Memorial Day

May 30, 2016

Greetings from where I remember,

In most towns I have passed through I have found memorials to those who have died in war. I have seen simple plaques to elaborate brass vignettes, from rough cairns adorned with flags to towering granite with detailed carvings.  Some are in the town square, others on the edge of graveyards, or in parks where people can sit and think about what they are remembering.

Large cities, it seems, must try harder.  The statues must stand taller than the bustling crowd, the obelisks compete with the skyscrapers, there must be more flags in order to show up among the neon and billboards. 

I’ve stood at the edge of Arlington, awed by the silent rows of white reminders.  I have been in gardens built to surround a single stone with the name of a lost son.  Some memorials are medals, some are parades, some are speeches.  Some are empty chairs at empty tables.

I have stood in front of the Vietnam Wall in D.C. on more than one occasion.  Each time is meaningful; seeing the names, the sheer size of the monument, feeling the coldness of the marble, being below the lip of the earth with the heroes’ memories. 

But the last time I was there I realized something new.  I watched the people step up to find the name they wanted, touching it.  And there in the black/grey surface I could see the reflection of the living imposed on the engraved names of the lost.  I could see us in the Wall.

The word ‘eulogy’ is from the Greek meaning ‘praise’.  The eulogy is meant to describe someone’s life, to recall the best of them, share it with those who cared about them, and those who might have wanted to know them.  We are given this glimpse of them, sometimes heartbreaking sometimes uplifting.  In grieving we console one another, we smile or cry, and we pledge to remember who we lost.  They are never gone as long as they are remembered.  The eulogy is a spoken memorial, words and images that settle on the listener and engrave a person’s life there. 

If we accept the responsibility we are given as survivors, we become living eulogies for those who have passed.  We carry forward the best of them, share it with others, and live it ourselves in our own way.

Gardens become overgrown.  Leaves gather around plaques.  Statutes crumble.  Engravings become worn.  Flags fade.  It is only the people who will outlast time; it is us, the living eulogies.  It is our role to carry the stories forward so that the fallen are never forgotten.

I saw us in the Wall.  We are the memorials.  This is the day when we are reminded of that charge. Sweep the dust from the engraving, polish the surface of the brass, wipe the smudges from the marble.  Carry the memory of the heroes out into this day and the next, and give them the honor they are due. 

Hope this finds you telling their story,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith

Running on Empty

May 23, 2016

Greetings from the release,

"If one could run without getting tired, I don't think one would often want to do anything else." - C.S. Lewis

During the night the shoe fairy visited and filled my shoes with osmium, the heaviest element on earth.  They felt normal until I put them on and started down the street on my run.  I thought: ‘Something is wrong with these shoes.  They feel like they are filled with osmium.’  Because I am a writer I often think in colorful metaphors, of which this was not one.    

The muscles in my legs were working but they behaved as if they had never run before.  I could feel them clunking up and down, graceless and awkward, marionette limbs, wobbling below me.  If it had not been focusing on wheezing, I would have thought it amusing.

Every runner knows that you should never judge a run by the first mile.  But after a couple of miles it occurred to me that this might not change.  Ever. 

Thirty-five years of running, the miles add up and it takes a toll on the body.  Maybe this was going to be the point where I begin to disintegrate into ash.  Pain in my hip, a twinge in my ankle, calf tightening, knee grinding glass into sand.  A familiar ache in my plantar fascia.  Is that the iliotibial about to snap?  One thing at a time, please. 

The day brightened around me, a beautiful spring morning, filled with singing birds and flowering trees. I finally began to move fast enough to qualify as running and not just falling forward.  Behind me I could feel something dragging.  I looked back to see if it was my butt.

It was an enormous billowing knot of canvas, tied to my shoulders and waist with heavy rope.  Great.  I have a parachute tethered to me. 

I leaned forward and pushed my concrete legs a little harder and felt the air begin to fill the parachute, felt it lift from the pavement and billow out behind me.  I was tempted to stop and let it rest.  Let us all rest. Rest in peace. Amen.  But I pushed on.  I could feel the pressure against the muscles in my shoulders, felt the strain in my back as I fought drag with forward momentum.  It was a tie. 

I remembered that I had eaten oatmeal the last couple of mornings, and I could feel it congealed in my bloodstream, my heart banging away trying to move the goo.  My lungs sympathized, but they were struggling with the bale of wet cotton I had inhaled during the night.

Shoes are too tight.  Socks bunching in the wrong place.  Shorts chafing.  I thought how closely the two words ‘tried’ and ‘tired’ were.  Ten miles is too far.  I’ll just run two and see how I feel.  Knowing how I would feel.

Slogging up a small hill, a gust of wind caught the parachute, fought me to a standstill and pulled me backwards.  I clamped down, felt my thighs burning in protest and fought back.  At the top of the hill I heard a horrible locomotive moaning, and realized it was coming from me, trying to breathe again.  A flock of geese called down from their V to tell me to be quiet, I was ruining their concentration.

Blood was finally making its way through the mush to my extremities, making it easier to transmit pain back to my brain.  I tried concentrating on my form, pumping my arms, which were moving four times faster than my traitorous legs, a cartoon parody of someone running. 

The sun was up now, warming the fields around me.  On the other side of the ditch a deer bounded ahead of me, its white tail flared in triumph, leaping in giant strides, effortless and graceful.  I pushed to try to catch it, and the honeysuckle turned to face away in embarrassment for me. 

Five miles went by, the parachute fully open behind me, yards of white fabric, nearly blocking the horizon.  I could sense endorphins seeping out to silence the pains, felt the oxygen leaching into atrophied muscle.  Slowly I began to gain on the pavement which tried to slither away in front of me.  I felt the strain on the ropes tied to my shoulder, heard the creak as they stretched in their effort.

The body knows, and should, after three decades of running, what it should do.  The machinery, rusted and sputtering, finally fell into its natural state, rasping but working.  Running.

Out of the corner of my eye I could make out my shadow, awkward body flailing in front of a sail full of air, bouncing behind, gleefully taunting.  The harder I ran the harder it would be.  Seems like there should be a Greek myth about this experience.

The twisted hemp strained and I pushed harder, encouraged by the thighs and calves, and felt a rope give way.  Snap.  And the fabric fluttered behind me.  Now I was turning back east, and I saw the sun was cheering me from the tree tops, and I stretched out a little more.  Snap.  Snap. 

Felt the wind escaping from the sail, and the drag lighten, and I smiled, remembering that I had defeated this scrap of fabric before.  Funny how we forget.  I opened up my stride, inviting pain into my legs, asking my lungs to ache, my heart to bang against its cage.  And felt the ropes snap in surrender.

The canvas fluttered to the ground behind me, specked with my sweat.  I felt my body surge with relief.  My legs were devouring the road now, left right left right left right, the pains now just murmuring, not forgotten but not running the conversation.  I felt the morning warming, my body warming with it. 

I breathed in the spring air, felt it deep in my lungs, pushing the cobwebs of damp cotton, filling me with hope.  I became partners with the pain, let the body tell me, remind me: I can run ten this morning.  Which means I can run eleven.  If I can run thirteen, I can run further.  Which means anything is possible.  Still.

Maybe it’s seven miles.  You can’t judge a run by the first seven miles. 

Hope this finds you breaking through,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith

Sing

May 9, 2016

Greetings from the Siren,

If you were in the car next to me while I was singing I apologize.  It may have appeared I was shouting at my steering wheel, or having some kind of apoplectic fit, but in fact I was doing ‘Born to Run’.

It occurred to me that lately I am not the kind of person who walks around singing.  This may be my disposition, which occasionally dips into the curmudgeonly range.  Or, it may be a maturing attitude about my singing talent, which can best be compared to a black hole in that it sucks the life out of all music around it.

Once, some time ago, I had an opportunity to hear my singing voice recorded.  I was singing ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, and ambitious piece under the best of circumstances, and it turns out this was not the best of circumstances.  Afterwards all of the recording equipment had to be destroyed in the first ever technological euthanasia. 

I don’t know much about music but if when you sing your voice is flat, off key, pitchy, and sounds like you are being waterboarded it might be best if you stick to lip-synching.

I will sing in church, counting on the Christian generosity of the people around me, which are few given that my reputation precedes me.  Even the choir director will occasionally turn from his work and wave his baton at me with the signal ‘ritenudo finiti’, loosely translated as ‘Shut Up.’

I have tried karaoke but each time it seemed there was something wrong with the equipment.  The song was always playing at a different key, and speed, and volume than I was singing.  Some places the karaoke equipment was so bad the owners would suggest it needed to ‘rest’ after I sang and they would shut it off for the night.

If you could imagine singing a mournful country song that actually included the word ‘caterwauling’, or someone trying to yodel to a Gregorian Chant, or the sound of bagpipes being mauled by hyenas, you are getting close to the discord that radiates from my mouth.

A few weeks ago I was driving and a Van Morrison song came on and I started singing along to ‘Mystic’.  This led to a multi-spasm of coughing, which actually sounded better than the singing, and I believe was my body’s self-defense mechanism, trying to protect the other organs.

But in all of this musical cataclysm there is an occasional confluence of circumstances where my ability, the song, the barometric pressure, and solar flares all combine for a less than tragic outcome.  

Of course in those moments I cannot remember lyrics of whatever it is I mean to sing, at least not the ones written for the song.  This week it was ‘Born to Run’.  What I lacked in accuracy I made up for in enthusiasm.  Again, if you were in my vicinity, I apologize for any concern I may have caused, or trauma I may have inflicted on your pets or small children.

My normal singing voice is a cross between a tenor and a goose being slowly run over by a steam roller dragging the silverware drawer.  Singing in the shower I am a bass, especially when I have a cold.  This is where I do my best Barry White, which registers on seismic recorders in Sacramento and will sometimes rattle the pipes so bad I have to call a plumber. 

For some reason as soon as I leave the shower my voice range reverts back to normal, which still cracks like I am cresting puberty.  And I cannot carry a tune in…something designed for tune carrying.

There is not much on the radio I will sing along to nowadays, unless you count NPR news, and that’s just pitiful.  I have a few favorite songs, which I sing only when I am alone, and they seem to be closest to pain free, when I move beyond humming to actual articulation.  If conditions are right.

There was a time when I was on the road that I sang a lot.  It was a way of keeping myself company, and I was not self-conscious about how it sounded.  Plus there was rarely anyone to hear whatever that sounded like.   It might be the conditions were better, or my voice was, or both.

In truth I know that singing off key and flat is better than not singing.  I have had a few days that would have improved if I could have worked up some Springsteen or maybe warbled some James Taylor or in an inspired moment, Cat Stevens.  If I’m honest the main reason it doesn’t happen is that it hasn’t happened.  I think taking yourself too seriously can add inertia to your day, and sometimes singing out loud is a way of reversing that.

“A friend knows the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.”  ~Donna Roberts

Hope this finds you belting it out,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith

Invasive Species

Greetings from the devine,

It was introduced in the south in the late 1800’s as an ornamental plant.  Its vines spread so quickly it became a threat to other living plants around it.  It shot up trees, over homes, bridges, anything that didn’t move.  It covered millions of acres, and went from being ornamental to aggressive, choking the life out of whatever it covered.  It became a reason to have the phrase ‘invasive species’.

I remember making my way through Mississippi and asking someone what it was and they told me and I loved the sound of the word in my head.  Kudzu.  I thought it was beautiful the way it coated things, made them graceful.  That is when I was told how dangerous it was.

I woke up with an idea.  I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and it was fresh in my mind, burning bright.  I was surprised at myself.  I could see the path I would take, saw the first steps, felt passion behind it.  I felt the idea filling me up.   I wanted to tell someone about it.

What we think is often what drives us, directs our actions.  Some days it is easy to manage our thoughts for our own good.  Other times we find our mind crowded with competing emotions and words and thoughts that coat our best intentions and overwhelm them.  It can be so subtle, so insidious, we don’t always know it is happening.  It doesn’t always matter.  And then it does.

We all rationalize, for example.  We have ways of protecting our ego by creating a framework of reasons to justify our actions, which sometimes avoids the true motivation.  It’s natural and every human has their own version of it.  It’s not hard to let it grow.  We can even see it happen and not change our thoughts until it is too hard.

I have this idea, it feels like a good fit.  I have to flesh it out a bit, I am not positive how realistic it is.  It’s a good start.  I will work on it later.  Maybe just get the outline on paper for now.  After I walk the dog.  And take out the recycling. I should start a list.

Most of us carry around the double edged sword of pride.  It can be so uplifting, pulling us through tough times with the strength of other accomplishments, or of our own worth.  And pride can blind us to what is good for us, keep us from our best selves.  Pride creates imagined slights, prevents us from an apology, or from asking for help.  It makes us afraid to fail, or to appear weak.  Proud thinking can seem so beautiful, and cover so much more beauty.

Some days our thoughts are choked with resentment.  We cannot see anything without feeling it is aimed at our failure.  Envy creeps in.  Others are succeeding, I’m just as worthy and I’m failing, and why is that?  Anger begins to grow.  We look for reasons to fault people who are working hard at what makes them happy.  The resentment climbs into each nook, clinging to the graciousness, the generosity, the admiration, the gratitude.  Choking it all into something else.

This idea, seemed like a good one at the time, hours ago.  I thought: ‘I should write that down, do something about that.’  But I am so busy.  So busy.  Busy, busy, busy.  I will write it down later and do something about it then.  So busy right now, can’t possibly deal with it til later. Busy.

Fear.  Self-doubt.  Second thoughts.  Sometimes they are disguised as rational thinking, or being sensible.  All of us have let our courage be sapped by being ‘sensible’.  Fear of failure, of ridicule, of losing something,…fear can take hold in that half-awake moment in the middle of the night, and by morning it will have covered all of your dreams.

I mean, not every thought that comes into my head is a good idea.  I can make a note and think about it when there is time, maybe in the summer.  Get a good pen and paper, sit out on the deck.  I should powerwash the deck.  What I need is a good system for keeping track of ideas.  Like a spreadsheet.  I can get to that next week. 

I have made my share of mistakes, and then some.  There are moments when those mistakes rear up and shake themselves at me, and I wince at bad choices, or choices not made. Regret will bloom and blossom.  It is sneaky sometimes, and once in a while I will see it attaching itself to places in my mind where I am surprised to find it. 

This inner dialogue, the words we say to ourselves while we make our coffee, is of our own making.  I am guilty of letting some of these things grow, lulled into believing that because I thought them they are always legitimate.  I am sometimes actually comforted by my mental kudzu, even knowing that it can be destructive.  I watch it grow, sometimes realizing it is covering my best self, because it allows me to take a less challenging path.  At least in the short term.

I had this idea, sort of a fantasy I guess.  It was impractical, but you know, I hadn’t thought it all out.  It was probably not all that great, but you know how it is when you first wake up.  Honestly the more I think about it, the less I think of it.  I should focus on my priorities.  I’ll have more time to deal with daydreams later, when things settle down.

Hope this finds you cutting back,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith

Green Doors

May 2, 2016

Greetings from this side,

The marquee says that rooms are $35.99.  Sunday special $31.99.  There are monthly rates available.  There are TV’s.  There are Jazz Rooms.  The motel is spread out behind other businesses near the UHaul office, dozens of units stretching away from the busy business district.  If you didn’t look closely you might not notice the low, non-descript buildings with the matching green doors. 

I have not been inside but I know what is between the narrow spaces.  I have seen the guts of some rooms pulled out into the parking lot, maybe for repairs after a big night, or perhaps to update an ordinary room to a Jazz Room.  Two queen beds, dresser, institutional night stands, lamps.  80’s Drab.

Among the row of businesses that form the moat between the motel and the constant traffic on the main road there is a gas station.  It has cigs for $5.30.  It has a small grocery aisle, a three burner coffee machine, a lottery machine, and an ATM.  Across the side street from the gas station is where I sometimes get my coffee.  Tall Pikes. $1.96.

January.

Through my windshield I watch the side lot of the motel.  There is a layer of snow, just deep enough to qualify as a winter stage.  I am sipping my coffee, an indulgence, watching people walk from the motel to the gas station.  Walk back with small plastic bags, holding Styrofoam cups, smoking.

A woman appears around the end of the motel.  She is wearing a winter coat, the hood is up, her hair hangs out in chaotic ropes.  She is wearing bright patterned pajama bottoms and insulated boots.  Moon Boots.  In one hand she is holding a cigarette, staunchly working her way toward the filter in short bursts, locomotive puffs.   In the other hand she holds a leash.  On the other end of the leash is a three legged dog. 

The woman leads the dog into the stretch of snow that is the median between the motel and the street.  The dog tends to his business as gracefully as three legs allow.  The woman tries not to watch.  I wonder if dogs are allowed in the motel, but smoking is not.  The woman pulls the dog gently but the dance is not done and so they wait in the cold.  I am struck by the image; two survivors, bound by a loyalty to that brotherhood.

 March.

I am standing near my car, hesitating before I get in.  It is unseasonably warm, and I am tempted to sit at the table on the sidewalk.   Across the street at the motel a green door opens and an unlikely number of people parade out.  It is reminiscent of clowns emerging from a small car.  A woman steps out, behind her a man, wearing shorts and a sleeveless shirt, holding the hand of toddler.  The child is wearing only a diaper.  Three more children appear, and then another man.  I stop counting.  I wonder for the tenth time about Jazz Rooms.

The man lifts the child by the wrist, dangling him by his little arm, swings him over the yellow mottled parking curb.  The group spills out into the sun, like mineshaft survivors, blinking at the light.  The man guides the child across the pavement, tiny bare feet twitching across the lot.  He leads him to the patch of grass, and lets go of his hand and we are bound together for a moment, all watching him celebrate with his little dance in the patch of nature where the three legged dog does his business.

April.

My car is parked in a different spot, facing away from the green doors, nosed against the strip of grass along the busy street.  A few feet from my bumper is the bus stop.  The grass is beaten down to bare earth there, seasoned with cigarette butts, bottle caps, Target flyers decoupaged in the dirt.

I am standing inside the coffee shop, adding an eccentric amount of cream and sugar and stirring it to perfection, looking out the window.  A woman pulls her roller bag across the parking lot, skittering across broken blacktop.  I didn’t see her leaving the motel but there is only one place she can be coming from.  Behind her are two young boys, one holding the hand of the other, tugging him to keep up.

I walk across the lot to my car.  The two boys are standing close to the bumper, waiting, fidgeting, the dance of all little boys wanting something to do.  The traffic roars by ten feet away, waves of noise crashing on us.  I say good morning; the woman turns slightly and nods at me.  The older boy says nothing.  The younger one says they are going on the bus.  I fold slightly to speak to him.

“How old are you?”  I ask.  It is my standard question for children in this range.

The boy holds up a hand and offers three or four fingers, struggling with thumb dexterity.  He may be telling me he is OK.

“Are you three?”

He nods.  He is chewing something.  Someone needs to wipe his nose.  It is not me.

“Is this your brother?” I asked, pointing with my chin at the other boy.

The boy went on chewing and nodded.  Then he shook his head.  “Naw. He’s me,… he’s my...he’s my stick brother.”

The other boy said nothing at first, seemed not to be listening.

The smaller boy again said they were going on a bus.  I said that sounded fun.  The older boy said something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the surf, and all I heard was dummass.

“I ainneether a dummass,” said the OK boy.  The older boy said he was too a dummass.

The mother turned and said something and the boys moved away.  The bus slid into view, silently, like a whale gliding in far deeper water.  The three of them disappeared inside it.  It gave up its illusion of silence and surged away from the shore, coughed a dark cloud and roared to fit in, bound by a loyalty to that noisy brotherhood.

May

It is unseasonably cold outside the coffee shop.   If it were not raining it would be snowing.  I am at the counter waiting for my coffee. Tall Pikes. $1.96.  I opened my wallet and remembered I had lost my credit card, and then it occurred to me I didn’t have any cash to pay for my coffee.  Just a fraction of a second, a tiny pang of anxiousness, flitting over the last few days, remembering the last money I spent. 

The barista knows me well enough to call me ‘Hey Buddy’.  I understand social capital sufficiently to know I could influence her, to invoke trust.  At the end of the counter is a millionaire I know well enough to ask for two dollars or two hundred.  Around the table there are other coffee addicts that would help a well-tailored patron, connected as we are in this brotherhood.  At the gas station there is an ATM, an ironic portal to my wealth.  There was no reason to be concerned.  No one was going to evict me, or humiliate me, or send me with my last things out to get on a bus to find some worse place to sleep.  I flashed back thirty some years to an afternoon when I stood at the counter of the bank and the woman told me Paul must be paid, and there was nothing to borrow from Peter.  I opened my wallet and saw the two dollar bills.

I stood outside for a minute, with my extravagant coffee, meticulously prepared to eccentric perfection.  I looked across the street at the barracks of the anonymous.  I saw them through the chilled mist that hung around me.  I felt the gauze-thin illusion that separates me from nights behind green doors.  The fine web of calamity, hard choices, one last drink, anger, compulsion, missed connections, sickness, random pointless luck.  The same fragile veil that hangs between any of us and all of us.   

Hope this finds you with $1.96,

David

Copyright © 2016 David Smith