a picture is worth

a thousand words, as the saying goes.

So, I realize I've been light on images and heavy on words.

I'll image-ine things up a bit.

(Any guesses as to what this is? Or where?)

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

A title of a wonderful story by Ernest Hemingway, whose short stories * I love but haven't read in many years.

A description of the jetBlue [I believe that's how they write it] terminal at John F. Kennedy Airport.

Tschuss!

* Is it true that Papa wrote this six-word, tragic story?

"For sale. Baby shoes. Never used."

It Is Written (or is it?)

Scene: Downtown, Montgomery Street, near the Y. About 12:25 p.m. I feed the coins into the solar-powered parking kiosk-thingy. It spits out the parking permit, a little receipt, a ticket, if you will, with the expiration time of 1:10 p.m. This little piece of paper is to be placed on the dashboard. I do so. Driver's side. I close the door. The paper wedges up against the window, in a crevice, making it unreadable, or virtually (why don't we say vicely?) unreadable, hence the danger of a parking ticket, but not the good kind of ticket. I open the door. I fish out the wedged paper and place it again on the dashboard, in a readable position. Take 2. I try to close the door, playing cat and mouse, waiting to see if the wind will swoop it, as if I were a bit player in a Charlie Chaplin movie, oh what the heck, as if I were the befuddled Chaplin himself. Or Harold Lloyd. The small piece of paper goes flying, orbiting above the dash. I pick it up and retrieve it. Is it written by the gods that I cannot or should not park here? Take 3. It not only goes flying but whips around and hides under the passenger seat, as if it has a personality or as if this is a cinematic special effect. I smile, even chuckle. Why get pissed? This is life! Is anything wackier than this? Take 4. I gingerly place it again on the driver's dashboard, pause, stand in front of the door, balancing, shieldng my precious receipt from the wind, waiting, and close the door gently, very softly. It works. Presto.

The Terminatee

Today, after hearing the postman's knell and signing his proffered forms and opening the Official Lawyerese Letter whose punctuation I could correct if I dared, I became the Terminal Man, opening a surprise chapter in my zigzag story, a chapter likely to unfold unto the terminus of my days and ways.

Of course, the Terminator's declaration is merely one version of events (and we know from Marcel Proust how subjective and fickle memory is), but in the corporate world (as opposed to the legal world) it is the only version that counts.

My feelings range from guilt to remorse to sadness to fear to anger, and, not least, to liberation and lightness (though you are right to say those two L words are not feelings per se; hey, I'm struggling here, okay?).

A sense of freedom is granted (yes, there's a cost I am paying) to anyone who would dare exert a modicum of dignity in the arena (the arena we spell w-o-r-k). How dare I return fire after a fusillade is launched at me! Some nerve!

I don't plead heroism or victimhood.

Besides, as you all know, Pawlie Kokonuts is a fiction.

It didn't happen; it's all a dream, in't?

I've quoted these favorite and shimmering lines of William Butler Yeats before:

"What they undertook to do
They brought to pass;
All things hang like a drop of dew
Upon a blade of grass."

I share these words again, dear friends and loved ones and anonymous readers. (Scroll down through the link above; cool pix.)

I've often referred in joking fashion to Mr. Soren Kierkegaard.

And now his celebrated leap of faith awaits me.

I will put my faith in the blade of grass. Or the drop of dew.

I will take the unnameable breath of this moment, and treasure its exhalation.

Mysteries of Fate and Transport

Fate and transport.

I love that term, even though it evokes a dreadful memory. Edit that to say, formerly dreadful.

First, the memory. Or, as Vladimir Nabokov memorably put it, in the wondrous title of a piercing and singular autobiography: Speak, Memory. (Anyone interested in writers or writing should check out the terrific essay at the link.)

It's 2002. I'm a technical editor and writer ("Project Specialist") at an environmental engineering firm. Oh. Let's speak it. (Why not? I am too old and detached from it to care or fear.) It was Blasland, Bouck & Lee, or BBL. (Today it goes by something like "BBL, an Arcadis company.") The client needs a chapter on the "fate and transport of constituents" at a contaminated site. We cannot, however, use the words "contaminated" or "contaminant" or "contaminants." In language -twisting the evil propagandist Joseph Goebbels could appreciate, we euphemistically call the pollutants or contaminants "constituents," evoking thoughts of the electorate or at worst neutral players in the drama authored by Mother Nature. I am tasked with writing Chapter 6, if I recall correctly, of a feasibility study (FS), or maybe it's a remedial investigation (RI). There's one problem: I am not in any manner an expert on the fate and transport of anything, certainly not constituents. I read up on everything I can find (articles, websites, in-house technical journals). I enlist the help a brilliant colleague, but he too is not an expert on fate and transport. But no one else wants to help; it is not corporately expedient. In fact, it is de rigueur not to help me. The real corporate expert, out in the Rocky Mountains, could conceivably help but does not, owing to schedule, distraction, indifference, malice, or, what?, his pending sex-change operation. He doesn't write one word to help me but charges 40-some hours to the project, for feck's sake. I can't sleep. My eyes are hollow. I am falling apart, ready to cry at anything or anyone. My therapist sees me in ruins. I work on drafts until 1 a.m. at home. I submit it to the clients. They hate it. My superior hangs me out to dry. That is my fate, transported there by misery and madness.

That was then.

Today, somebody at my current workplace mentioned something about aquifers, and it transported me back to those fateful days. Those former days were the beginning of the end of that toxic job.

Tonight, walking the dog, the sky bright at the horizon, a blue of Caribbean waters deepening into a nightly dark blue denim of dreams and blankets, starlit fabric heralding a creeping absence of day and light, I wondered at the fate and transport of the blossomed and billowing forsythias competing for hue and chroma with the double-yellow stripe in the middle of the park road.

I wondered at the fate and transport of emerald hills carpeted fresh and raw as any dusk in Ireland.

What is my own fate and how will I be transported there?

My mind bubbled with echoes of virility and nubility seen at the mall I just returned from (okay, I'll fess up: that's a highfalutin way to describe my ogling of scantily clad female beauty -- at least scanty compared to the coated cocoons of wintry dress sported round these parts for about nine months of the year).

Fate and transport. We see it all over.

I get home and a silverfish centipede scampers in the dark of the kitchen. I cringe at them. I fear and loathe them. I kill it by stepping on it with my shoes, slightly disappointed the dog or one of the cats didn't see it first to do my dirty work. Then it would seem more, um, natural.

Moments later, in the bathroom off the kitchen, it's a spider. I take a tissue and catch it and toss it into the toilet bowl while continuing with the fate and transport of the not-quite-forsythia-colored streaming of my personal constituents. After earlier browsing through Buddhist books and after buying A Book of Hours illustrated by my high-school teacher John Giuliani, I admit it wasn't kindly to Mr. Spider. Yes, I suppose I could've tossed him or her outside.

But I was in the middle of my own surficial water discharge/recharge cycle.

Nobody's perfect.

Such is my fate.

May this posting transport you to somewhere you have not been to before.

Tschuss.

P.S. As you know, I'm annoyed that the poster up above is missing the comma after wildlife; plus the rest of its punctuation is a dog's breakfast.