Decayed teeth / Decayed ambitions

After some phone calls you stay sitting where you are, recounting it as it seeps in and changes the character of your mood and outlook. I knew that, with the way this one ended, it certainly would, though this time I decided to walk with it. So for the second time in the afternoon, the boy and I packed up for a long trudge through the neighbourhood with some Bazan in my ears. A few blocks from where I keep my belongings I came across a woman who immediately expressed her excitement at the sidewalk construction being done along the street adjacent to where we stood. We were at the corner of an old church built with stones the size of chairs. She had her hair cut in a bob and wore glasses with dark red frames. She reminded me of an old boss I had, a slightly maniacal woman who lacked the characteristic to see with varying perspectives. This woman told me that this kind of work was just fantastic to be happening, and that usually you have to get into the faces of city politicians in order to get anything done, and that she was someone who regularly does just that. I congratulated her on the difficult work that kind of activity presents, and I told her and encouraged that it is important, that grassroots political movements are sometimes much more effective and immediate for a community in need of results. She said that she was a Big Sister as well, to four girls, and that one of the elder sisters had found an exciting direction for herself by also becoming an activist, and that it seemed she was even starting to dress like this woman here. As she was telling me that, a girl with hair dyed bright purple walked past us, and behind her the woman raised her eyebrows, looked at me, and pulled her chin back into her neck. A friend of hers, she said next, told her that she should start running for a position here, but that she did not want to do that kind of work. She told me that if you want to make politicians do their job you have to get in their face, and if her meaning was not made then she stepped forward while she was talking, telling how to get under peoples' skin while almost rubbing noses with me. Her teeth were like the colour of mustard, the real kind of mustard, and one of her front teeth had a dark crack that travelled diagonally across it. This woman told me that the city has a policy of filling holes within 48 hours of being reported, but that the time it took to fill the one that broke her back took five and a half years. "You have very nice eyes, and nice teeth," she said with some kind of knowledge. "That will get you very far." Maybe it did.

In at the mouth / In at the eye

I can recall the uncanny number of times this summer that I have heard an old story about a shoot growing from a stump. I heard reflections on it read aloud after dinners, and I read it in several different books whose pages coloured with me in unfamiliar places under this summer's sun. I pluck leaves from trees and use them as bookmarks. I saw the story again while my nephew was baptized, told to little children while a preacher knelt by them in robes. In all of these accounts and in each of their contexts, the story talked of the shoot being a new plant. But this brand new shoot out of this stump should be seen as the very same. This new growth is the very same plant, its fervor and goodness climbing out of anything. There is a pause, but not an end.

A long while ago I was given a small cactus in a little brown plastic pot, wrapped in bright and red, metallic foil, and tucked in a paper bag. My gift giver overshadowed thoughtfulness with humility, but I accepted it with my whole heart. When I had the cactus at home, I sat it where I would always see it. It grew quite quickly, and I watched it stretch its stem up and out of the dirt around it, leaning bright green and a little crooked on my desk in the sun. But I did not know its proper care. I was excited at its quick growth, and in that excitement I gave it too much water. After some while it began to shrivel from top down, and its spines slowly flaked off. I learned about how to care for this, to cut off the top, and to add in some dry soil, possibly sand. I carefully cleaned off the little white tufts that grew along the ruts of its stem. I waited, and the cactus stood pale and hard. After a long passing, though, next to the scab that had puckered where I cut, the cactus continued growing. Its stem pushed up into a little bulb, with new spines flecked around it. I keep it where I see it. And it grows, and it grows.

But one night every thousand years.

This morning started next to sleeping fur and half bottles, and under the sound of light rain and heavy feet of small children being yelled at by their mother. Their floor is a loud ceiling, so I turned up the rest of Badlands in bed. Now I sit in this back yard. I wonder who put this bench here, and who has sat on it before me. The sun is out now, and in the afternoon here you can feel the wet being lifted up out of the grass. With your eyes closed, you can tilt your head slowly back and then down, and watch the orange brown light change with the direction you face in the sun. I think, only to myself now, about how weird eyelids are. And I think about some weeks I held this spring, and of the long stretches of toil that bracket them. I think about the path of years that walked towards that time, watching hair grow long. All moments spiral off into infinity. I think of the marvellous weeks that will strike through every story I have yet to write. I think next that I should go pick up one of my leaky black pens, but I stay instead, to sip my coffee and watch this brilliant toddler carry and kick a fat green walnut.

Three parts / Seven parts

The loveliness of weddings is in part due to the audience in attendance, who have woken up that morning to enhance their beauty with trim suits and dresses. There is a signalling selflessness in the way they gather for two people. Everyone sending all of their happiness in one direction. And it lasts for the whole of the afternoon, through the ceremony and into the rest of the meticulously planned afternoon, while light music and energetic hosts help the day along. But then after dinner the speeches come, just after dinner, when people begin to lean back in their chairs, worn out with their contentedness. They slip off their shoes under the table, and they loosen their ties and leave their jackets to hang on the backs of their chairs. It is like taking off an armour of selflessness, where then passed all around are remembrances of the reasons why each person loves the two getting married, why the wedding is the perfect thing to have happened, and on. And almost as if because of everyone's loosening outfits, the speeches slink inside their seams, and their reflections turn upon themselves. And while they listen, fingering the stems of their wine glasses, everyone is wondering to themselves about love, about their love that is kept boxed. A beauty turned to ache, and then sending its meaning into a night covered with a blanket of dance.