1-27-2013

The reconnaissance hours. Sunday at the coffee shop; sun-sloshed, my shadow alternating between blur and pitch against an opposing wall; peduluming seed bag at the window, junco excavating breakfast; flickersome freckles on crystalline snow. I consider the tree dead ahead and its legion of shadows. In the initial estimate I write off the optics as inscrutably complex; I think of landscape artists and suppose their chiaroscuro to be a guessing game. Yet the mind craves exactitude, it craves a cause to every effect, an action for every reaction, and so I focus, and concentrate, and try to read the light like one reads a pool table, graphing angles, calculating geometry. And just like that, the shadows unravel, simplify; the black and the gold partner up as waltzers, each color holding the hand of its contrary; poles of shade and light hinge at definite, discernible points, and all is rendered orderly. Methodical thought tidies the mess of sensation. It feels good.

I do not debut the jumper, the Salvation Army foolery with Christmas pom poms caught in the straggled green collar and tartan present toppers stapled down the front. Everyone else is wearing perfectly inoffensive woolen numbers, albeit erratically patterned, and my desire is to blend into the spirit of things, not to stand on sartorial ceremony. I hide the indiscreet glue-gun work beneath the sheath of tailored wool, coat belt cinched to squash the highland bows, and consider the eminent good sense of making a first birthday party an "ugly sweater" one. Baby Ruby samples the cake frosting with her feet and knees and fingers before reapportioning the ecru paste to all and sundry, sugared war paint banded thickly on her cheeks. I crouch in a corner, admiring the child at a distance. She's beautiful: face that pulses with expression, eyes of layered blue, every feature denoting both sweetness and curiosity and utter unconcern for her doting onlookers. The frosting finds her iris, stinging the lovely orb, and she is taken to a corner to be cleaned and to cry. The crowd fluxes and unfurls, its centralizing agent gone, and I find myself on the sofa talking to a chap with a ten-month old. The first-time father is working towards his PHD in cellular genetics, or something of that nature, experimenting with cyclins in fruit flies, trying to determine if a new-found member of these proteins, one that apparently has all of the looks but none of the personality of the others, does indeed belong to the family it mimics. I am enchanted by his enthusiasm. He requests I hold his son, Gabriel, for a moment while he collects his things as his wife has suggested they should be heading home soon. I have no instinct for babies and sink into cold sweats at the prospect of handling them, but I am caught fast by social graces; I have no time to object, and Gabriel is delivered into my arms. I feel his weight; I scan his swollen cheeks; I cock my head to better hear his sleepy clucking. It does not feel half so wrong as I feared, this ball of being, breathing, breathing, breathing, ribs to my ribs, feet at my elbow, head in the crook of my arm. It feels humbling, sacred even; it anchors me in the moment and the moment tastes of eternity. 

I walk on infirm firmament, my garden grows from chaos, entropy, fission, disorder. It is disorienting to till such soil, but I am not discouraged, for I have seen the flowers that bloom in such landscapes: harmony, uniformity, fusion, order. Life is neither all Reason nor all Madness. It is both, each consistently creating and destroying the other. 

The sun and the coffee-shop are fled; the Juncos shiver and slumber; I sit with night and fresh, thick snow at my shoulder, and the music of Satie, and the peace of the evening. And it feels good.