jumpingfish

1. Pocket Park

Sometimes it happens in the spring sometimes in the fall, but it never happens in the summer. This weekend Trudy marshaled her energies and gathered folks for our neighborhood’s contribution to Austin’s It’s My Park Day.  

A fledgling park down the street was born recently when the city bought several parcels of land along a utility easement that was once upon a time going to be a street. Despite the intentions of the Planning Department and the hopes of the speculator who owned the four plots, there will be no street, for it would have paved over what has become a pleasant spot of greenery, and years ago during a city land use planning exercise the neighborhood let the city know our views.

So those plots are now a pocket park, albeit a park in need of nurturing: enter the fair and industrious Trudy.

2. Thinning the Thicket

Trudy and John assigned Bob and me a simple task. It had been suggested to them by the city: thin a thicket of junipers that was growing near a bend in the trail so that a breeze might blow thru and eyes might see beyond.

“This is a job David would like,” John suggested when they met to plan the day. The two of them had strategized this as a way to entice me. It worked.

With our simple marching orders, Bob and I went off for several hours while other folks focused on other things in other places. Bob and I were quite content to be left alone in that one place with that one thing to do.

3. A Fine Meditation

The night before and into the early morning, it had rained long and slow. The ground was soft. Our shoes were caked with mud. Great drops of water fell from the treetops as we trimmed. 

As Bob and I worked, the drizzle stopped. The skies were mercifully cloudy, the temperatures cool. I took off my raincoat and threw it on the ground.

Bob and I pushed our way into the tangle knot of juniper branches that slapped against our arms and tried in vain to poke us in the eyes. As our piles of cut branches grew, the voices of the others in the distance would drift thru the undergrowth. Frequently I could hear Trudy laughing.

I must concede this: John and Trudy found us a wonderful task. Because with the sound of her laughter joyfully rolling thru my head, with the comforting cadence of swift saw strokes and with the smell of juniper resin drifting in the air, the quality of that morning meditation in our fledgling park was indeed quite fine.

We thought the backpack belonged to the two women across the Taco Deli picnic table from us. They had said yes when I asked if it was theirs. I must have misunderstood. It turned out to belong to Marco who walked up a few minutes later, clearly drunk and apparently homeless.

“I’m not sure I’d want to sit next to this white trash,” he mumbled as he sat down with his back to us. Awkward but it was clear he was referring to himself. He started talking to a woman with a dog. And at one point he started singing Frank Zappa lines that I sometimes sing. Going to Montana soon. Gonna raise me up some dental floss. Raisin’ it up; waxin’ it down.

The woman walked away, so he turned to us. Mumbling and cussing, his eyes peering out from behind squinting eyelids, he spoke loudly in language not well suited for the nearby girl scouts waiting for their post-hike tacos.

He had a huge scab over his right eye and a horrific scrape on his arm. But he wasn’t obnoxious if you could get past his choice of words. So we chatted for a while. Because… well we were sitting there, and we wanted to finish our tacos

Marco talked with obvious regret about the days of his youth, about dropping out of high school, about living with his step mother and step sisters in Spain, about moving to Albuquerque, about how he liked Austin better, about getting beat up when he recently got off a bus. Sometimes he would start speaking in Spanish. When I replied in Spanish, it was quickly evident that I was out of my league, so I kept quiet when he started speaking French. And after he was talking for a while, he paused and looked at me.

“I’ll give you twenty dollars if you let me sleep on your couch.”

He didn’t wait for an answer. 

“No. I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t,” he said. “The nominative I would not let the accusative me sleep on the genitive my’s couch.”

What a loss.

It’s a fine thing, that Oak tree sapling poking up out of the pot from the acorn we poked into the dirt in the pot under the mulch in the fall. A fine thing, that spring-green finery, ever optimistic under blue skies and under chicken wire to keep the squirrels at bay.

And it’s a fine thing, those wild onions blooming in the back, their white blossoms upon their green stalks. A fine thing, that they come back this time every year, ever optimistic under blue skies even though you don’t want them growing in your butterfly garden where the later flowers belong.

And it was a fine thing, you and me at the park in the afternoon. A fine thing sitting there under blue skies in the unusual heat of the day. Sitting there the four of us at the picnic table, the dogs sniffing the air, the creek burbling at the bottom of the canyon, and the two of us with smiles on our faces listening in silence.

“Do you get bored with that?” I asked.

“No!” You laughed.

A fine thing.

The sky was blue. The sun was high in the sky. And these were the smiles of my brother’s daughters.

We made New Year’s cards this year that had a cover with the image of the sun sitting on the horizon. We left if up to the viewer to derive a meaning — something like Ben Franklin’s observation about George Washington’s chair.

If I know the fair and industrious Trudy well, her preferred interpretation might differ from mine. Which is fine; that was after all the design’s purpose. But I’ll leave you with a less unambiguous version of mine:

source: Gustavo Viselner
hat tip: The [inestimable] Weekly Sift