Chaos Orders

At the height of last summer’s hottest week a butterfly flapped its wings in China and as a result, only twelve days ago, I was reintroduced to a forgotten world.

The wind started blowing in the early morning, and by noon was shaking the house as though it were made of nothing more substantial than cardboard. Sentinel trees, some having stood guard for hundreds of years, suddenly grew lusty for the wet earth, and heeding the dim memory of their kind, sacrificed themselves to the dream of becoming nurse-trees. It was a fey dream. They fell by the hundreds over a thousand square miles, most harmlessly, but not all.

A tree down the road fell across a power sub-station and darkened the homes of 9000 residents, mine included. No power, no heat, no television, no telephone, no Internet. I played cards and scrabble with my daughter by candlelight. I read by the light of a camper headset with the red LED light activated to conserve the battery. After several hours of doing that I would turn it off and everything glowed with the bright green light of an aurora. I threw out the entire contents of the refrigerator after two days, and I took very cold showers in a very dark bathroom. I wondered how friends I could not talk to were doing. I thought a lot.

After 5 days the power came back on. Another two days and the cable worked again, but because power surges had damaged my router the Internet and telephone (VOIP) were only restored today.

I had missed a lot, but I know my problems were trivial, nothing, bumps on a toad.

I didn’t learn of Virginia Tech until two days after it happened. It took my breath away and I have a lot of catch-up grieving in absentia to do. I’m still at it. I found out that in a town just to the west of me a tree fell on a truck and killed the driver. A man I know, a teacher at my youngest daughter’s school, was fly-fishing and was struck by a falling limb a foot in diameter. He’s still in the ICU.

There’s no big lesson in all this, no wisdom I’ve gained. Life went on, and death, and love and war, and commercials and everything else that normally goes on. But dammit, it did bother me to be disconnected from it, even for a few short days.

My Favorite Toy

I was asked to name my favorite toy from childhood.

Arrgh! Questions like this drive me crazy. I resisted for a couple of days, but I finally broke down and answered.

Ask most Americans to name their favorite color and the response is likely to be red or blue or whatever. Ask a Brit and the response is often something like “Favorite color of what?”

So I’ll answer like a denizen of the UK: “Favorite toy to play at what?”

But there are some toys I remember more than others.

I had a red 3-speed bicycle my grandfather gave me just before he died. My father had a flat tire one day and I wanted to be just like him so I pounded a nail through a board and drove the bike over it. He figured out what I’d done and wouldn’t fix the tire for weeks. I’d probably still have that bike except that one of my sisters accidentally drove a tractor over it. At least I think it was an accident.

I had a Radio Flyer wagon. A great toy too, but I decided it needed more carrying capacity and built a huge wooden box on top of the metal base. It was so heavy I could hardly pull it. I didn’t want to admit that I’d been dumb enough to paint myself into the corner of a figurative room, so I waited until nobody was home one day and I killed it. Really. I got my uncle’s 12 gauge double barreled shotgun, loaded it with two double-ought magnums, and blew the thing to bits. The shotgun was too big for me, I was only ten, and it slid under my arm as I pulled the triggers - yeah, both at one time - and broke my nose. That didn’t matter though, because I had to put the shotgun back and clean up the bits of wood that littered the yard. I hadn’t finished yet when my parents and sisters returned home. Nobody ever asked me why my nose was bloody, why there were bits of wood all over the yard, where the wagon had disappeared to, or why my clothes smelled like cordite. I guess that was just normal stuff for ten year old farm boys. I hear these days that guns are locked in cabinets. Wow! And, no, I haven’t owned a gun in decades, so your wagons are safe.

I had a brown teddy bear that I wore out with love. One day the fabric just split open and white fluffy stuffing spilt across the kitchen floor. I cried for an hour.

I had this cool camera once. It used a film size called 620 so it was fairly large, and it was made of pink plastic. Mostly I took pictures of anything that didn’t move out of the way. One day I read about how balloons had been used in the Civil War for reconnaissance so I decided to give aerial photography a shot. First, I made a mechanism from an old windup alarm clock that would ring the alarm bell and trip the shutter simultaneously. Then I practiced with the clock/camera contraption until I could reliably predict a one to five minute shutter release window. Lastly, I taped the entire thing to a box kite - not those wimpy little box kites you find in a store, but a 2×2x5 monster flown with 30 pound test braided fishing line and built as a Boy Scout project - and then found some wind. It took most of a full day to get it to work but after the film came back from the drug store I had a beautiful photograph of the barn roof from 300 feet up. That was the end of it though, because when I tried to repeat my achievement a strong gust parted the fishing line and my kite was last seen crossing the Canadian border. I’m probably responsible for a spate of UFO sightings.

I built a crystal radio. It really amazed me that I could hear people talking and listen to music simply by putting the parts together in the proper order. It was magic.

I had a beautifully illustrated copy of Alice in Wonderland. I read it out loud almost every day and stared into the illustrations until I felt like I was falling into them, just like Alice falling into the well.

But favorite? Any of these? No. My favorite toy then is my favorite toy still; that wonderful toy between my ears, that lump of meat that houses the I that is me, and connects me to the universe, the most stupendous playground of all.

Blessings

Tonight I visited dear friends and was fed an exquisite vegan chili. It was the kind of food that feeds your soul as well as your body, and the kind of food you remember and want to eat again the next day. Well, I've been taken care of on that account as I was sent home with a big bowl filled to the brim. I'll have it for lunch tomorrow if my daughters don't snitch it in the meantime. I think I'll sit by it in the kitchen and growl if anyone approaches too closely.

The chili was washed down with an ample quantity of beer, and when the eating was over we played cards for a hour or so. I lost badly.

The air outside is crisp and cold. It snowed only a day ago, and the sky is crystal clear with thousands of twinkling stars. On the way home I chanced to look up just as a meteor streaked across the velvety blackness, a sparkling blue-white incandescence trailing behind it. I'm sure it was there just to show off to me.

When I got home my daughters greeted me with hugs and an invitation to sit with them to watch a movie. I did, and within a few minutes they both fell asleep, their heads resting on my shoulders. They are so wonderful.

Rob Brezsny is right, the whole world is conspiring to shower me with blessings.

Chinatown

While on a business trip to New York City I took my evening meal in that frantic hive of humanity, Chinatown. Because MSG gives me a livid headache I asked my waiter to have my order made without benefit of that dubious substance. He looked at me and, indignantly, with a heavy accent said: "Yes Sir! Food has no ingredients!" I wondered if this was a generic statement or if he was referring to his food only. I thought that I might not want to go that far so I queried him just to be sure: "No ingredients? At all?" With great dignity he responded: "I give my pleasure to you - so, no ingredients, no ingredients. Yes?" Belatedly I realized that this might be a good way to lose weight - The No Ingredients Diet. No wonder Atkins offed himself. (He just made it look like an accident - but I know better.) So, with great bravery, I ordered. The food arrived, mountainously, but with no MSG - it was actually quite good. My waiter came by the table in mid-meal and asked "Is everything pleasure to you?" I almost told him the truth but managed instead to blurt "Very good, very good. And thank you for no ingredients." His smile told me that I had given my pleasure to him. I can, however, tell you that the drinks served in that establishment were chocked full of ingredients - presumably not those subtracted from the food.

Categories

To make sense of an otherwise overwhelming stream of information the brain has evolved a remarkable capacity for categorization. In the pursuit of becoming, in the quest for enlightenment and knowing, that trait is also the strongest of all adversaries.