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!
Drifting in and out of sleep, thoughts shifting willy nilly one to another, breath shallow and slow, patiently awaiting the next inhale. I stopped drinking coffee a couple of months ago to improve the quality of my sleep life. No immediate effects detected, but over time two big changes have emerged. First, I’m knackered by 8:00 every night. Used to be afternoon naps kept me going throughout the evening. But the naps have disappeared as well. Without the morning caffeine, my body has found a new internal energy that powers me through the day but falls off like a step function at about 8. Second, I’ve always fallen asleep on a dime but have had issues staying asleep through the night. Now I sleep like a baby for at least 4 and a half hours then lie awake for quite some time just thinking about this and that, running through the plots of books and movies, the social dramas I’m privy to, the sporting events of the day, projects I have on several burners and gravity. Used to be I would try forcing myself back to sleep, but now I’m more relaxed about it and find the meanderings of my mind soothing. Time passes quickly and voile, morning arrives and I’m refreshed. I don’t even miss the coffee.
I try standing on one leg, barefoot on a rolled up towel. Studies indicate balance decreases with age and falling is more dangerous for older adults, often leading to a severely restricted physical life. I’m wanting to avoid that. Hence the towel under my foot. Wobbling like a bobble head, arms flailing, it might be that I fall over many times before the muscles figure out what exact pressures to put on each toe and heel to remain upright. Results have been scattered, some days are better than others.
Balance is the second step to walking for a child. The first is the strength to stand on one’s feet against the pull of gravity. Once the upright position is achieved, there remains the task of not toppling over forward, backward or sideways. Watch a child at this stage and you will notice them swaying in all directions. The child starts with a slightly wider than hip width stance thus facilitating balance side to side. Mostly they fall either forward or backward until they learn to keep the wobble within their “radius of gyration” determined by the distance their center of mass can shift sideways before the leg muscles can’t pull it back upright. This radius shrinks as the child develops the proprioception and strength necessary to maintain vertical. My efforts on the towel indicate my radius of gyration is larger than it used to be. I aim to fix that.
The cars roll silently by on the street outside my window. Drivers seen only as silhouetted profiles. Earlier ambient light gave clues to their identities, hunched shoulders here, a woman’s hairdo there. Now it’s just shadows. Later the headlights will come on and even the color and shape of the car will be too vague to decipher. Only the direction of travel, as the lights flicker in the window, sliding across the walls in the opposite direction of the car.
My earliest memory of a dream/nightmare was of my mother laying me down on a bed in a strange house while she and my father played cards with some of their friends. I was maybe three years old. Light from cars played across the walls and took on the shape of a train of boxcars going by. Then one of the boxcars stopped on the wall, it’s doors opened and ghostly figures reached out for me, bundled me up and took me into the boxcar. I began screaming for Mom to come and save me but when she opened the door she saw me still on the bed, told me to be quiet. I tried waving to her, tried to get her to see that the baby on the bed was not me, I was in the boxcar about to be taken away. She closed the door and went back to the card game. That’s it. To this day, 70 years later, the dream still haunts me.
We’ve gathered at Keith and Selma’s place on a hill with a west-facing view. A few wispy clouds threaten the view but, if fortune holds, the gaps between them will expose the comet we have all come to see. Internet searches told us to expect to see it around 45-60 minutes after sunset in the west southwest and just above the horizon. But that’s if you are in England at 40 degrees north latitude. We are not, and so must translate to our local time and place. A daunting task under any circumstances. Ah, but there is a marker in the skies for us to latch on to: Venus should be to the left of the comet. Armed with this information the position lies just between the two cloud layers noted earlier. Finger crossing allowed!
As it turns out,the comet appears to the right of Venus, but much higher in the sky than we would have expected. And nearly half an hour later than we thought. But lo and behold, thar she blows, just bright enough to make out with the naked eye if you squint properly, a skill which all amateur stargazers are well-practiced in. Donning binoculars provides a most gratifying sight, the hazy head of the comet with a long tail streaming out at about 11:00, if you were looking at a clock. I’m in awe. Here is a visitor to our skies from significantly far away, far enough that the time it took to travel here is measured in centuries. And unlike other comets with shorter orbital periods, this one won’t be back for thousands of years, if ever. Flabbergasting just thinking about it.
I enjoy a weekly friendly game of poker with a few retired guys not unlike myself. The game itself has been on for over 40 years. I’m the newbie, and the youngest, having come aboard only 5 years ago. Fine with me. There was a steep learning curve in the beginning – I lost over $80 in one night two separate times. Now, I’m pretty steady at anywhere from $20 down to $20 up for a pleasant evening. Last week I brought home $5.50. Sadly, the game requires five living humans and the last several years have seen large attrition rates in our roster. Putting a game together means five of the six of us most be in town, healthy, and available. We miss a few weeks here and there.
We had the first fire of the season last night. Kind of chilly and with the coming rain I felt the need to keep the dampness at bay. Wood heat. The stove radiates heat slowly and evenly throughout the house. No noisy blowers from the heat pump pushing hot air around only to have it cool off as soon as it gets warm. The wood stove has a lot of “inertia.” That’s a fancy physics word for “once it gets hot it stays hot.” Longer, at least. Smooth heat. And it smells good too. And not just because we threw old chicken bones and fat in there all summer long. It doesn’t take much wood to get the house warm.
My oh my! During a road trip to the Southwest last year, we stopped for lunch in the tiny Arizona town of Bisbee, a haven for artists near the Mexican border. The wonderful crowded diner we ate at had a luscious coconut pie for dessert, not quite a custard pie not quite a cream pie, something in the middle and just right. Enamored, Betsie has since scoured the internet for recipes to match what she remembers. I don’t know where she found it, but the search paid off in spades and now we enjoy that pie as the desire strikes, and it struck over the weekend during the comet watch. Meaning to share it with the other watchers on Sunday night, she left it in my care to transport it since she would not be attending. I invited myself to dinner with the folks on the hill where we would wait for the comet. In a senior moment of grand proportions, I forgot to bring the pie, forgot even that there was a pie. But Selma and Keith had not forgotten. No, they had it clearly in their minds that dessert would be pie.
Someone gave Kai a cheap yo-yo. He’s almost four, so a weight on a string is pretty cool in and of itself. Betsie asked me to show him how it worked. I had once been fairly good with a yo-yo so I wound it up and after a few attempts managed to make it go down and come back up. Kai’s eyes lit up. He wanted to try. So I wound it up for him, showed him how to put the string on his finger and demonstrated how to quickly roll it off his hand. He opened his palm and let it fall sideways, looking at me the whole time. I saw right away that this was a dead end. Too complicated, too young. Finding that balance with kids between helping them grow and and learn new things and frustrating them with something too complicated. I have walked that line too many times and now am reluctant to cross it. Better to let the kid explore their own edge of ability. Less likely to overstep their developmental stage. We tend to push them into more than they are ready for. Helping them grow up maybe too early. Part of a vicarious urge to relive our own childhoods and yet we want them to remain childlike on into adulthood, once again to live vicariously through them. Perhaps she’s a queen in a fairy tale dream, but her eyes fill my eyes with love.
Who knew carrots would turn bitter when in cold storage with apples and pears? Was this a problem for homesteaders with root cellars?
Picture yourself on a trampoline with a baseball in your left hand. Begin bouncing up and down. When you reach the apex of your next bounce have your left arm out in front of you, palm facing down ready to drop the ball. Just after the apex, when you are starting to come down, release the ball and watch it. What motion does it have relative to you? To the Earth? If done correctly, the ball should stay right where you let go of it – below your hand. As seen by someone on the ground, both you and the ball will fall at the same speed. More precisely, both you and the ball will accelerate at the same rate toward the ground, moving faster and faster until the trampoline interferes with your downward motion as your feet touch the mat. As the springs stretch under the force of your weight they apply an increasingly stronger upward force on your feet until you have slowed down to a stop at maximum spring extension. The springs then begin to contract, creating enough force to push you back into the air. Similar to full deep breaths, the inhale fills the lungs, a bit like a balloon being filled with air. The elastic stretchy force of the balloon forces the air out if you let it, just like the expansion of the lungs causes a pressure to build up which you can release by exhaling. Most of us just let the breath go to wherever it no longer wants out on its own then begin a new inhalation. Practitioners of breathing exercises work to extend the exhale, forcing leftover air out of the lungs thus creating more space for air and increasing their lung capacity. The breath can be seen as a swinging door, inhaling to open in one direction, exhaling to open in the other direction. The point at which the door is closed is never static, always passing through. This limited analogy ignores our natural breath, cultivated through decades of inattention, focusing instead on the possibilities of increased vitality through a concentrated effort to deepen the natural breath.
A colleague from my teaching days was telling me about a family project during his teen years – building a telescope from parts. The project took two years, grinding silvering the mirror, building a suitable tube and mount, and purchasing eyepieces. After completion they turned it toward the sky and focused it on Saturn, the ringed planet, and sure enough, there it was! Rather there they were, the rings, resplendent and ghostly. Not a fiction perpetrated by conspiracy scientists. Not a fantasy dreamed up by early astronomers with out of focus lenses. Nope, this was the real deal. Next came the moons of Jupiter that got Galileo in so much hot water with the Church. Yes. The Andromeda galaxy. Tougher to find but , Yes! The phases of Venus, Hercules’s globular cluster, the list went on. Surprisingly, my friend went on to become a mathematics major and not an astronomer.
Boom! went the cannons. Boom! Boom! yet again. Boom, boom! as the fireworks dazzled in the sky. Take heart my little laddies the wolf is in the glen and he won’t be out this evening as he cowers in his den.
The witch hazel, stunning in its fall reddish purplish browns, reclines for the winter, tucked away beneath the drooping boughs of a Douglas fir. A few sparrows dart through the branches, playing hide and seek with me. Masters of landing on twigs just out of sight behind a branch or leaf. I’m not your enemy, I say to myself. But it’s a slippery slope for a small songbird to become accustomed to being plainly visible. Predators abound, from feral cats to hawks and other opportunistic mammals. No sense inviting disaster. Still, I dream of a random wink from a common yellowthroat as it perches coyly on a branch not ten feet away. Some slightly larger birds lack this shyness – jays and robins and blackbirds for example – but quickly scatter when approached, perching tauntingly nearby in plain view and hurling insults at me, the invader, the potential threat. Sigh.