FUTURE 86

I love that name, Future 86, emblazoned on signs along Route 17 in New York State, bestriding the hills, rivers, valleys, bare trees, and ribboning highway.

Future86.

Great band name.

Or title of a psychic fair that looks to the past and the future.

Future 86.

questions for a new year

Is it a year of the rat?
Or of the hat?
Maybe the sloth, the lemur, or axolotl?
When is the lunar new year?
How about the solar?
Or the plexus?
Where will I be a year from now, days after Epiphany?
Will I *be*?
Won't I *be* a "someone else" in any event, no matter what?
What epiphanies await me this year?
This day, this second?
And am I ready for them?
And does it matter, ready or not?

leaf it alone

As I watched Onondaga Creek swirl before me, after heavy rains, the waters muddy and leaf-laden, over by Plum Street, standing near those gorgeous, black industrial pedestrian bridges, I fixated on one greenish-yellow maple leaf, caught in the stream, carried along, floating, twirling. And I thought: why that leaf? What about the other leaves and twigs? And for how long do they pass before me?

November nuances

Several readers got nervous when they saw my post about the calendar turning to September, "nervous" not being entirely an accurate adjective, but suffice it to say that they were concerned, caring, considerate. They feared I might be on some sort of psychic shelf, a ledge, a place of morose departure. I assured them then that it was all about transition, turning the page, if not a chapter, or even a whole new book. So, since then, more days have tumbled by, more seconds ticked, and so on. If I say, I'm doing fine, will you doubt it, since men tend to assert that claim so readily despite the odds? Well, my doing fine is fine enough, embracing all of it: pain, change, renewal, reinvention, loss, gain, discovery, recovery, penury, luxury, song, silence. The leaves fall off the trees by the end of November, though at first many of those dappled delights cling on to the branch. But the bare branches have a stark beauty all their own. My friend the late Raymond Davidson, a New Yorker magazine artist, used to tell me he loved the simple line of those branches in preference to the picture-postcard leafy scenes. It's all all right. It's all there, all here.

the gates, the questions, the monologue

Yesterday, driving on the stretch of 92 from Fayetteville to Manlius, I saw a wooden sign advertising for homes or apartments. GATED COMMUNITY, it said. Since this portion of the county houses our landed aristocracy, I entertained questions popping into my head like comics' speech-dialogue balloons: what are the gates for? to block you in? or block you out? to give you security? what is security? security from whom? Trayvon Martin? George Zimmerman? the approaching tanks? the marching menace? are the gates there to protect you from -- wait for it -- THE CITY, and its alleged rampaging crime and welfare and urban terror and guns the NRA says we need to have but They must not possess and everything else the paranoiac fear-mongers outside its borders sell? will the gates be designed to protect you from the Liberal Agenda? or from FoxNews's evangelism of negativity? in short (actually, not so short), will these gates be so designed as to give you peace and quiet, safe from Them and It and That, the peace you have earned and deserve and have a right and entitlement to? those gates?

That's a lot of pompous questions on a Monday afternoon, on a day we call Labor Day but do not labor and instead celebrate as a holiday, thanks to the labor movement (a holiday, unless you are one who must work today: nurses, doctors, police, firefighters, fast-food workers, gas station clerks, mall workers, military, musicians at the fair, fair workers, EMTs, prison guards, caregivers, clergy, and many others).

Speaking of prisons and prisoners, I know a fellow just released from prison. He did his time, paid his debt to society, as the saying goes; a little over two years. What's he going to put on his resume, "Employed at a gated community"?

turn the page

The turned page I am referring to is the calendar, the one on the wall with images of sunlit vineyards and the darker one in my head and along my veins. I welcome its turning, its flip into September, with promises of cooler weather, falling leaves, lighter branches. My August was stormy, tempestuous, and laden with hollow anxiety. (How was yours?) August is gone. It is so yesterday. Its self-inflicted wounds are already scabbing over, hardening, waiting to fall off so that new skin can be brightly born. September song: shed, shed, let go, let go, tweet, tweet. Say farewell to thunder and rain and prepare for wind and snow and sleet. Welcome the gently falling leaf floating in the dusk offering Vesper prayers with no incense but weary sighs. Hello, curled redbud leaf now yellowed still partly heart-shaped settled on yesterday's lawn tomorrow. Greetings, September.

Mrs. Dalloway

I am reading Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. The book, a paperback edition published decades ago, had been sitting on my nightstand for ages. Isn't "nightstand: a quaint, old-fashioned word, rather Victorian, suggesting reading and domestic habit and a hint of orderly bliss and harmony? Not that I have that gospel to preach this evening. Would that I could. The novel is A Day in the Life (which was termed the #1 song by the Beatles in a special edition of Rolling Stone magazine on newsstands now) of Clarissa Dalloway and her privileged if angst-ridden world and those around her. The words are delicious, the sentences stringy and sinewy, the cadences charming, the characters perplexing and intertwined (none more than Septimus Warren Smith, fresh from the horrors of the War, and his Italian wife Lucrezia). I like this work, today, better than the work of Marcel Proust. And doesn't Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine owe a tip of his cap to this book, since his book explored lushly not a full day but a lunch hour? "It had no plot," you'll hear someone say as a negative comment against a movie or novel or story or you-name-it. That critique typically rankles me, not that I should take it personally. Who the feck cares if it has a plot? We all know Hamlet or Macbeth or Tony soprano will die, but we watch it anyway. Ooops. Trapped myself there. "It" in those cases refers to productions that have a dramatic arc. Fine. I'll grant you that. Maybe the whole "plot" business, or the fixation on it, bothers me because I transfer that to the "God has a plan for me" saying. I get it, but I don't see the Divine Power playing with us like puppets or marionettes. Yet I have experienced "grace" and "providence," so perhaps I am a confused and sloppy thinker or feeler. Where was I? On the street in London, or the park, just after lunch, inside the head of clarissa and her band of drawing-room characters. Carry on.