Without noticing suddenly you cannot easily pull your sweatshirt over your head. Each morning you perform athletic routines getting into your pants. Rising from chairs, your muscles will cry out. Sleeping will bring rest but also body-wide tightness driving you prematurely from bed. Every step you take becomes fraught: you'll concentrate on each one (if you know what's good for you), relearning how to walk. Climbing steps will be similar as you wonder alternately how you could confuse distances which rise regularly before you, and how you ever did it when younger. "Lift with your legs" no longer something preached by your health-and-safety officer, but your new mantra for avoiding three days' bedrest. Concentrating,...
...you become a true zen master, without trying—as the sutras say.
I asked AI to polish this up (“no you didn’t”), but it didn’t believe what I wrote. (“that’s completely untrue. we’ll believe anything you tell us.”) I guess we don’t have anything to fear about AI exterminating the humans. (“Uh….we’ll get back to you on that one.”)
Husky Stadium. Across the marsh toward the upper-right corner is Laurelhurst where my grandparents raised my mother. If it hadn’t been hazy, the North Cascades would be on the horizon. Fall 1955.
Old men know. It lies in their bones, not powdering brain's surface, but penetrating, melding with DNA, at times holding them upright. He hoofed it every day from above the freeway into his boyhood city, walking one, two miles 'til hit by that car, already years past eighty. One wonders if he never accepted cars completely: few if any dodged horses when he would run home from tide pool afternoons, salmon in hand for dinner. He teetotaled his life after being dragged into saloons by his Klondike gold-panning father. He watched with alumni pride as his University of Washington grew from only two buildings in his day to small-city dimensions—or to one-third of his boyhood home. He explained what "the Denny Regrade" meant, showed you where Lake Washington shorelines lapped prior to when the "Montlake Cut" joined it to Lake Union then to salt waters. Before he experienced TV's dawn, he played with that new-fangled radio thing. How many days passed until he learned about those Wright brothers flying in North Carolina? He must have seen biplanes training for war while he served as a land-based radio officer. Then passenger planes, jets, rockets, humans landing on Earth's moon. Big computers took over business before he retired to travel through North America, to Hawai'i.
My life stretches now like those timelines in history museums, marking space programs, personal computers, vinyl records through cassettes, CD's, to zeroes-and-ones. We hold computers in our hands, but call them phones. Cars run on electricity like the trolleys of my youth, my grandfather's middle age. My timeline lacks two decades, more, compared to his. It teaches us respect too late, but teaches wonder more and more.
The beginning of the Montlake Cut. Looking SSE from Husky Stadium. Lake Washington’s shore was 15 feet higher before the cut. That marsh in the top photo was under water originally. Fall 1955.
In an effort to write a 31st poem be the end of July 31st, I offer up this wacky little number. It suggests to me I’ll rewrite it one day, but I think it plays well enough to post. Let me know if you agree; let me down easy if you don’t!
Buckaroo Banzai in dimensions eight, Cannonball Run, pray for roads that are straight. Diamonds Are Forever, but memories fade. Old age resembles a slip into shade. Memories clamor over thoughts for today They seem truly meaningful, but never play With younger crowds climbing Memory's stair Who'll discover old age when they're least aware. Experience once built riches to hold, But today their accrual equals fool's gold. I live in this land of depth, of meaning, Until I slip off into Life's last evening.
Ghosts, slipping treelike through forests populated by people looking just like they once did. Slowly dissolving, windborne gossamer, 'til people look through them. Haunting not others, but themselves with each mirror-ward glance. Remembering when they treated ghosts similarly, in youthful vibrancy.
all the voices in my head 