It was an unexpected and chilling moment. As is my wont, as I made supper Monday night I had on in the background the Japanese international television station, NHK. The program was about learning the Japanese language by reading the news.
Autumn doesn’t begin until Thursday night — Friday morning if you’re a few time zones east of here — but recent events led me to begin a regular fall pastime a little early this year.
It was beautiful. It was sweet-smelling. It was deadly. For quite some time, I had ignored lovely, white-flowered vine that had begun to entwine its way around my backyard fence. Gardening has never been a hobby of mine. In contrast to my mother —- who has been known to happily steward anything from ferns to palm trees, bringing them tenderly back from the brink of death and into lush contentment —- my thumbs have always been decidedly mahogany.
It happened again, dammit. I was headed to the store when, out of the woods on my left, a deer appeared. Again. It ran in front of my car, again, and I slammed on the brakes, again. There’s always that moment, magnified by the mind’s ability to slow time so that every second is a million instants, of wondering if the deer was fast enough, or I was, and I’d manage to avoid hitting it. Usually it’s a narrow escape.
Two ruckuses that have occupied our society the past couple of weeks have gotten me thinking a lot about truth. One came from the Left and one from the Right. One was Liz Cheney’s loss, one student loan debt forgiveness.
The mowing is finally done, at least for now, and the whole area carries the invigorating scent of newly mown grass. My amazing Swisher mower pulled through like a champ yet again. They make ‘em good in Missouri, except that when a friend overseas asked me about it, I checked and learned that it is no longer manufactured, which is a shame.
As life moves to dotage (and of course anecdotage), and like many people having allowed my recovery from COVID-19 to proceed largely at its own pace, I only now am getting around to mowing.
It hit me like a bolt of lightning last week, as I saw the OPEC logo flash on the television screen. It is, at best, a doodle and not a very good one at that. The thought had been simmering in my mind — “cogitatin’” as an old friend put it years ago — since I first saw the ridiculous NATO logo. This comprises a four-pointed star of the sort drawn by every third-grader, along side the letters “NATO” over the letters “OTAN,” or “NATO” backwards. It does not strike me as something sufficiently sophisticated to characterize as an idea.
Today’s rain would have altered plans, if today were thirty years ago. Thirty years ago, my family was sitting at a table on pea gravel under our deck eating a meal together, chalk on the concrete foundation proclaiming the venue “Augusta the Third’s” — a pop up eatery in today’s parlance — to celebrate my grandparents’ fiftieth anniversary. And they were ecstatic.
Paul Sorvino died on Monday at age 83. He was involved in an anecdote that I cherish a little. In some respects it might surprise you.