wideeyedfunk

Category: Life

  • Seal-self doesn’t see in grayscale.

    I cross my legs at the ankle and spread my arms, belly down in the water. Friar’s Bay is shallow and calm, the water extra salty, the same temperature as the air. I float effortlessly: only nose, forehead and eyes above the water. The rest of me lurks just below the surface. I am a seal.

    I am a seal, and I monitor the strange beings hauled out on the sand before me. I flip and spin, to watch out to sea where the moored sailboats disgorge more of the many-limbed creatures. They too will haul out on the beach.

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    I flutter my flip…er, hands and feet to float over the little reef. There’re fish and seaweeds and urchins to be looked at in there. I flip and spin. The little black dog occupying the beach is heading toward two empty beach chairs and blue beach bag filled with snacks and novels. My seal self doesn’t care. My person self has concerns. The dog passes the chairs. Seal self dives, disappears among the rocks, emerges farther along the beach.

    Seal self and me self roll and roll in the water: the sky, the sea, the sky, the sea – shades and tones of blues and greens that defy likelihood. Somewhere else, someplace we used to be, it is grayscale. Some faintly remembered place where seal self will never be, doesn’t want to think about. We float, eyes above the waterline.

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  • Darkest January.

    The long haul is here. The days are cold, too cold and windy for good dog walks, gardening, anything really. The nights are frigid, too frigid for standing in awe of the starry universe. The short hours of daylight, and don’t try to convince yourself otherwise, yes the days are getting longer but they are still short – the short hours of daylight pass interminably in the dark gleam of overcast skies and no end in sight.

    The house creaks and bangs in the shifts from cold to exceedingly cold. I can hear my neighbor’s back door slam in the hyperlucid air. The dogs bark each time. Shivering a little at my observation post at the window, I think dark thoughts about wearing their warm furs as a cloak. That would stop the barking.

    Sirens blast through the city more or less constantly. January is the season of emergencies. Fires burn hotter, car accidents shatter windshields and bones more spectacularly, the cold makes the emergency greater, the response itself dangerous.

    The WideEyedSpouse and I have inhabited Northern Cities by chance and happenstance for thirteen of our twenty years of marriage. None have bested the grim, dark, endurance trial that is Buffalo for sheer misery. The windows of abandoned houses and factories stare into the darkling days and pink-light nights. Heatless, roofless, they are havens for the desperately poor. The dreams of a new generation of city-builders are lost under heaps and mounds of poorly plowed snow, rock salt encrustations, and the skittering drifts of wind-blown trash. Hundred thousand dollar Mercedes purr warmly past layered heaps of used clothes that are people waiting for buses. The contrasts are starker without the greenling veneer of temperate spring and summer, or golden fall.

    Maybe it’s me.

    Maybe tomorrow I should strap on my Wisconsin-bought ice skates, don my Minnesota-cold furry hat and glide in circles on the new canal-side rink. Maybe I should make snow angels, feed and water some hungry birds. Maybe on the gloomiest and coldest of days I should make donations to the heating assistance fund, the electricity assistance fund, the food cupboard and hope that I’ve helped others get through.

    Maybe I should rejoice in the long quiet that is a Northern City Winter and find peace.

    We’ll see.