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A Long Time Ago

Wed, 13 May 2015, 04:47 AM (-06:00)

Ranga and I work together. I’m an engineer on the project. He’s a product manager. We had just ordered our lunch and were standing there looking at all the soups on the menu. We spoke about our plans for a week-long company event in the summer.

He is going up the weekend before. I am staying the weekend after, meeting the fair and industrious Trudy afterwards for a trip to Assateague Island to see the ponies.

“I went up there with a friend once in the summer,” I said. “I was a summer intern. It was 1981.”

His eyes widened. “Wow!” He emphasized the w’s when he said it.

I looked over at him. “What, wow?” I asked.

“That was a long time ago.”

I looked down for a moment, lost maybe in a reverie. Then I looked up. “Yes, it was a long time ago,” I conceded.

“I wasn’t born yet,” he said.

It doesn’t seem that long ago. But I guess it was.

Country Dogs

Tue, 12 May 2015, 12:48 AM (-06:00)

Outside it was cool and crisp. There was a slight breeze blowing. We took the dogs for a walk.

We took them for a walk into the night. Into the fresh air washed clean from the rains of the day. Down the block. Over to a vacant field where the wildflowers have been left to grow. To where the grass is high. Into the wild.

To say that Miss Izzy and Mr. Guinness live lives of leisure does not quite capture the reality of it. During the day when we are at work, they can wander in and out of a doggie door. Out into the backyard and back into the house where they certainly nap in luxury most of the day. Out into the hot sun and then back into the cool house when they’ve had enough. But of course like any dogs, at the end of the day, they are eager to go out beyond borders of their little Eden, out into the wild.

For us this night, the wild was was not very far away. Just down and over a couple blocks. To a vacant lot where the grass is long and the wildflowers grow. Along the edge of a soccer field, on a path well-worn by soccer moms and soccer dads and soccer kids. Not all that wild after all, but wild enough for Izzy and Guinness.

They were pulling at their leashes. They were enjoying the cool and crisp, enjoying the breeze. Izzy stopped and raised her head. She gazed into the vacant lot, peering over the long grass at shadows in the distance.

“Ok, miss Izzy. Let’s go,” I said, stepping off the sidewalk into the grass and the wildflowers.

She leapt off the sidewalk following me, bounding over the grass the was over her head. Bounding once. Bounding twice. Keeping her head up. Bounding thrice. And with that third bound, she decided that she’d had enough. She stopped and pulled me back to where we had come from, where the grass and the weeds wouldn’t scratch at her belly. Back from that little bit of wild. Back to the sidewalk, where Guinness patiently awaited her return.

He had no interest in the grass or the wildflowers or the shadows in the distance. And now, neither did she.

Because you see… we don’t have country dogs.

Night Thoughts

Mon, 11 May 2015, 12:31 AM (-06:00)

Something woke me up.

In the dark, in the bed, I turned over. But at that moment, the same thing that woke me up must have startled Izzy, because she woofed once and that started barking loudly as she ran out into the living room, barking madly thru the screen door at something in the backyard.

The fair and industrious Trudy got out of bed and settled her down, sliding the glass patio door shut so that Izzy’s alarm might not wake the entire neighborhood as it had us.

But that was two hours ago. Guinness has settled down in the living room. Izzy is quiet now, curled up somewhere at the foot of the bed. Trudy sleeps motionless beside me. And I am here, wide awake, unable to turn my brain back into off.

They’re going to build another highway, another bridge over the river towering over the existing one. And the legislature is going to pass a law stripping the city from its ability to regulate (to forbid) plastic grocery bags. And another law allowing concealed weapons on college campuses.

The east side of the city is gentrifying at a rate that will complete the refashioning of the city, effectively banishing those without significant means to somewhere else, anywhere but inside the city limits where real estate is now only affordable to the upper crust.

The trail they were going to bring to this neighborhood will bypass us after all, sticking to the other side of the freeway in response to the howls of protest from a vocal handful of loons worried about dangerous others walking and riding nearby.

I have a code review to do, and I didn’t do it over the weekend. And we have deadlines looming in July that are unlike any deadlines I’ve ever faced before.

My family is gathering in Michigan in the middle of July on precisely that weekend when my company is gathering in Maryland. So I’ll miss the kids as another year passes and they head into middle school.

Ben has talked about changing jobs, which might be a good thing. But he has also talked about moving far away.

The Bermuda grass needs to be pulled in the garden bed in the back. And the Hackberries coming up along the fence. There are fire ants in the pepper plants. The wild blackberries are taking over the beds on the south side of the house. Will our first apple on the apple tree make it? And the two persimmons? There is poison ivy in the new pocket park at the end of the block.

Do I have my running stuff packed for tomorrow? Where is my laptop to take to work? I didn’t pack my lunch. Will the Monterey Oak heal its wound. Will the neighbor’s Walnut tree drop that branch on our power line? Why isn’t the oven broiler working? Will Martin finally get the permit allowing him to replace the patio door at the condo? Should we do the flooring ourselves? Do we need a new circuit if we put new lighting in the ceiling?

In the dark, in the bed, I sit up and fumble for my glasses and walk into the study and begin typing the the keyboard. Because clearly, my brain is not going to turn off.

Lagrange Points

Tue, 5 May 2015, 07:43 PM (-06:00)

I was sitting at the keyboard trying to deal with NuGet packages that were there but weren’t there. I was just about to restart Visual Studio when I got a text from Ben.

“I’ll come over tomorrow night before it gets too late…” it started out.

That’s a good thing, I thought, him coming over before it gets too late. He usually stops by after dinner with his mom, but it’s always late, and the fair and industrious Trudy has resigned herself to the inevitable, and with drooping eyelids I am wishing that I had, too.

That’s what I was thinking as I started the second sentence.

“And I want to talk to you about orbits and Lagrange points.”

Ah yes, I thought. That’s a good thing, too…

…wait, what?

Texas Arboretum

Sun, 3 May 2015, 09:22 PM (-06:00)

1.

We stood on the crushed granite trail on the hilltop gazing beyond the grass waving in the wind. Beyond the faded Bluebonnets. Beyond the explosion of orange and yellow Indian Blankets growing among the grasses. Beyond the clusters of Oaks.

Clouds floated by. The sun shined. The sky was blue.

Trudy held her face into the breeze and sighed. “We don’t get days like this very often.”

2.

The field of Indian Blankets rippled. A butterfly alighted on the lavender blossom of a thistle. She looked over at me.

“Are there tears in your eyes?”

3.

The ground was soft under the canopy of the massive Live Oak tree. As we stepped off the trail, the ground invited our footsteps.

We walked around the massive trunk and then sat down, leaning out backs against it, closing our eyes, listening to the birds in the canopy.

4.

A Scissortail was sitting on a protective fence surrounding a young tree some distance from the trail. I pointed at it. As Trudy turned and looked, it leaped into the breeze, its scissor-tail splitting and turning as it darted out across the prairie grabbing something out of the air and flying back to its perch.

5.

It’s dark outside. The wind chimes are ringing in the back. A cool breeze is blowing in thru the window over my hands on the keyboard. It’s May. That cool breeze won’t be hanging around here for long. It feels luxurious.

It is late. I stand up to crank the window shut and pull down the blind.

Trudy was right. We don’t get days like today very often.

I wrote it

Sat, 2 May 2015, 09:22 PM (-06:00)

Really?

What? … Really what?

Girl sliding down the slide? Caterpillar in the grass? What is wrong with you?

What do you mean?

Why do you write that stuff? No one wants to hear that crap.

…

I mean, come on. Really. You’re gone for most of a month and you come back with that!?

It’s what I wrote… What do you want me to do? It’s what I saw and what I wanted to say. And I don’t know who reads it. And mostly I don’t care. I wrote it. I write it.

You do.

So live with it.

The Second Time

Sat, 2 May 2015, 05:55 PM (-06:00)

She toddled around a bit at the base of the playscape, looking up at her father who was looking down at her. It didn’t seem as if she had been there before.

Other older kids were running and biking and laughing and screaming all around her. She turned away from her father to watch them. Her mom came walking slowly up to her and grabbed her gently under her arms and handed her up to her dad who reached down from the top of the playscape.

He had a wide smile on her face. Her face was uncertain. He held her hands and had her walk over to the top of the slide. She had other ideas. He had to coax her along.

An older girl was sitting at the top of the slide waiting her turn. Then in an instant she was gone, into the plastic tunnel, down the spiraling slide.

The dad coaxed his little girl to the slide, picking her up slightly so he could swing her into a sitting position. And then he let go of her.

They were far enough away and the general din of the playground was sufficient to drown out whatever it was that he said to her. He patted her on the back. He pushed her a little bit closer to the edge. He whispered in her ear. He pushed her once more. And then she too was gone, into the plastic tunnel, and … and … and there she was coming out of the tunnel, rounding a turn lying on her back with her hands and legs waving a little bit hither and yon.

She came to a stop before she reached the bottom.

She sat up with a startled look on her face. Her mom kept her distance. And the little girl looked back around the spiraling turn and into the tunnel and then she looked out at the kids around her and then back again into the tunnel. And then beaming smile exploded across her face, and her eyes lit up. She waved her arms in the air, and she kicked her feet.

And at that moment, in spite the general din of the playground I could clearly hear her scream with glee ready … so ready … to try it for the second time.

Sitting There

Fri, 1 May 2015, 08:31 PM (-06:00)

I sat there on the grass close to a bush, away from the sidewalk where the boys had asked me to move as they began kicking a ball up and down the hill. I sat there with sweat dripping into my eyes, grateful for the breeze, stretching after four laps around the pond. I sat there leaning forward over my legs, stretching my old-man muscles, staring at the grass between my knees.

Green grass imagine that. The rains have been merciful. And the grass is green this year. And soft to sit in.

I sat there looking at the grass, feeling the breeze, cooling down, listening to the boys and the other kids playing on the playground and riding their bikes in circles. I sat there looking down.

And I saw a small caterpillar inching its way up the side of a blade of grass.

With each minuscule move it made, it would crane its head and circle around reaching for another blade of grass just out of reach. It was a tiny, tiny thing, that caterpillar. The gap between those two blades of grass was five less than a centimeter. The green worm arched its back and stretched its body as far as it could reaching for that other blade of grass that it knew was there, just out of reach.

And then it moved on, failing to reach that other blade of grass but finding a nice round, green leaf of a pony foot growing just millimeters away.

“Sorry mister,” one of the boys said as he came to get their ball that had rolled up against me.

I smiled. He smiled and rolled the ball back to the others.

I looked back down. The caterpillar was gone. Gone somewhere into that jungle of grass and pony foot leaves.

Water Main

Mon, 13 Apr 2015, 08:50 PM (-06:00)

1.

“Can I look in?” I asked.

He couldn’t hear me over the sound of the dump truck and started to climb out of the hole.

I walked closer.

“I was wondering if I could look in,” I said loudly.

“Sure,” he said. “Here’s the water main.”

He was standing in a pit about four feet deep on the east side of the street. His boots were a foot-deep in brown clay-y, ooze-y mud. He poked his shovel in the corner of the pit to show me the water main. I saw nothing but ooze-y, clay-y slop.

2.

He pointed toward the middle of the street near where last night a guy named Derrick had sprayed bright yellow one-call marks locating the gas lines.

“The water main might be leaking somewhere up there.” he said.

“A bit more street to dig up,” I said.

“Yep,” he said. “Not sure how far.” And then he glanced quickly up.

“I hope you weren’t planning to go to sleep until about 2 or 3am. We’ll be banging out here until then. And we just called in the big trucks.”

I laughed.

It’s 9:40pm now. There has been no crashing. No smashing. No banging. No big trucks.

And the fair and industrious Trudy just announced that the water is back on.

Snakes, 1-2-3

Sun, 5 Apr 2015, 07:56 PM (-06:00)

1.

The girls said there were snakes. Their coach said, “Those were earthworms!” The entire team objected. Days later, Trudy found a picture one of them had posted on Facebook, which were not even close to being earthworms.

Yes. They were snakes, albeit snakes covered in mud, but snakes without a doubt.

2.

We stood in the street saying goodbye. We had eaten Tex-Mex (the best stacked enchiladas I’d ever had). We had played a rousing game of Scrabble. (He beat the tar out of the two of us.)

I pointed to to a spot in the street that was glistening in the streetlight light.

“A snake skin,” he said.

“No, a snake,” I said. “It was trying to get to our yard.”

3.

The south side of the house is kind of a mess. Weeds and unmowed clumps of hard-to-reach grass and 4×4 posts I scrounged last year when the construction crew was disposing of our rickety, falling-down pergola.

Anyway, I walk by that mess many times each weekend going from the front yard to the back and from the back yard to the front. On the north side of the house, I have a rule of always stopping to pull a few weeds every time I pass. I don’t know why I haven’t followed the same rule on the south. So today I stopped and stooped and pulled a handful of greenery.

As I grabbed my last handful, there was a flickering movement, and I caught the tail end of something long and grey and wiggly slithering into a clump of leaves.

Yes. It was a snake. And this one had made it safely into our refugio.