maple on Winter’s edge.

Moon
In
Autumn:
darkness falls
as Rabbits shiver
In its pale glistening shadow.

(More on Fibonnaci Poems)

I.
In a time of war, three soldiers came upon a woman and her infant son. As they laughed and made a game of her, she begged them only to spare him. The child lay silent, even as she died, and they went on their way, boasting of their prowess.
II.
Years later, the war long over, one of these soldiers, a grandfather now, woke one morning, anxious. As his wife snored, he put on his coat and went out into the crisp morning, walking the few streets to the house of his daughter. He stood, shivering, in the gray chill light, watching the window of his grandson’s room, waiting for the lamp to be lit.
III.
The second soldier moved to a foreign land, and married a woman he could barely understand. It was cold there most of the year, and he spent hours each day walking on the rock jetty near the ocean. One day, he saw a injured bird, tangled in some line, keening helplessly. He climbed out on to the rock above where it sat, and reached for it, hoping to set it free. In terror, the bird pecked at him, drawing blood.
IV.
The third became became wildly rich. His evenings were spent in the company of the his city’s most beautiful women, drinking subtle and delicious wine. He had never married, and each night, before going to sleep, he would unfold a tattered page he carried with him, and read a strange poem he found years ago, when he was much younger.
V.
The boy was raised by couple who lived not too far from where he was found. They loved him and he them. Later, he moved to the city, where he rarely smiled, and became a much loved and admired poet. His critics, and they were few, claimed he was not serious enough for such melancholy times. Every day, he walked about this city, pockets filling with scraps of paper covered in penciled scribblings, never failing to stop and pet a stray dog.

A cliche but true:
Informing me of the crime, doesn’t mitigate the crime.
That it started as an itch,
Especially one as grotesque as that
to walk out your door on to the path
A path? No, it’s a driveway, that leads to a street, which leads to a Mall
under trees that black deep into the forest,
I barely understand this line.
and further.
Than what?
And to pass through a village with a cool spring,
Are there still Villages, much less springs? Do they still wear corsets in Villages?
And to pause for a moment,
We just started. Oh, symbolically speaking, you mean.
looking back.
I hate myself.