Wild Pages is an exercise that students in the Beautiful Lies/Beautiful Truths writing class took on each week. Instructions are simple: Fill up 7-10 pages on any topics you choose. Write fast. Don’t go back and edit or correct. Just keep the words flowing. Here are some of the gems Gregory created. Enjoy!
The lilting phrases of the electric piano jazz against the rhythm of the drums and bass. Classic piano/bass/drums trio with a Latin twist; feels like everything is just fine. Toe tapping and then the change to cool sweet slow brings an Ah! And I feel like swaying. Just enough dissonance peppered into the mix to titilate a random connection or two. I’ve been down this path many times: The Bill Evans Trio. When I was trying to learn piano jazz in junior high Bill was my principal inspiration, my main squeeze. Waltz for Debby filled my idle hours. No, I couldn’t listen while doing homework or reading or playing games. Empty it out, drop everything and just let it in.
Why did he have to take drugs? So many of us getting lost in induced creative clarity, eventually unable to climb out of the collapsing hole. 1970 and I’m putting speakers next to my ears as I lie on the living room rug. Mom looks askance but I’m in jazzland and she only partly gets it. “Too much Frank and Bing, she can’t quite escape the swing.” My head fills and floats free down the river in my mind, timeless and lazy. Great music does that, launching journeys through the ebb and flow of life.
I’m not really a cat person. What’s the point? They’re not team players. Oh, sure, they are soft, cuddly, and that purr, so ca;ming. I get all that. Even their playfulness. We once had a yellow tabby eponymously named Harry that would chas a little blob of cloth tied to a string on a stick. You could tease Harry for hours with that contraption. But Harry wasn’t a friend, really. He mostly ignored us, lounging with abandon on Mom’s stuffed rocker with the green floral pattern that she would knit in or watch the news from. He left his hairyness everywhere. He was not particularly picky regarding food, but nevertheless he preferred tuna and chicken to anything else. We made other offerings, but after a few bites he would meow for the staples. By way of us living next door to bird lovers, Harry became a house cat, barred from the great outdoors, which he bemoaned at first but eventually lost interest in. That left him with only one way to get his instincts to hunt satisfied: catching mice. He was good at it I guess because the only evidence of mice in our house were the “treats” he left us in the night – mostly-dead mice writhing in agony. That was one check against him in my book. “Finish the job, buddy! This ain’t no torture fair!”
I get asked to write things often enough. Wedding and birthday cards, thank yous and condolences and the odd poem or explanation of something I know about. As a physics instructor I also wrote many a letter of recommendation for students. Generally tongue-tied in conversations, writing is easier. But the knack of really connecting with the reader seems to be more difficult. Physics lectures are easy – often repeated and well-honed. It’s writing with emotional impact that eludes me. Just saying “sorry to hear of your loss. I’m here if you want to talk or need a hug or a shoulder to cry on,” seems perfunctory, Hallmark.Times I have been on the receiving end of those words they seem hollow.But I guess I gotta say, the fact that the person said them did mean something to me.
We all mastered gravity in the first two years of our life. It’s ingrained in us, you don’t have to think about what will happen if you drop the ball, it finds its way to the floor as quick as that. You don’t fall over when you stand up unless you’ve had a bit too much to drinkor an external force acts upon you that is larger than the internal forces you use to keep yourself upright. That’s right. You use a lot of muscles to hold your body vertical, to stand on the soles of your feet. Every step you take you push the ground away from you. And you must balance on that foot until the other leg swings your other foot into place to support your weight. Then the process repeats ad infinitum and we call that walking. Some people can even chew gum at the same time.
Let’s go back to that “pushing the ground away from you” statement. If you were to do that with both legs at the same time we call that jumping. I don’t know about you, but I have a standing jump of about 18”. I used to jump higher – I used to be younger. Most of us have heard that there is less gravity on the Moon. For later, there’s just as much gravity but because there is less Moon mass, one sixth, the same force I would use to jump 18” on Earth would lift me six times higher on the Moon. That’s 108” or nine feet.
So now, imagine that separationists have worked out a way to build a force field around Mt. Rainier and blast it into space with rockets. Once out in space the force field fails and they all die and it becomes an asteroid orbiting the sun. You are on a mission to reclaim Asteroid Rainier. After successfully landing on the surface you go for walk and since you need to stretch your legs you do a few jumping jacks. On Earth those same jumping jacks would lift you only about 6” off the ground. How far above the surface do you jump on Asteroid Rainier? A few approximations must be made to work it out but it comes to approximately one thousand times less gravity force so that a 6” jump on Earth would push you away from Asteroid Rainier 1000 times farther or about 6000” or 500 feet.
I watched a black bear forage for food up in Spray Park on Mt. Rainier yesterday. The bear ‘s fur glistened in the sunlight with brown highlights and appeared very thick and healthy. Preparing for winter, seeking out grubs and other insects. Berries long gone. Perhaps a stray rodent would come his way. He or she, no way for me to tell, ambled here and there sniffing and pawing the ground cover snapping up whatever it found. Unconcerned with us, it eventually wandered into a copse of evergreens and we moved on.
While filtering water for our campsite at a stream crossing the trail, a man came down the trail with a woman on her back. I assumed she was his girlfriend but as it turned out, she had broken her ankle somewhere up the trail and the man was graciously carrying a stranger out of the woods. The expression on the woman’s face was one of extreme pain mingled with fear and a kind of defeat. Luckily the man was young and fit enough to possibly make it the 2 miles to the trailhead. It was a heroic act and caused me to re-assess my preparedness for just such an emergency.
Climbing out of my tent in the middle of the night, the stars glowed jewel-like in the cold mountain air. Tall firs and hemlocks obscured the open sky but there were yet the telltale signs of Orion’s belt and the Pleiades, old friends from a childhood filled with nights sleeping in the backyard. Moving a step or two in any direction changed the view completely. There was an unknown planet. It’s brightness and placement telling me that it belonged to no constellation, but a wanderer. The puzzle of the ancients futilely attempting to divine a pattern slash motive for their errant motion. That they all followed the zodiacal path and crisscrossed each other was at once a clue and a deeper enigma. Magic? Perhaps some combination of spheres rotating around us, each with a planet on it, each with its own motion. In the second century AD, Ptolemy came up with an ingenious convoluted scheme using such mechanisms. An elegant if not completely false system, it would stand for centuries as the best of all possible theories. Ptolemy’s work would eventually fall to the Renaissance astronomers Kepler and Brahe, who uncovered the deliciously simple truth of elliptical orbits for the planets. A feat of imaginative courage, for there was not much that could support it except the observational facts that that was exactly what it was. It would be left to Newton in the next century to tease out the mechanics of the gravitational force that bound the solar system together, that ,based on rigorous mathematical foundations, demanded elliptical orbits. Not only was the ellipse vindicated, but the scale of the solar system was now in sight. Simple experiments were able to place the planets at appropriate and vast distances from the Sun.
Is it common to make new friends after 70? I think I want some, but life has become so focused around the rituals of daily life and the need for personal space that I settle for social gatherings of various sorts and even then find my social graces have become even more stunted than I grew up with.