jumpingfish

Was that a picture of graduation day you sent? I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume so. What a fine thing.

Congratulations to the grad. And to the parents, too! What a fine thing.

Miss Izzy and I went out tonite to walk under the clear night sky. The sickle of the Big Dipper hung over us, and a waxing gibbous moon meeting up with Jupiter. And there was a Nighthawk sweeping thru the air high above the parking lot lights.

She and I slowly made our way to the soccer fields, around the gravel elementary school track and around the middle school track that they resurfaced last fall and is so spongey to walk on. Izzy found many excuses to take many detours.

Miss Izzy, does Mr. Guinness tell you about his running days, when he and I would go out to the lake? Does he tell you these things as he raises his head from his slumber when you get back from a long walk like this? Does he whisper his stories into your ears when he greets you?

He was a fine running buddy. Although perpetually distracted by everything at walking speed, when we would start running, his ears would lie back against his head, and he would run faithfully beside me, barely flinching at the other dogs and runners we passed. Does he tell you that? Does he tell you about how he would go for five miles with me and how one time he ran the seven mile loop?

Oh, those were the days, Miss Izzy, when he and I would go out there for a run around the lake and make this long walk of ours look like the child’s play that it is. I think we could do better than this, Miss Izzy — for Mr. Guinness’s sake. Ask him; see what he thinks.

When watching me work in the yard a long time ago, one of the three sisties said to me, “It’s a good thing you don’t do this for a living.” She had noticed my slow, inefficient way of doing things and correctly observed that they wouldn’t scale well if I charged for the work. Of course, my time in the garden isn’t a money-making venture. It’s an escape from the daily keyboard and monitor. I am content with the dirt under my fingernails, even if it comes only slowly.

That having been said, there are tasks I dread. And for these, I concede that I need to learn to work efficiently so that I can dilly-dally in the fun stuff. Improving clay soil is one such dreary task.

I can attest that there is no joy in thudding a shovel into clay, in struggling to scrape gunk off the blade, in breaking up sticky clods or in trying to mix good stuff in. Yet the formerly rich topsoil of the garden bed outside our kitchen window has been diluted with big clods of brown and red clay (as the result of the deep holes we dug for the new grounding plates), so the soil there needs improving. I confess, I have no interest in applying my inefficient approach to that task.

However… I have been trying to create a rain garden to capture the (usually rare) rain that runs down our driveway and pours off our roof. And as I have been digging, I have found earthworms by the handful. I spent more than an hour digging today, and as I dug, I collected the worms and dispersed them on the mulch outside the kitchen window. Handsful of them, many handsful. At the end of my otherwise inefficient labor, I must have distributed one hundred worms. And with each toss, I could see that the previous batch had already burrowed down into the mulch, no longer visible on the surface.

Somewhere down there under that mulch, my army of worms is even now at work breaking up the clods and aerating the gunk and pulling organic matter down into the soil — doing the dreary work for me. The paradigm of efficiency. 

The sisties would be proud.

1.

We were sitting at the dinner table talking about politics and journalism. (Now isn’t that just the stuff of dinner table talk?) Trudy had an observation, and I had a meta-observation about her observation.

“Well, that’ll be a jumpingfish,” she said, smiling sincerely.

I chuckled. It was a tiny thing, not particularly profound. An offhand comment. Indeed, as I sit here, I have no recollection what I said and neither does Trudy. Yet she was right. It was a little ditty that mixed dry humor with political observation and might have been something fit for these pages.

But it won’t be. Because the moment came and went and the minor brilliance of a triviality is lost to oblivion.

No big deal, right? It happens to us all the time. Moments come and go, and it’s not like we can hold on to them all. I mean, that’s the stuff of life, right? Yet it’s… it’s just that the oblivion thing has always seemed to happen so much to me.

2.

So in the interest of rescuing another triviality, here’s something that I managed to jot down into barely comprehensible notes on my phone as I was leaving work, yesterday.

On the long walk. Past the waterfalls and lily pads, up the hill to where my car is parked (as far from the office as can possibly be) in the shade of a cluster of Live Oaks and Yaupon Hollies. The long walk. On a sunny day like today.

Another moment saved from oblivion!

“Do you want to try the HOV lane this time?” Trudy asked.

She was behind the wheel. I was navigating. We were high-tailing it as fast as we could out of Houston, trying to beat rush hour.

We’ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we’ve been two or three people in the car — a veritable high-occupancy — it’s never been absolutely clear to us that the HOV lanes are indeed free, anymore, combined in places as they are with toll lanes and TxDOT-quality signage.

I grumbled something about not knowing. But then a sign appeared. High above the roadway. With clear rows and unambiguous words: HOV 2+ FREE.

We decided to merge into the fast lane.

And so there we were, sailing along between the concrete barricades passing the slowing afternoon traffic. As rush hour was beginning to condense, it was all Trudy could do to keep our speed to 65 miles per hour, even as the cars in front of her began to pull away.

We win! We were thinking. And then, a funny thing happened.

The HOV lane rose up and began to curve to the north. The concrete walls squeezed in, and the traffic slowed. We were coming to a park-and-ride, not a surprise, I suppose, but the puzzling thing was that the signs only gave us two choices: exit into the park-and-ride or continue around the tightly turning roadway on the HOV lane to FM 1960.

But… but… we didn’t want to go north. We wanted to go west. You know: west, like the HOV lane had just been doing five minutes ago. But no. We were beginning to realize that this was not the Katy Freeway HOV. And now having passed the park-and-ride, there was no exit until the far northwest side of Houston.

Incredulous at our failure, at my failure as a navigator, I murmured something like, “Oh well, I guess we’re going home on highway 290.”

Let’s just say, that in all my years of coming and going between Austin and Houston, I’ve never taken the highway 290 route. From the side of Austin where we live, you’d never do such a thing. You’d end up on the wrong side of town when you got home.

The wrong side of town. That’s where we were headed.

There was however, one upside. You see, there’s this gas station just outside of Brenham on highway 290 that serves hand-dipped Blue Bell ice cream. And OMG how long has it been since we’ve sunk our teeth into a cold scoop of Blue Bell.

Oh well, we’d just have to make a stop.