Weeknotes: January 13-17, 2025
Monday January 13
My limbs trundle reluctantly up the hill past the south edge of campus, the wind biting my bare face. The first half mile is accomplished by will alone, but it gets better. I gauge my footfalls gingerly over the ice patches and head down the ginnel that connects College Place with Pearl. By the time I cross onto Spring Street, my body feels relaxed and lithe. At Waterworks Park a woman stands over the hood of her blue minivan arranging loaves of supermarket bread to feed to the assemblage of ducks and geese closing in around her.
I think of my mom, a lifetime nurturer of urban waterfowl populations. I picture her tiny figure holding up a bag of hamburger buns to feed the squawking gulls. For a brief time she and I kept up a Christmas Eve tradition of emptying a large bag of cracked corn on the grass by the Brighton Mill Pond, a gift to the cold feathered peasantry. Even now when I go to visit my parents, she is constantly managing a half dozen feeding stations. Just yesterday I caught her scattering seed on the front porch for her favorite possum and then on a metal table out behind the kitchen for her resident doves. She loves her doves. My parents have always had big hearts for wild things.
Weeknotes: July 8-12, 2024
Monday, July 8
In my dream I'm exploring a vast art deco hotel. It's mostly empty, either abandoned or in the offseason. Crates of interesting goods are stacked haphazardly around a casino-like room and behind the ornate bar I notice a beat-up cardboard box advertising a Casio keyboard model I've never seen before. What I pull out of it ends up being a gig bag containing an ornate handmade bouzouki, or maybe a cittern. Its strings are strangely paired with the middle ones in overstuffed clusters of three or four, all tuned in unison rather than octaves. I also notice the wood has rotted around the soundhole and on the back. A shame, as it's a beautifully designed instrument. I decide not to steal it.
I spend some time with Pretzel, my neighbor's three-legged cat, for whom I'm caring this week. He has barfed on his white couch blanket every day and every day I carry it down to the laundry room and re-wash it. I listen to Jake Xerxes Fussell's new album as I drive to Dexter to meet up with my cousins one last time before they depart to their respective homes in Pennsylvania and Florida. After dinner we visit our grandparents' grave where last summer we also laid some of their mom's ashes in a spontaneous little family ceremony. Then it's hugs all around and off we go into the furnace of a July evening. I put on some Hawaiian slack key music and keep all the windows down even on the highway.