March forth!

It's the only day of the year that supplies its own horoscope. It doesn't tell you what good fortune will ensue, of course. That would spoil the fun.

Advocates for National Grammar Day have also co-opted it, seizing on the noun turned verb and the adjective turned adverb as their rallying cry. But I say, forget the grammar: seize the day!

So I went back to bed, read a bit more of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, fell asleep, and then I was ready, boy. Went upstairs. Shifted a few piles of papers, threw out a bunch of floppy disks, got that room looking sharp as a button.

I remember in another lifetime when I was an after-school care worker, my first career, I convinced about five kids to go up and down the school hall with me, banging on drums and tambourines, yelling, "March forth! March forth! March forth!" Those kids probably have kids now, and I swear, when I put my ear to the window, for one moment I heard the distant sound of a crow.

Of course I went out to cast my bread upon the waters, had lunch with my friend, artist/ponderer, Walter Kopec. And he had the perfect piece in his studio: Vertebrae of Hope. A minimal dude bending his backbone to contemplate, and maybe reach down for, the word IF.

Sometimes the marching forth is subtle: inconveniencing yourself a little to pick up the IF, not just think about it.

I took the Silver Line to Downtown Crossing. Lots of marchers in the rain. Took the Red Line back to my bike, and on my way out of Alewife, passing the marsh at the foot of Thorndike, whazzat? Through the tuque and the bike helmet, a familiar sound, like a telephone ringing....

Red-winged blackbirds! They're back! About twenty males silhouetted in a bare tree against the gray. A tree they knew and associated, perhaps, with their own march forth.