Crippled

“The last time I saw you, you were a cripple.” This from the mouth of an old friend, wife of a writing pal. She was right about not seeing each other for some time—going on four years—but it was the “cripple” part that turned Keith’s head, who looked over from his conversation behind the conference table with trademark raised eyebrow. What have you done now? Let’s just say I burned some bridges. Or that it wouldn’t be the first time someone from that period in my life felt they could take verbal swipes. Later, at the reception, she seemed open, friendly even. Had she just been stating what she saw as the plain truth? “We weren’t sure you were going to get out of it,” she said. Get out of what? The rut I was in or the wheelchair? “Here I am,” I said, meaning for better or for worse, like it or not. “You were like family,” my pal said when I confided how much their hospitality had meant to me back then. Past tense. The last time I saw you…Then I turned into the arms of an old student—a “kindred spirit,” she said—genuine worry on her face, with forward facing questions, and so, thankfully, walked confidently into those.

Driving River Road

I want Hopper here with me riding shotgun. He’d know, like Walker Evans, to look for the past inside the present: to be keyed into the dilapidation and see it, like I do, as a form of beauty. And I am not talking some knee-jerk nostalgic impulse—though I have enough of those—but truly beautiful by being so lived in, so ignored, so resilient. Even as the riverfront rapidly gentrifies closer into town, out here it moves slow. The biker bar has a hipster makeover. Kayak manufactures move in alongside plastics warehouses and sewage treatment plants. If I had Hopper along for the ride, I’d let the man meander, give him time to spy just the right plein air. This morning I found a postcard from my father at the bottom of a moldy box. He'd gone to see a Hopper show and so wrote: "Hopper had the draftsmanship early; what took time was that sun-washed American melancholy, those big-band solitaries, that Texaco station about to be swallowed up by the gloom of the woods."

Wind in the Trees

The wind pushes the tree tops around like upside down mops. No crows in sight, for now. As I write this, as if psychic, my puppy brings me her stuffed toy—a crow that, when pressed at its center, emits a realistic Caw, then another Caw, then, a beat later, a sharp Kee-Waak, the crow’s warning call. Or maybe it’s Hello there! Or: Fuck-off, you dumb human attached to that even dumber quadraped. But back out on the road, for the most part empty this late morning, wind and rain keep the dog walkers inside. Maybe it’s the news about the Paris shootings, but I keep looking up at the swaying trees to see if a bomb’s about to go off. Still, a man’s got to be walked by his dogs. What would we do if a tree did come down? Which way to run? If I look up again to see how the tree’s falling, it might be too late. Or I might just run right into its doomed trajectory. The dogs strain on, oblivious, excited by the wind and the rain, or by my hurried step, or by some strange smell new to their encyclopedic snouts, propelling them forward like fish in a silty river brought high up its banks by the rain.

River Road

It’s an eleven-mile drive along River Road from our house to Avery’s school. The trip takes about thirty minutes, depending on traffic. We often drive the freeway, which shaves a good ten minutes off our time but it’s not as interesting a drive, nor as relaxed. On River Road there’s always a show: we pass a nature center and a public golf course, a woodworking shop named Lothlorien, the mall, the county’s technical college, an old-fashioned roundhouse in the process of being torn down, a popular rib joint, three hipster dive bars, Zen Tubing, an ancient, supposedly haunted, county jail and three convenience stores boasting live bait. There are scores of nearly invisible houses stuck up in the hills, with old cars parked in precarious places, and at least a dozen churches, including the Freedom Biker Church, which occupies a dilapidated storefront next to an empty Aikido studio and across from a plastics plant. There are two river put-ins. A Willow tree’s branches hang over the road in one spot, bangs cut straight. And there’s this stretch of uninhabited road that follows the bend in the river and runs alongside the abandoned railroad tracks. I get lost each time inside that tiny thirty second stretch, dragged out of the city by the river’s pull, mind going off somewhere; then we round the corner and this urban ecotone gives way to buildings and barbed wire and pretty soon the school building comes into view and we’re there.

Something Else

1)

“When I am on the horse, I can pretend I am not here,” the young woman says. One of the Palestinian elite, she says this inside the confines of an equestrian club. Who doesn’t know this trick of the mind, this gift of privilege, this curse? “When I come down, I am back in reality.”

2)

At the end of “One for Daddy-O,” a eight-minute cut off Cannonball Adderly’s classic album, Miles Davis croaks out into the voluminous silence, “That what you want, Alfred?” At least, I think it’s Miles. It sure sounds like his trademark rasp. And the wicked smile built into those five words sounds like Miles, too. It’s straight-out braggadocio. He knows that’s what Alfred wants. The producer leans into the intercom to impart, “That’s a take,” but Davis beats him to the punch. Even when it’s not his gig, Miles makes sure everyone knows he’s the boss.

3)

In Lubbock, Texas, visiting a friend, I got into a game of H-O-R-S-E. Seeing that we were both poets, we decided to play L-E-V-I-S instead. (It was that or L-O-R-C-A.) I went on a little run and had the guy L-E-V-I to L-E, ball in my hands. I’d already done a move he couldn’t execute (round the back, catch it with the same hand, reverse off the glass) but gave him a second try. (Rule #1 in H-O-R-S-E: never lower the bar). I missed my next shot. Dude’s a shooting guard by nature, and competitive: he went on his own little run and won the game with a long corner three-pointer. I had my chance, had my foot on his proverbial neck, and (Rule #2) I let up.