Sonata

The Desert

Phoenix Arizona was constructed on the desert, displacing millions of lizards and tumbleweeds and leaving them homeless. You can see them on the street corners with their little signs:

“Hungry, unemployed – will work for a higher place on the food chain”.

The humidity in Phoenix has been raised several points by the presence of so many swimming pools. Kind of like terraforming our own planet, making conditions far more livable for our kind. Of course it would help if we could quickly grow some asbestos skin to keep from frying in the convection oven that is Phoenix in the summer. On the way to my hotel during a recent trip, the shuttle driver said that they had to close the airport once that summer, an action they take only when the temperature exceeds 121 degrees F. “Asphalt melts”, he explained in his warbling Venusian accent.

Stephanie sez Stephanie can see into the hidden, dusty corners of life on earth.

She asks, “Why is it that whenever someone names their baby ‘Robert’, they never call him ‘Bob’?”

As in; “My what a beautiful baby boy. What’s his name?” “Bob”

Nope.

Hurricane Isabel Does the word ‘debris’ ring a bell? We avoided the worst of the wind and completely missed the storm surge. Of course a storm surge here in Chapel Hill would mean, he says glancing at the Home Almanac of Cataclysms, a mighty big storm. Time to head for Arizona. Oh wait, too hot.

Our new house was framed but open to the elements when Isabel hit, so she provided several hundred pounds of elements onto the work site. A small tree from the neighbor’s property fell onto our property, narrowly missing the house. Our neighbor owns the adjacent 60 acres and several hundred additional acres in the Chapel Hill area. More on him later.

Weather.com carries these little pictures of “projected hurricane paths”, which attempt to narrow down what is possible to what is more likely. We obsess over these images, hoping to create a better scenario by force of will alone. Yet, as we watch Isabel’s steady march across the Atlantic, we realize we are completely at the mercy of the prevailing atmospheric pressure systems and the dynamics of their interaction. The hurricane simply goes where it’s told in a language we poor humans cannot fully understand.

The Neighbor The above mentioned tree-deprived neighbor stopped by the home site while Young and I were there. He was carrying a pair of binoculars and seemed angry about something. He had driven across his pasture in a pickup truck and was standing on a small knoll that separates his land from ours. We started some small talk when he launched into a tirade on how the builders had placed some of the building materials from our property onto his land and how they should be more careful. We promised to let the builder know, quietly thinking, “Oh boy, our neighbor is an old farmer with a major chip on his shoulder”.

It is dusk and the deer are on the move around Chapel Hill. A herd of 20-30 glides out from the forest onto our neighbors pastureland. He is instantly alert and whips the binoculars up.

“There he is!” he cries. “I’ve been after that big one for two years, and tonight he’s dinner!” He then goes on to explain to us that he never buys meat from the supermarket. “Tasteless” he says. He then takes his leave of us and drives off. About 10 minutes later we hear a tremendous blast like a howitzer going off. This is the sound of dinner being acquired. Now we think, “Oh boy, our neighbor is an old farmer with a major chip on his shoulder — and a BIG GUN”.

More Stephanie Stephanie was beginning to learn about Jim Thorp at school. I explained that his records were expunged and medals returned after it was thought he had accepted money as an amateur. Stephanie says, “…and then they burned his medals and scattered the ashes to the wind?”

I see she has passed the test on ‘harsh and brutal’ and can only hope she leaves space for ‘kind and loving’; poised between reality and dreams.

Stephanie caught a cold last week and was fairly sick. A lady of extremes, Stephanie immediately begins to imagine the worst.

She tells Young, “Don’t remember me, Mommy, I want you to be happy”. “Forget about me”, Stephanie tells her bemused mother.

Home-life As we go about the business of equipping our new home, we run into just about every type of person imaginable, working in all the crafts that surround the home building business. There’s Tim the carpenter and Vince the electrician and Bobby the builder and Stan the plumber and Vicki the flooring specialist and Art the mason who is 77 years old, and Dennis the trim guy and Tom the cabinet guy and Cameron the audio guy and Bill the granite guy and Roger the roofer and Michelle the lights lady, and even Jeff the building company owner.

We visited Michelle the lights lady at her store over in Chatham County. As we spoke in the arcane lingo of sconces and indirect lighting and down rods, I noticed a small girl toddler, no more than two years old, wandering the store. Every once in a while Michelle would look up and say, “Don’t touch that Alisha” or “watch your head Alisha”. I thought it odd that such a small child would be allowed to roam freely in a store with so many shiny, expensive and eminently breakable things. But Alisha mostly just gazed with eyes as round as saucers upon her shimmering, sparkling friends, resisting as best she could their siren call.

“That’s my little trooper”, Michelle says.

“She’s got cancer”, she adds in a soft voice, like swans in flight. There is no sadness here, only love and strength and hope.

Sonata in Life Major Remember when you played Frisbee on a clear, untroubled day? When all your past regrets, folded and forgotten, spun on that simple plastic toy? Sometimes the disk would catch the wind just so, and rise over your head in defiance of gravity, the camera catching the wonder in your eyes. Then the Frisbee would begin to tilt and slide away, gathering speed in its arc to earth. We think we have it but it accelerates away leaving us to weigh our shortcomings in laughing disappointment.

In simple acts there is redemption.

Now and then I think about the little girl with the big disease, walking around in a sea of lights, protected in the glow, hands searching upward.

Reach up without fear, she tells us, reach up without fear.