Sunday, April 22, 2012

In Medias Res

Goodnight rainy night. Today I drove through the rain to commemorate another year older, Redbeard and his dad have birthdays in the same week. We did that age-old sit around and eat and drink and tell the stories that become us, or that slowly we become. As I drove through the rain I tried to be grateful and mindful, rain pattering, wipers wiping.

And on the way home that familiar stretch of Walnut street when you first see the skyline of the city headed east back in, I was overcome with a wave of something like nostalgia, like a tenderness or a kindness toward Redbeard and myself, how we grapple and hang on, try to untangle the knots and move forward and make some of this progress you hear so much about. What then, once we make it? Do we think there will be no more progress after that? Do we hope to reach a state of perfection after which there is no more problems, no more struggle? And yet every morning we wake up, fight it out, soaring victories, crushing defeats, and then the middle times that are like a march or a trudge or walk across a lawn on a summer night sweeping your flashlight from left to right.

That skyline. Seen me through so many chapters, so many phases, hard to even keep track of them all. Sometimes it reminds me of the bigness of things, of the view from the uppermost floors, from which all my days and cares and most earnest most fervent thoughts, memories, feelings, wishes, desires, plans seem impossibly, laughably small.

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