The beauty of [that star] smote his heart as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him.
So says xkcd [here] quoting Tolkien describing Sam looking out on Mordor in The Return of the King. I don’t remember it, but I should.
I need to contemplate on this a bit and go out tonite and gaze up again at Jupiter … if the clouds will only clear.
“Gabby opened her eyes for the first time.”
hat tip: [TPM]
It’s 5:55 pm, New Year’s Day, just before closing time.
Janie’s face periodically twitches as she scans the merchandise. She isn’t moving particularly fast, and then the phone next to her register rings. She picks up the receiver while she totals up the bill.
“Yes ma’am. We close at 6:00,” she says and hangs up the phone.
“Well they’ll have to get here quickly,” I mumble in a lame attempt at humor.
She doesn’t hear me.
Crystal opens up a register, because Janie’s line is getting very long. A woman checking out in Janie’s line leaves her husband with half their merchandise and takes the rest over to Crystal while the rest of us watch.
She has coupons. 50% off coupons. The kind of coupons that bring people here.
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Crystal says to the woman. “You can only use one coupon.”
The woman stares at her briefly and then looks down at the four coupons in her hands (and actually collects a fifth from her husband). And she looks over at the boxes of candles she’s buying and then up at Crystal.
“Well, can I ring them up on separate orders?” she asks.
“…Sure.”
As we leave the store, Sam is pushing in a cart filled with dried flowers. He’s half-way thru the doors, but a woman has stopped him to ask something—a question about the cart or the store or maybe the dried flowers.
“Whatever you like, ma’am…” he says, looking up at us.
She walks past him into the store.
“…I just want to get this stuff put away so that I can go home.”
The sunshine is slanting down from the blue eastern sky. The thriving kale is glowing greenly in the light, and the lettuce and spinach and radishes are peeping up above the soil.
The dog is barking and carrying his blue dog toy to and fro. And now it’s his magenta monkey. And now he’s barking as we dance and sing to Stevie Wonder with long yellow beams of morning light reaching across the floor.
And now the boy is up. And he’s getting ready to go. And we’ve got our sweaters on and are getting a leash for the dog.
And now we’re leaving. Going to get breakfast tacos just down the street.
Happy New Year to you all.
…slam!…
For the New Year. For tomorrow. For you and for me.
There’s songs to make you smile
There’s songs to make you sad
But with an happy song to sing
It never seems so bad
To me came this melody
So I’ve tried to put in words how I feel
Tomorrow will be for you and me—Ngiculela, Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life (a really good album to play loudly on the morning of the first day of the year)
“Dad?” he called from the dining room.
“Yes…?” I answered from the study.
“Is it ok if I stay at college for sixteen years?”
I didn’t say a thing.
“… There are so many good classes.”
I laughed, remembering how I used to get all dreamy and itchy as I leafed thru the course catalog when I was in school. I got up and walked into the dining room.
He had papers spread out on the table before him, papers covered with scribblings: BIOL, POLT, SOCI, ECON, ENVS, HISP. And the browser on his computer had several windows open showing graduation requirements and course descriptions and the schedule for next semester.
He pointed to a class that had caught his eye. A sociology class: Alcohol and culture.
Hmmm.
…
Well anyway, Happy New Year to you!
Two college students are in the dining room now. Back in town for at least a few more days. They’re sitting at the table playing Scrabble. One from the Pacific Northwest. One from the Midwest. Both back home from a long ways away.
And it got very quiet in there all of the sudden. I haven’t heard anything for twenty-five minutes. They seem to be taking it quite seriously.
As well one should, right? Scrabble is serious business.
This liberal arts education thing is working. Right? Right. Although … you know … they both get perplexed looks on their faces when we ask them, “And so what do you think you’ll do with your degree when you get out of school?”
Oh, the dreaded question: “What are you going to do.” So easy for the engineer or geologist to ask. (It was always so obvious to us.) So hard for them to contemplate much less answer with more than vagaries and a wave of the hand.
That’s fine. Silence and words go together well. Very well, I’d say.
The sky was cloudy gray. A breeze was blowing out of the south. Fog clung to the ground.
He was running around in 400 meter circles. Red jacket and blue shorts. His dog trotting faithfully beside. He was alone. Surrounded by silence.
The bell at the elementary school rang as he began. The school was empty. No kids. No teachers. No cars in the parking lot. The ringing rolled across the fog-covered field, where he heard it as jogged otherwise in silence.
Four laps, then a rest for a bit. The dog looking up at him wondering when they were going to start again. Then four more laps. In the fog. Under the gray sky. In the quiet. Alone out there with nothing but his dog and the wind for company.
The bell at the middle school rang as he finished. That school was empty, too. No kids. No teachers. No cars in the parking lot. The ringing rolled across the field, where he heard it as he stood there in the straight-away sweating. And the dog looked up at him wondering what was going to come next.
Time to walk back home.
The stereo in the study was playing loudly. Heart: Crazy On You. Oh, the guitars—an excellent song to crank the stereo to.
Ben was in the living room passing judgement on the parental choice of tunes. Some got a thumbs up, some not. When this one came on, he looked up and asked, “Is this Talking Heads?”
Trudy and I looked at each other in instant horror.
“What are they teaching the kids in college these days, anyway?” Trudy asked.
Home for the holidays, the boy is on the couch with the dog.
Both are reclined after a fashion, the boy whispering into the dog’s ears. And Guinness wagging his tail as fast as he possibly can, jumping into the boy’s face and pushing his black body against the boy’s chest.
He is clearly happy that the boy is home again.
“Do you want to look at ribbons?” he asked her.
They were on sale, you see—60% off. And, well, she likes ribbons, and so it was a very sensible thing to ask.
“Oh I have such a wonderful husband,” she said, spreading her arms and giving him a hug and a kiss right there in the middle of the aisle. “He comes with me to the crafts store and asks me out loud for all to hear if I want to look at ribbons!”
But they were on sale, you see—60% off. It really was a sensible thing to ask.
“Which lanes do you need?” I gasped to the club track coach as I passed him.
He smiled and shook his head. “We’re not starting, yet.”
I held out two fingers and panted, “Two more laps.”
He nodded. His kids were just arriving and putting on their shoes and stretching on the ground.
The dog and I finished our laps and sat down in the grass. The kids started their warm-up, jogging the straightaways and walking the turns, talking with each other in small groups. Jamie, who lives down the street, was among them. She smiled and waved and said hi to Guinness as her group walked by.
The weather was gloriously warm for late December. The sun had just gone down a few minutes before, leaving behind a few wisps of cloud spread against a pastel blue sky. And the last rays of the departed sun were painting the clouds with brilliant hues of pink and red with electric margins. And the air all about us was glowing.
The kids started running down the straight away, oblivious to this spectacle about them.
Give them time, David.
Years from now it will be them sitting here watching a yet younger group of kids walking and talking in apparent oblivion. It will be them wishing they could run faster and run longer. And it will be them soaking in the deliciously warm winter weather and gazing with dreamy eyes at the glowing sky about them.
Just give them time.
© jumpingfish by David Hasan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License