Pilgrimage

When I do these late night hikes I always quarter off through the neighbor's wooded patch and then out through my sister-in-law's driveway. The trick is to avoid walking on concrete as much as possible. I always feel slightly "sneaky" and, well, sinister when I do it. I wouldn't want some female to peek out her back yard and think, "Who is that man in my yard?" That's why I jumped a little bit when the neighbor on the other side of my sister-in-law's house turned on her back yard light to let her dog out. I just assumed it was a female neighbor and so I sagged my shoulders somewhat and averted my gaze in a posture I hoped sent out the message that I was too affable to be a rapist.

Then I noticed that there was no neighbor and that was no dog. A fox had set off the motion detector light which threw the backyard into a soft glaze of lighting. The house had actually been empty for nearly a year, there was no neighbor, and this fox had come out of the woods to work efficiently through the grass, quartering and sniffing until he had investigated the entire yard for possible prey. The nature of the lighting - or perhaps the nature of the fox itself - kept the animal in shade so that I couldn't see whether it was a red fox or silver fox, though I could see everything else in the yard. Everywhere he went he brought his own shadowy cloak with him.

He was clearly a fox though - there was no missing that fluid motion, that serpentine neck supporting a sleek, almost cat-like head. He was no cat though, you cannot confuse a canine's body and motion for a feline. The shadow he moved in caused his profile to stand out in sharp relief so you couldn't miss the ears and the brush tail. I had stumbled across foxes before and this was the perfect fox shape, except without detail, like a fox-shape cut out of the night and animated.

It worked over the entire back yard and then it was gone in three minutes or less. In a few seconds the backyard light went off too . . .

Where You Going, Where Have You Been?

The earth is turning away from the sun again: the predawn air is cold and crisp and there's no hiding from it on my motorcycle. It may be hot in the afternoon when I ride home, but the there's no mistaking the light: golden like wine and just as intoxicating. Every morning I debate wearing a jacket for the ride in - it's cold enough to warrant one but I don't want to have to keep up with it, and I certainly don't need it at three thirty when the sun is out and there's no coolness to speak of.

But you can see it on the leaves of certain trees - the sycamores and the sweetgum - that are colored by the cool nights and sunny days. Autumn is coming. Another one.

The other morning, on my way to the office, I stopped by Ms. O's classroom to check on my oldest son's grade. Math is not his best subject and I handpicked my son's schedule, rearranging it, so he could have Ms. O. These are the little perks teachers get - they're not much more than the average parent can pull off if they agitate hard enough, but there it is. Like so much in teaching, the perceived perks are fragile and hollow.

Ms. O told me that my son was doing well. She smiled and said, "I remember you wore that beeper when your wife was pregnant with him so you'd know when she went into labor."

We both laughed at that - beepers for crying out loud! Technology of the past! Once upon a time they were all the rage, now consigned to the dustheap of laughable items like plow-shares and chamber pots.

I hurried on my way back to my classroom, but I thought about that Long Ago when I wore a beeper. The school has been rebuilt and renovated in those seventeen years since he was born, there's almost nothing of the old school left. There was a courtyard behind the school where we would eat a picnic lunch during soccer season when my wife brought him to school because I had a game to coach and couldn't come home. That was right about the time I got a tremendous splinter in my foot due to the substandard wood used by our hack contractor. My son was so upset at the vision of blood soaking the paper-towel that I held to my foot that he couldn't go to school the next day. Those were the sweet pre-school days, long before worrying about math scores and AP classes. He stayed home the next morning, haunted by the vision of his mortal and wounded father. He drew me a picture and hugged me when I came home, and you could see the tear tracks on his cheeks.

That courtyard is gone, and my son will graduate next year. Time rolls on in its relentless way. Every Autumn whispers to me and tells me that the universe turns and turns. I'm not old yet and never will be, not on the inside. But time rolls on.

Confessions of a Poor Wayfarer.

Massive thunderstorms played havoc with our flight from Atlanta to DC, which in turn threatened to put the kibosh on our flight to Shannon, Ireland. A rather large, rubbery and ineffective woman of Caribbean descent seemed to indicate that there was nothing anyone on this earth could do to help us. Perhaps we should just turn around and go home . . . ? Try again tomorrow? Stay in DC and take up squatter's rights?

We made phone calls, pulled strings. There was a shift change going on at the booking desk but these loud talking, brash Dominican women were willing to go the extra mile, bless their hearts. Perhaps there was some kind of friction between them and the Caribbean woman who was so useless. I told them that she said it was impossible, but they pounded the keyboards and booked us on a flight to Dublin where we'd meet a bus, which would take us across the Island to Shannon where we might or might not meet up with our luggage. It was a calculated risk and we jumped at it.

There is almost always turbulence over Newfoundland. The plane bucked and swayed and threatened to upset my dinner of vaguely chicken-like patties and colorless vegetables. There is almost always turbulence over Newfoundland and nearly always some form of turbulence in taking a group of students overseas. It's part of the adventure . . .

Skies were grey in Ireland the next day, as if we had landed in a mysterious island that lay beneath a pile of uncarded, oily wool. The georgian buildings were shiny with rain and puddles lay black on the streets. The bus rumbled on, going west beneath the rainy skies and I felt happy. Most of my travelers were comatose from jet-lag and the difficulty of resting fully while sitting up in economy airline seats, but I was wide awake. I can sleep in the hotel room - I never want to miss a second of being alive and conscious in a foreign country - and so I was alone on the bus, surrounded by the dead, and I was the only one to see the horseman.

The 21st century was all around us in Ireland but it didn't seem to matter to the horseman who came hacking along at a good clip on the sidewalk, pacing our bus briefly. He wore a traditional flatcap pulled low to the bridge of his nose and I could not see his face but I'm sure it was shining with the sheer joy of trotting his horse bareback along the suburban streets of Outer Limmerick with rain sifting down and no cars to speak of to belch poison into his air. He wore a white sweater and his pants were tucked into knee-high wellies, and he sat that horse the way you're supposed to, back straight and shoulders square. In one smooth motion he pulled his horse to the right and they floated up and over a low stone wall and, for a short time longer I could see them quartering away across a lawn and then they were gone.

In one form or another I see that Horseman every time I travel. He's part of the mosaic of haikus that I encounter each time I pack my carry-on and look backwards with a pang in my heart at another leavet-taking

 Last summer I was again awake while all those around me were sleeping as we took off on an early flight out of Rome towards Germany. The sun was coming up over the rumpled fabric of the Alps and you could see the Mediterranean like a streak of blue on the horizon. The pilot's voice came over the intercom, his German accent low and calm. We were coming over the Alps, he said, and would soon be passing the Zugspitze, Germany's highest peak. 

I had not found God in any of the churches we had visited that summer – not even in the elaborate cathedrals we were leaving behind in Italy, full of frescoes by various masters and the broken bone fragments of half-forgotten saints . . . but as we made that slow, timeless pirouette over the mountain I felt myself open up to the divine. The air outside was what overly excited outdoor writers describe as “crystal clear”: the mountain peak that seemed just beneath our wing was so sharply focused that it seemed to pulse. Everything I’d ever read about glaciers was written on that singular mountain, right up to and including the vast saucer shaped cirque at the very peak where a chalet and four wheel drive vehicles were clearly visible despite the fact that the valleys below were lost in the astigmatism of altitude. Who had driven that vehicle to the summit, where snow still piled up along the jagged edges? Who was blessed enough to breath in that hard, cold, sharp air? Hanging valleys carved the sides of the peak and silver braided rivers curved and recurved down the sides until they fed into valley lakes that were seafoam green. Turning my head I could see the Alps roll away back South to the sea like a vast herd of gigantic, primitive fauna . . .

I turned again, looking up and down the aisles, hoping to share this moment with someone who was as moved as I was. Only one person in our travel group was still away – he and I locked eyes and, from a distance, his eyebrows going up and down spoke volumes. This was The Mountain peak which holy men for eons have sought out to get closer to the Divine. This was The Mountain that the Priest wanted Frederick Henry to find in A Farewell to Arms. with someone who was as moved as I was. Only one person in our travel group was still away – he and I locked eyes and, from a distance, his eyebrows going up and down spoke volumes. This was The Mountain peak which holy men for eons have sought out to get closer to the Divine. This was The Mountain that the Priest wanted Frederick Henry to find in

The plane banked again and The Mountain pulled away as if it leaving us. Below the plane undifferentiated green hinted at detail that we were too high to make out clearly – but if I turned all the way around I could count the rivers that lovingly braided The Mountain like silver chains on a priestess. The plane banked once more and The Mountain was gone. I sat back in my seat knowing that I had been given a gift.



I lived on that high for weeks later the way some people do from religious retreats. From time to time I'd look away from whatever I was doing and the image of that mountain would fill my mind and I'd become strangely calm and happy.

These are the things that are difficult to photograph or capture on a hastily scrawled postcard. These are the moments I live for, like that time in Venice by the fountain . . .

Right off Piazza San Marco there is a little side piazza tucked in tight to the flank of the duomo itself. I figured I’d settle in there, where the sun was filtered. Children were loose in the piazza chasing the pigeons who allowed them to get just so close before rising as one and taking flight. The campanile tolled the hour as campanili do throughout Italy despite the fact that this is a culture that doesn’t recognize the tyranny of time. Asian travel groups moved in platoons and Americans spoke and laughed a little too loudly. The air was dense with decay . . .

Somewhere in the church of San Marco the legendary bones of the legendary Saint Mark were kept as trophies and medieval tourist attractions. My own bones pressed back against the shady side of the church as I decompressed and gave away all the Time that my American psyche was carefully hoarding, tallying, sharing out. Eventually I became aware of what I took to be a father and son sitting next to me. They were Asian of some type but they insisted on speaking together in heavily accented English for some reason. It was like listening to a Samurai film. The father was small and trim and wearing glasses; the son was in his twenties and fat. Something had come between them and the son’s voice, with its peculiar accent, was sour with pout.

“You NEVER let me touch it! I thought this time but no!”

The father did not raise his voice; his dignity was graceful despite the fact that he was on the defensive.

“Yes, yes. It is, of course, my fault. Mine. I made a mistake. Yes.”

“You never let me. You let HER but when I ask, you become angry.”

“You must . . . understand. I think of you . . . differently. Therefore I treat you differently. This is my . . . error. You are my son.”

“It’s embarrassing!”

“Come, come my son. Let us get some gelato. It is my error. Next time! Next time!”

I watched them walk to the gelateria knowing full well that I would never know where this conversation came from and where it ended, after the gelato. I didn’t want to know. Every summer I find myself in Europe and in every city I endeavor to lose my students on a gondola ride or a trip up the Eifel Tower so that I can be loose, the Poor Wayfarer – a mute witness to small objects and events that are avatars of god. Il dulce fa niente.

In Killarney, Ireland I once found myself in a pub just off the square where the horse carts are tethered. The rain whirled like steam and, despite the fact that it was July, it was chilly so I followed the sound of music into a smoky little public house where a trio sat upon chairs and played folk music while looking past and beyond each other – as if they were three individuals and their confluence here, at this time and place, within the framework of this song, was a strange coincidence. The air was thick and sweet with the smell of cigarette smoke and spilled beer and wet wool; a the faerie music whirled madly and sweetly like a hyperactive child, produced by a man with a guitar, a young lady with a fiddle and a third young lady with a concertina. It was the concertina girl I focused on. Her lovely wedge-heeled slingback kept time with the music and she played that odd instrument like someone who has made her peace with a difficult marriage. She looked away from all of us.

One year we were in Lucerne, Switzerland during a folk festival. White tents made up temporary beer gardens that were full of singing and heroic drinking. Sausages were for sale at every corner and mustard was de rigeur. For a while I made my way along the waterfront, visiting the junk vendors with several of my students. At one such I found a sheep bell on a deeply worn leather collar; when I shook it, the fey tone summoned a memory of another trip to Switzerland when we stayed at an inn at the foot of a mountain that was shrouded by high altitude weather. Sitting in the back garden you could hear the plaintive tolling of sheep bells in the clouds and I thought I’d never heard anything lovelier. 

I asked the price of this bell and the young, preteen beauty with her porcelain skin and clear eyes, put her palms together and smiled shyly at me. “So!” she said. It was a word to buy time. She raised her fingers to indicate four Swiss Francs. As we were walking away one of my students laughed at me for making the purchase but when I shook the bell it again brought me to that hill up in the Alps . . .

The streets of Lucerne were filled with people in folk costumes and from time to time a group would coalesce and then the air would still as their voices came together in harmony to sing old hymns a capella. Men with alpenhorns would come together in synchronicity to produce that low cetacean thrum that seemed to have the power of transportation. I again slipped away from my crowd and found a park where I could sit and watch young men stand with acumen, carefully arranging chess pieces the size of elementary school children on a board that was affixed to the ground. Chess creates its own time and now when I shake my shepherd’s bell I feel the mountain in the mist but also the diffusion of time that is chess played in a park on a July afternoon in Lucerne while alpenhorns moan theatrically in the distance . . .

Parks – why don’t we have parks like these in the States? Music again steered me to a trio, this time in a park in Dublin where the music wheeled and whirled capriciously while swans cruised like ships of the line on station. I lay on my back on a bench and watched a young couple make up from something or other. He held her hands in his and faced her, speaking softly and urgently; she looked dubious. 

One suitably rainy day I slipped away from my group and travelled through the tin-type weather to the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris to walk the narrow lanes between the houses of the dead while rain drops slipped from the leaves of plane trees like tears. All alone I navigated among the bones of poets to find Jim Morrison’s grave tucked away in a fold of the land. There, to prevent desecration, a guard stood watch. We caught each other’s eyes and he smiled like a child found during Hide and Seek.

On another visit to Paris I sat alone outside the Louvre and watched young girls with the stage presence only young girls can have shrieking and laughing while chasing each other through the dour and dignified adults, spraying each other with condiments. Asian tourists stopped and watched woodenly – I would say, inscrutably – their women folk wearing bonnets like something out of a Ford Western to keep their skin lily white.

In Innsbruck I ate herring and listened to two American priests argue hotly over some matter of theology. On the island of Capri I watched a well dressed gentleman saunter casually over towards a wall near the harbor, away from the shops hawking brick a brack. Despite his elegant and philosophical air, I could see that he had unzipped and was peeing against someone’s garden wall while studying the turquoise water philosophically. In Athens a gentleman from Argentina was giving away fliers in the Plaka. He attempted to explain to me his idea for hovering airships that would enforce the law from above. He spoke in conspiratorial tones.

In Rome, alone again, the gypsies stalked me with the glacial insistence of lizards. You could find solace in the old Forum beneath the olive trees. You could also find solace among the ruins of the tower atop the hill of Assisi where the cultivated plains of Umbria roll away in feminine curves.  

In Amsterdam I watched the hotel staff unhurriedly pursue a man in his underwear who held his head and continuously called out in English, “You must call ze ambulance! You must call ze ambulance!” The hotel staff moved implacably toward him, herding him the way you might a chicken loose from the coop.

I could tell more: the stone stairways down the cliffs of Sorrento that lead to the beaches and the feral cats and the sound of conversation and laughter from young men and women drinking wine in the moonlight; the English dames on the train out of London who had nowhere to sit, and who spoke of me in the third person as someone who might move if I had a shred of decency; the cloying, mildewed smell of the ovens at Dachau . . .

I am the Poor Wayfarer. I’ve been a mute witness to ten thousand small things in cities where I am an alien. The natives look through me and the tourists bump me as they pass. I am as at home in these cities as I am in the town where my tiny house sits among the oak trees.

 

An Illustrated Generation

Not too long ago I made a remark on Facebook that caused all kinds of problems - no, not one of those comments where my moderate-liberal political views cause the Far Right to roll their eyes and mutter about socialism and class warfare. In a political climate that has seen the sudden rise of the Tea Party, anything left of Traditional Fiscal Conservatism mixed with Social Liberalism is seen as firebrand.

Nope - this time I made what I thought was an amusing remark on something I saw while motorcycling down Buena Vista (Bwayna Vista). There are deer on this in-town road - several years ago Liz hit one late at night that sounded like a bus full of nuns smashing into a walrus - so I keep a sharp peripheral eye peeled. There are deer and there are humans who will do what humans do from time to time, to wit: wander into the road for no reason. But the periphery is the dreamy edge of your vision and it creates its own realities sometimes.

That day, as I rumbled smoothly around the curve I caught up my handbrake sharply as my peripheral radar caught sight of two men standing in the yard - one fairly normal and the other covered in ghastly burns. But not, those weren't tragic burn scars at all, they were grotesque patches of hair growing in green-black fungoid patches on his body. An ape with the mange? Dressed in wife-beater and long shorts? Isn't there an ordinance against this sort of thing?

I craned my head around and got a better, more direct look: it was a man covered in tattoos. Ah, that explained it.

I've never seen the point in most tattoos - especially not the ones that are pieces of larger tapestry. If that's the correct description. On second thought, it's not - rarely do people put together a mosaic of pictures that complements the shape of their bodies, adding shading and nuance the way well-applied makeup does. If you have an awkward body it's not improved by five or six random splotches of green-black.

I'm especially baffled by the girls who get what I can only describe as a bib tattooed to their chest. I can't look at those without leaping to the conclusion that this woman has more chest hair than I have. The second glance does not reassure me, as I've already been ruined by my first impression. I'm forever ruined by the whispered suggestion of wooly chest hair on a girl.

I suppose a lot of my misgivings re: tattoos comes down to a generational thing. My entire "formative years", to use the term I hear Television Psychologists utter when they slide their glasses down the bridge of their noses to look blandly at their patients, were built around the premise that only certain kinds of people get tattoos. Mainly trashy ones - the kind that grow up in hovels, reheating casseroles and looking forward to a good night of bowling and then, perhaps, a boozy rutting in the back of a car somewhere. The type of people who can't read - proudly.

I think it was my generation, actually, who - in their college years - broke the class trend. Suddenly college kids in the upper middle classes were stepping through the doorways of tattoo parlors. The scions of middle management accountants were getting discreet designs here and there, always wary to put them somewhere that they could be hidden if necessary. Later, of course, there would be no need for discretion - once the cap was off this particular brand of narcissism you could expect young pre-lawyers to get neck tats, Russian gangster style. Future mothers of America were sporting barbed wire patterns around their biceps that suggested that they were dangerous animals that needed to be caged, or POWs who had escaped from a camp somewhere. Frankly, I'm not sure what those suggested, but it was anything but Clean Wholesome Mom.

What must it be like to look at Mom and Pop with their full sleeves and their neck tats and god-only-knows what's climbing around on their body beneath their clothes . . .

I'm baffled. Things change, of course. Time is fluid on its crash course towards . . . well, where-ever time rushes. In future generations, who knows what will be du jour and passe'?

I'm in the minority on this issue, as in so many others - so many, as a matter of fact that I've started to pretend that I'm a visitor on this planet from another dimension . . . but more on that later - when I made my statement on FB that I found tattoo culture to be, well, grotesque, many were angry and felt judged. Those the phrase one of my detractors used. He felt judged. Which I guess is true. If your body is covered in poor feng shui illustrations the color of mold or bruises I suppose people might judge you. It's self-inflicted unlike a hare-lip or glass eye. Anything you do to yourself and your demeanor that's not natural will provoke judgement, or commentary at the very least.

Oh well - time is fluid, but it loops back and forth in a serpentine manner not unlike old rivers so that it's possible to stand at the top of one loop and look simultaneously forwards and backwards. The faster time moves, the more of us find ourselves at that loop . . .