The Old Mule

A Visit

I am looking out of a window, one from above a busy street. A blanket of snow, languid horses…that sort of scene. It is impossible to feel at home in a world always spinning. A let room offers little comfort for the deeply weary. Tea steams beside an unmade bed. Women in light robes descend staircases. They call for candles.

With determination we clear the air.

Hands wave through heat-steam. Sunlight clears from the curtains; the mood is set. We moan rhythmically, enticing the surrounding unseen. We bait them forth from their caves, from beneath beds, from the back of abandoned schoolyards. Everyone has felt the something leave a room, yet when the ears are tuned and eyes set…nothing, yes?

The air is cleared for an instant. Everything lay still. The perfect order of life hangs upside down, bat-like and too clear-eyed to ignore. We are standing in puddles, a month’s worth of rain. Gardens sprout and encompass our dream in respiration and humidity. The vines have us snared, the order is undone, we should never have looked back.

Tea steams beside our bed. We wrap in wool sweaters and walk the park. England, it seems, has not yet awoken.

The Delano, and not

Back from Miami – land of decadence. The entire lower county teems with Eros, tight-knickers, and ominous law enforcement vehicles. After a beans and rice dinner, I got lost in Little Havana, drove down roads that ended with unhappy Cubans in swirling groups. Economies of scale where captured on the front porches of low slung shacks, hidden beneath date palms and power lines.

We stayed on the beach – South Beach. Our hotel: a long, white thing with a hard bed and stylish mummies. To smile was too utterly uncool for the plush and well off attendees. An untied shoe, crooked hair cut or indifference to disk jockeys would represent intolerable fallacies of composure.

Situated between an allee of well pruned Ficus, the pool was lined with lounge chairs fitted with crisp white towels by bronzed, raven-eyes boys. Displayed thereupon, with not-to-be-bothered countenances, was a sea of breasts. Chests displayed amid multicultural chatter. French women with tartlets, the Italian mother with large fruits. Little English models waded waste deep and motioned for cups of tea.

The coast was fine, a hot place of gardens and withered skin. Beauty is a commodity there, a for-granted enterprise that belies that nature of humanness, the unrest of age. The un-perfect are pressed back in to the dunes to sun-bleach like an ossified shell. I forgot to look for shark’s teeth – our regular beach game. There was too much tar in the water. It stuck to my throat. I could never get out what I wanted to say. My feet felt like irons, wading through the crowds. It did not feel right to meander in hapless motions – my regular mode. My mind was too tight; I was too far from home. Too out of place.

We drove straight home a day early. What a wonderful thing to walk back in to ones house after being away. So many details are taken for granted: the garden, the bed, the way things smell, and the friends who check in on a Sunday afternoon. As I get older, I realize that what makes life most enjoyable is the feeling of being home – everything just so, lying beside my wife. Being home.    

San Juanito, Oaxaca

Before I leave, a memory of from our old house.

A New Night

We are propelled by mystery. Think of how little we know. In the ageless days, just after youth, forests beckoned with immense swaying branches, hiding ecosystems. Imagine what occurred on fresh spring moss. 

At certain times, bodies live without routine. This is what the country boys told me. That there is a dangling thrill of what lay just out of site, out of reach. Much mystery is behind them, I guess.

Tomorrow we drive down the coast, as far as it goes.