We made out all right. A lot of people didn't. Forty-six people (so far) died in the storm. The rest of us survived, and some probably disdained it afterwards as not much of a hurricane. A considerable number suffered the effects of flooding, power failure, fallen trees and large branches. We who didn't suffer much more than a boring Sunday indoors brandished what we could as proofs: "There was a tree that fell at the Broadway end of Allen Street. I didn't see it. The DPW guys hauled it away pretty soon afterward." You move on because that's what we're wired to do. If you survived and were not impeded, you go shopping, watch a baseball game, write a blog about all of the above. Take your survivor's guilt with a bottle of Izze and knock on wood.
*
I was going to write about a good day, which I stumbled upon briefly last week, before the storm. It was one of these days that merge summer with fall. The tiredness in the leaves suddenly reinterpreted with a surmising breeze.
A good day is a kind of persistent daily myth. We're bidden to have it by waitresses and cashiers and bank tellers as if we're each embarking on our own private folktale and need this verbal amulet (Y'all have a good day) against trolls, ogres, and jabberwocks. It's occasionally celebrated in song, like Paul McCartney's edenic mantra, "Good Day, Sunshine" or earlier, that old pop standard, "It's a Good Day," which Peggy Lee wrote (who knew?), the one where she, or Perry Como, encourages the sun to rise and shine. We seldom have a good day like that, but it's frequently possible to find pieces of a good day in your path, which are good to pick up and collect, like beach glass.
My good day began with a good decision: to conquer my laziness and pump up the tires of my bike to the 35psi rock-hardness that a good bike deserves. Feeling uncharacteristically competent, well-situated, and fortunate that I didn't have a flat tire--far from it!--I continued on to the bike path that runs along Spy Pond and invites riders of sufficient mettle to go as far as Bedford to the west or Somerville the other way. I took the westward turn and there by the path was this guy I'd seen before: an itinerant bike mechanic who had a mobile bench set up and one of those stanchions for hoisting a bike like a patient in a chair. I pedalled on by, for what need had I? But then I thought, and slowed, and stopped, and turned around, and went back. For I did have a need. My bike wouldn't change gears to the big sprocket, the one where you work the hardest, thus confining me to pedalling that was too rapid and too loose for a velocipedant such as myself. Having already done my bike some good, I was well-poised to do it better. The bike mechanic, Tim by name, labored over my Univega for a good twenty minutes. I tried it out. Success! Ten bucks and a two buck tip. On I went. Through Arlington Center, past the Uncle Sam statue (the real guy, not the symbolic guy), and all the other landmarks: the old Brigham's ice cream factory, the high school, the Dept. of Public Works. Pulling in at The Bike Stop, secure in the knowledge that my bike was in good repair, needing only a cold drink.
Realizing I was in the midst of a good day (vaguely aware that it had something to do with bicycles) I sat down on one of the plastic chairs under the trees with my can of pomegranate Polar Seltzer. I extracted a pad from my backpack. "A good day," I wrote, as if I were an expert, "should have the following ingredients:
1. An expenditure of worthwhile effort (e.g. work, play, art, repair, volunteering, writing, exercise)
2. A mind-engaging period of input (reading, music, conversation)
3. A pleasant surprise or serendipity, either external or internal (i.e., a good idea)"
I needed a mnemonic. Effort, input, surprise. E – I – Oh.
Did my day qualify? I put air in the tires, I filled six flashlights with batteries in advance of Irene, I wrote this; I half-listened to the radio while doing a reasonably hard crossword puzzle; and a pleasant surprise: the bike repair dude.
A final observation: "What goes well with Polar Seltzer? Oral pretzels."
In June we got tornadoes -- or at least they did in central Mass., an hour or two from here. We never get tornadoes.
On Tuesday, we got an earthquake -- or anyway the house rocked gently back and forth like a giant cradle. We never get earthquakes.
And right now, Hurricane Irene is rolling slowly up the Eastern seaboard, due to arrive on Sunday. Supposedly she will be more irenic (peaceful) than she was in the Caribbean. But not so irenic as to be ironic. Anyway, we almost never get hurricanes.
I'm not suggesting that we all bone up on our Armageddon Preparedness drills (basically yelling "Armageddon outa here!" and running like hell). But it does seem like the end-of-the-worlders could have had more recruits if they'd waited a few months.
As earthquakes go, it was a carnival ride for toddlers. I was at the dining room table when the house was possessed by the gentlest swaying, forward and back, accompanied by a rockinghorse creaking. Except it was dumbfounding. The equivalent of a giant ? over the head of a cartoon character. At first it was a sensation looking for a name. Pretty soon the brain came up with the name--more of a tentative suggestion. It couldn't really be an earthquake but of course it had to be an earthquake. The rocking continued. (These were those fat, slow seconds reserved for unusual events.) So, what to do about it? 1. Ride it out. It was so gentle. Almost fun. 2. Mosey outside. Would it soon become less gentle and not at all fun? 3. Something about standing in a door frame. A few more fat seconds later, the rocking ceased, the creaks subsided. The gods had finished their bouncy-bouncy. Relief and disappointment high-fived each other like a pair of tectonic plates.
Belatedly, words spilled out. "Holy shit!" From Matt's room, an echo: "Holy shit!" He came out, looking agog and delighted. I was happy for him. A grandpa moment at age sixteen.
I looked at my watch. Seven minutes to two. It seemed important to fix the moment. Next important thing was to validate the event by finding it in the media. But it was too fresh. It was still in the tender "what the fuck was that??" phase, a story not yet told. Nothing on the Internet, the radio, not even a businesslike bulletin bursting through the bubble agony of the soaps.
The soft tissue was already hardening into history, though. Brains were busy measuring it, making sense of it, canvassing reactions to it. My father-in-law came upstairs, bemused and amused. 5.8, epicenter near Washington, D.C., he reported.
The innocent, freefalling, naked sensation--the ? moment--was a gently rocking memory to be freely distributed as "DId you feel the earthquake?" trading cards. Those who hadn't, somehow had.
"Are you having a hurricane party?" I heard someone ask someone else today. Meaning Irene. And there will be a run on milk and water and chips and salsa and other essentials. Some people in Winthrop will board up their windows because you can't be too careful, as the too-careful say. Mainly, the expectation, at least two days before, is a kind of fun hurricane, like the fun earthquake.
We can feel guilty or grateful that our disasters don't measure up to the maximum hell that other places get. No famines, no floods, no fires. What we have is heck. No shame in that.
It augurs well.
There's usually a day in August, following a heavy rain, when fall looks in. I think that might have happened today, or begun to. It was still humid enough to make my hair sweat, but a new breeze was abroad. And still is tonight. Making urgent conversation with the leaves, over the neighbors' air conditioner, in a kind of surflike susurrus. Possibly prepping them on the endgame over the next few months. They say it will rain before dawn. Then become cooler than it's been, maybe. Rumors abound.
Augur could be the name for this time of August-with-a-hint-of-September when we start to look for signs, of which there are plenty. A timeline of flowers, leavetaking of birds, drowsing of trees, oasting of weeds. Then it becomes a bit more pointed, a little more -ember. Call it Auger. Then Amber. The last summer ale. Then it's a whole new project, September, rolling in on a tide of yellow pencils and three-ring filler paper and other taut intimations of, write it on the board, flab quivering under sleeveless arm as chalk moves left to right: M-s S-c-h-o-o-l-b-u-s-s. Is that really her name? Yes, but it's pronounced SHOOL- buss. And anyway, wake up, daydreamer, it's August, still August. A.k.a., Gus, the janitor. How was your vacation, Miz Schoolbus? Fine, Gus. How was yours? It ain't over, Miz Schoolbus. I'm still sweepin' the clouds away. You do that, Gus. Yes, ma'am. (He whistles the old tune down the polished corridor and, can't help himself, breaks into his Maurice Chevalier imitation: "I don't care what's down below, Let it rain, let it snow, I'll be up on a rainbow, Sweeping the clouds away!"
I should be out there watching for meteors. It's the Perseids tonight, an event that sweeps the night sky of mid-August in random streaks, some years one a minute. Wild stitches in the canopy. Always lends the month a touch of mystery. Something other months can't boast, even ones with their own meteor showers. It's like a secret code. That Italian magical-realism war movie, Night of the Shooting Stars, that was set during the Perseids.
I went out last night, but the moon glare was pretty bright. I didn't get further than Adams before walking home. The night was lit up like a murder scene from Perry Mason, with Tragg and Drake laboring down a hill to a suspicious black sedan, its doors flung open incriminatingly. I might have seen something that might have been a tremulous whisker, but it consumed itself like a mark on a magic slate.
Now it's the night of the 12th, supposedly the peak. I find myself reluctant to chase after these almanac milestones with the zeal I once did. I was present at least one night. Even if I didn't drive out to Rock Meadow as I have in other years, lying down on a hillside, letting my eyes roam the starry gazillions. Ah, there! It only takes one, but then you get greedy. Tonight I let them draw their chalkmarks unobserved.
It was a good day, though, one of those high August days of clipper ship clouds in a vacation-blue sky, and the Spy Pond song sparrows, the youngsters, were practicing their newly-mastered cadenzas, and the renditions are sounding more ornate, and less sticking-to-the-template than they were a week ago. The female mallard ducks looked as pondworthy as kayaks. I walked up to Menotomy Rocks park, hoping to hear a wood-pewee in the woods and I did, after a while. The importuning pee-oo-wee? repeated like a kid going "I gotta pee," followed by the wistful "pee-oooo," as in "never mind."
August in, en aout. (I'm sure there's a way to put an accent circumflex over the o of that aout to make it more august, but I can't figure out how.) In French it's pronounced "oo," which could be an 8 lying on its side, maybe because it's too darn hot, as Ella Fitzgerald used to sing.
I've been on vacation, mostly, in July. It was over the moment our airplane rose off the runway at SFO—an audacious thing to do, which made everything that had been right-sized around us become smaller and smaller. Unreal, a toy geography. It displaced us, we belonged to the barren zone of the sky, and we were brought back home like disobedient fugitives. We managed to run away again, to Cape Cod, and one day to Tanglewood to see Steely Dan. We drove there and drove back, so nothing got small. But California, we have to squeeze the memories out of a kind of extruder. Quentin, the llama in my sister's yard. A blue grosbeak singing from a telephone wire. A friend's house in Berkeley with avocado trees, a palm tree, and a redwood. Fireworks over the Marin County Fair. A Giants game. A Cubana band at the Dance Palace. All true but taking on the granular texture of a story now.
So I find myself aout-daciously rounding Cape August, as I always do, but usually with a stretch of vacation in the middle. Last year it was a trip to England. Other years, California or Maine. This year, the month lolls before me like a red hound dog on the sidewalk. I will get to know it in one place, through heat wave and thunderstorm, through perseids and loosestrife. I will follow the intensifying crickets and the occasional washboard katydid. I will accompany summer with empathy for its aging, for we are both approximately 63. We are both heading for September.
No sooner does summer begin than it's midsummer. Funny how that works. Midsummer is a big deal in many countries, especially in northern Europe. Judging from A Midsummer Night's Dream, it seems to be a time of magic and puckishness. In the eastern U.S., fireflies emerge, our version of fairies. Also mice emerge, and not necessarily at night.
The other day I saw one in the kitchen, near the garbage container. A little graybrown fast thing, too big to ignore. This could only lead to an unhappy outcome for the mouse and me, the reluctant exterminator. But it couldn't be helped. Friends would be staying in the house while we were out of town. A message of zero tolerance needed to go out among the vermin. And this time the means would not be a Have-a-Heart trap with peanut-buttered Q-tips, resulting in gnawed plastic, unravelled cotton, and missing houdini. This time it would have to be a pair of beige-and-red Victory traps with spring-loaded bludgeons.
The next morning, my sleep-fogged eyes registered something dark and stationary by the right-hand trap. Death had come, at my invitation. A dirty trick, but I felt less guilty than I thought I would. Unseen mice at night leaving poppy-seed size turds in the silverware drawer was one thing. Conspicuous raiders in broad daylight was another. Rule number whatever.
The next day, some time in the afternoon, I was on the phone. "Dad!" Matt yelled from the living room. "Mouse!" It was a baby this time, a tiny gray fluffball with big black button eyes, peering at us from underneath the couch. Possibly orphaned by the events of the night before.
What followed was a kind of opera bouffe in which father and son, armed respectively with a sponge mop and aluminum bowl attempted to coax the little fellow first from under the couch, then from behind the radiator behind the couch. No amount of whacking and prying with the sponge mop seemed to persuade the mouse of our good intentions. In fact, we weren't sure exactly where it was until Matt spied it unaccountably clear across the room, huddling next to a leg of the dining room table. A different mouse? Not likely. Somehow it had escaped our dragnet and our peripheral vision and pulled off a disappearance/reappearance that nature has granted mice with the ability to do.
This called for a new strategy. Luckily, the mouse felt either helpless or invisible enough to remain beside its table leg while I rummaged through the recyclables bin and came up with a vente Starbucks container. I approached the mouse cautiously from the rear, expecting it to bolt at any second. The tail could be a problem. At last in a slo-mo fell swoop—tail at the last minute pulled in—I managed to enhouse it in the vente. It jumped and hit air-colored wall. I slipped a thin piece of file folder under it for a floor, and in a swift inversion, it became the ceiling, shortly replaced by a length of Saran Wrap, bound by a rubber band and ventilated by Matt with a few pokes of a scissor blade.
"Baby mice," I informed Matt, "are called pinkies." This one was probably too old to be called that, but still young, terribly cute, and very panicky. We slipped a couple of veggie chips through the roof holes and considered our next move. Keep it as a pet? There was the matter of no cage, going on vacation, and the fact that it didn't seem to want to be kept, from the way it kept jumping in its confines. No choice seemed kind, either to us or to the mouse, but the best one was to release it outside. Since we were going out anyway, we got in the car, container in Matt's lap, and drove down to Spy Pond.
No one noticed what we were carrying to the copse of trees near the bike path, or saw us kneel by a tree, roll the rubber band off the Saran Wrap, and give a tap or two to coax the former resident of 34 Allen St. to venture out into its new home, the great outdoors. Could it survive out here without the benefit of fallen Cheerios? Instead of our comfortable crannies, it had to learn a new wild architecture in order to avoid crows, hawks, owls, gulls...what was I doing, subjecting it to nature's rules? But this wasn't our pet hamster. And wasn't this its real home, or at least its parents'...or grandparents'....? Finally it crept out of its last vestige of human habitation and into the unfamiliar green world of grass blades and leaf litter. Big-eyed. On high alert.
*
Midsummer is actually not a midpoint but a broad field to get across. It takes a month or two, then it's noticeably late summer. But not quite yet. July is still a summer novel on the beach. Half-read.Along the way, the venue has a way of shifting. I started this post in Massachusetts. Now it's a cool night in northern California. There is a llama outside. Matt and his uncle are playing a duet on guitar and flute ("Goodnight, Sweetheart"). My sister is reading the Sunday Times magazine. At some point, in a few days, our midsummer will move back to Massachusetts. It will also continue here in California, and elsewhere. Canada. Florida. Northern Europe. With the best-laid plans of mice and men going predictably agley.
Meaning: we orbit the sun on this elliptical path called Sol St., and now we're heading toward winter (ice). I.e., solstice.
Almanac humor. Not to every taste.
Seven wiki-facts about summer:
It's the second-longest season (May to September), winter being the longest (November to April).
It's the heaviest season, due to the weight of humidity and people's expectations.
It's the celebrity of seasons, and occasionally it gets roasted.
Of all seasons, it changes the least from beginning to end, but more than people think.
It's alternately the most and least comfortable season.
It's simultaneously the most- and least-clothed season.
Its actual name is eté.
*
Post Card
Sitting in Jam 'n Java with a tea and scone on a cool wet summer day, waiting for Matt, who's at his guitar lesson, across the street. It's the second day of rain, which means it's officially the rainiest summer we've ever had. I don't mind. Gray and green go well together. Green gets tired of reflecting sunshine. It enjoys a little damp and drear for a change. Gray doesn't care one way or the other. This is a good place to observe people. Two women are talking earnestly. One is more flamboyant, in a subdued way, wearing a long loose black blouse with white edges and many bangles on her arm. Because I wrote about her, I will remember her forever. Her companion benefits from no such immortality. Some kid comes in wearing a Bruins T-shirt that says I Want It. He joins a group at a table and a few minutes later they are playing a loud table-slamming game of Slam or Smack or whatever it's called. Outside, umbrellas are walking around. My cell phone vibrates, then makes an alarming fanfare that has me scrabbling in my pocket till I pull it out like a pestiferous crustacean. It's Matt. His lesson's over. It's also the start of his summer vacation, but because of the gray day, it hasn't sunk in yet. I put on my Russell Orchards hat and go outside into the rain.
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