“Green Book” – rent on Amazon Prime.
Month: March 2019
Sunday Morning
The voice, the tale, the image, the parable that gets through to you – that wins your heart – religiously is the one that makes it past your defenses. You’ve been won over, and you probably didn’t see it coming. You’ve been enlisted into a drama, whether positively or negatively, and it shouldn’t be controversial to note that it happens all the time. When you really think about it, there’s one waiting around every corner. It’s as near as the story, song or image you can’t get out of your head. Religion happens when we get pulled in, moved, called out or compelled by something outside ourselves. It could be a car commercial, a lyric, a painting, a theatrical performance or the magnetic pull of an Apple store. The calls to worship are everywhere.
– David Dark, Life’s Too Short to Pretend You’re Not Religious
Notes: Quote Source – Thank you Whiskey River. Photo: Manuel Cosentino with Behind a Little House
Flying Delta 2-Stop. With the Wind.
That’s Lake Superior in Marquette, Michigan.
Susan dropped me off at the airport yesterday, I was heading home. She was spending a few more days with her Mom. That’s her shot with an iPhone a few minutes later. This scene. This moment. That you can capture this, with a handheld device and text message it seconds later. Miracle, all of it.
I paused after posting this. Any words after this, would seem to pollute the magnificence of the shot, and her moment.
But I plod on. Briefly.
I look upward at the tall snow banks. The dirty snow. 26° F. The cold wind gusts. The Upper Peninsula in Northern Michigan, in March, is winter anywhere else.
The car ride to the airport, was not unlike the car ride in. Quiet. Heavy. No RTP greeting at the airport, or at home. No beefy hug around his thick torso. His absence was a Weight. He’s Gone.
I drive the town.
And I See.
What he gave to this town, this college. His influence on standing up the Superior Dome, the world’s largest wooden structure of its kind. Or the Berry Events Center. Or the U.S. Olympic Education Center. His dreams realized. His name, not on the structures, but we know, these towering structures know, how they were born and who gave them birth. They now sit stoically, quietly, in Memoriam.
His solitary drives around Presque Isle Park. His favorite restaurant. His Friday afternoon watering hole where he’d sit having a cocktail at the bar. His seat now sits empty.
Yet, he is present, ever present, like a twist on the old Teton Sioux proverb,
He is now history in this town like wind through buffalo grass.
Inspired by Robert Creeley: Will we speak to each other making the grass bend as if a wind were before us, will our way be as graceful, as substantial as the movement of something moving so gently. We break things into pieces like walls we break ourselves into hearing them fall just to hear it.
Saturday Morning
At night, crickets sawed outside the windows of my childhood bedroom, and I read sixteen years of old journals, turning their pages into the early morning hours, as if I did not know what would happen next. There I was, same as ever, a linked paper chain of self-replication, continuously through time, the very same shorthand for a simple, happy life: muffin tins, cross-country skis, a desk by an open window. When had I made everything so complicated?
~ Sarah McColl, “Joy Enough: A Memoir.” (January, 2019)
Photo: Dan Smith
