Shadow
There's a line from “Strawberry Fields” that goes like this, “It’s getting hard to be someone, but it all works out.” I missed a possum on Needle Street, right between Marais and St. Claude. I meant to go back, to plant him, to offer some kind of tree. Then life. Then movement. Then popping roots at the school and wondering which ones might be strong enough to support the tree.
I cut a dark green satsuma in half this morning. It was nowhere near ripe and yet the juice was nice, a cross between a lemon and an orange. And I remember now, running like a wild man around Khao San Road in Bangkok. That was twenty years ago. I no longer know that man. It’s hard for me to believe I was that man, and yet there is still a part of me that is him.
I don’t always know where I’m going. I get excited in moments. Those days in Bangkok, I remember the calamondin fruit. I remember the way old ladies crushed these green balls in juicers and added sugar cane juice. When the sun came up early enough and I was that sun, there was something special about the way I got to convene with the pigeons.
This still gives me solace in the mornings, when I sit by my back window and there is no thought save for the cardinals that come, for the way they turn their heads sideways to make sure I am okay. Even though they know me by now there is something built into them that needs to feel safe. And so though I would never harm them, I sit still. I do not move. I try to let them be, for this is the only way to show my love in these moments.
The babies, those born somewhere on this land to Cardinal Red and Crazy Cardinal Gray, in between her banging her head at her own reflection and him sitting on a higher branch to make sure she is safe to eat, their babies, they come for the strawberry guava, right outside this writing window.
I see more than seeds. I see my own death. I see children I have never met. I see sidewalks lined with fruit and these children eating to their heart's delight, and in this will come the end of the night. I believe it is the Jews who say that once your name is no longer spoken, that is when you are truly gone.
A writer told me this afternoon that she has realized, and I realized this too, traveling across the United States, that she is the only one who can write from her point of view. I am the only one who can tell these stories and yet I am also the one who decides what to include and exclude, and sometimes I forget, and sometimes I want to impress, and sometimes I want to relate with the rest of humanity.
Take now for instance. For the last seven minutes I have wanted to tell you about how surprised I was for how many guava are in a pound. The delight of these things should make them 99 dollars each and instead you can get six or eight for ten bucks. Sure you can go to Hong Kong Market and get guava the size of baseballs, but these are hard, not yet ripe. The guava that come from my hands are divine, juicy and yellow inside.
Years ago, nothing had a name. Years ago, we ate the marrow of bones left behind by the dinosaurs, and years ago we existed in the middle of the food chain. And in the middle of the food chain, our brains needed to function in a way that everything we faced needed to be assessed as safe or unsafe.
That trait is still in Cardinal Red. And Cardinal Gray. That trait is still in me. And in you. It is why we sometimes run. It is why we sometimes shut down.
In these moments, what if a black bee is the greatest gift? In these moments, when the clouds turn silver and the rain does not yet know she is coming there is a chance to reach out and grab the moment, even a chance to remember the laughing gulls, those white birds with black beaks, those birds you might sometimes see at the beach.
I remember them in the street, in front of my house, when I would bring home sausage biscuits that the students did not eat. I remember how they came, aware of the chickens and sparrows, cavorting with starlings, all of these birds came and ate and I got to sit and watch. And this, my love, it was everything.
