friday, march 10, 41 a.b. ....
 

"two interstates diverged in a wood, and i -
i stood and watched the median strip,
and that has made all the difference...

well, along with all those people honking, of course."
 

a cold and cloudy day. calling it "ash friday" would be too cute by half and not quite accurate besides.  still, there is the taste of cinders about it; a day mostly to be endured and not embraced....

a distinct change from a couple days ago, but then march is like that.  a real tease, and an unself-conscious heartbreaker as well.  it used to be worse before i wrote it off in my mind a few years ago as a winter month that sometimes poses in heavy spring make-up that can just manage to hide its true nature when the light's just right.  even so, one cannot go from sunny blue skies and 80 degrees to cold and grey and flurries without feeling a bit time sick.  at least i can't.

but then i always have had to grasp the rail of a nice, firm calendar in order to pull my mind through even the calmest of seasons....

in any case, i'm not depressed.  no no no.  i just have a touch of marcholia.  i'm sure it'll run it's course soon enough....

while i'm waiting, i think i'll shake my head and see what falls out...

just to pass the time....
 
 

Guess the address - win a doll!



hmmmmm... see that dark hulking structure in the center?  that's where i used to live.  in a small apartment above what was first a hardware,  then a bar.  the earliest home i can remember, in fact, having lived there for the first 9 years of my life.

i snapped this picture on a whim while riding in the back seat of my brother-in-law's car back in 1979 or so - already some 12 years after i'd moved away....

a couple years after this picture was taken, a woman was shot to death in the bar i used to sleep above.  shortly after that, a kitchen grease fire destroyed everything else in the vicinity.  this is the only photo i have of the place.  it might well be the only photo anybody now has of it.  quite the unprofessional snapshot of an unremarkable urban mess, eh?  and yet when i look at it hard enough and long enough, i can sometimes catch a glimpse of bubble lights and magic eight balls....

the building beyond the dark hulking structure was once an a&p grocery.  the building this side of the hulk once housed a barbershop, an aluminum siding sales force,  and a tv repair.  before the corner of the block was demolished for a shell gas station, there was an italian restaurant and a drug store.  right around the corner was a bus stop, a shoe repair, a carry-out, a laundry, a dry cleaners, an upholstery shop, a beauty salon, a typewriter repair, and another bar.

for a short while there was even a costume shop with a huge gorilla outfit in the front window that i could stare at as long as i wanted - but ended up not staring at nearly long enough before it disappeared forever.

 "traveling" when i was a kid meant having to cross a street....

"really traveling" meant hopping on the bus for the 10 minute ride to downtown....

today i can get exactly nowhere on foot.  not even to a bus stop.  well, ok - there's my garage.  and i suppose if i really tried i could navigate our sidewalk-lacking road all the way to the funeral home a mile to our east, but really... if i ever have the need to go to a funeral home, i don't plan on walking....

*pausing to shake my head some more....*
 

two nights ago i got an unexpected call from someone who used to live a half a block but a world away from where the above photo was taken.  i haven't seen this person in almost 20 years, haven't heard from him at all in at least 14 years.  i have no idea why he tracked me down and called, but he did....

he's been married twice now, has lived everywhere from michigan to kentucky to alabama, and is father to 5 kids, the oldest 20 and in the air force.  for him, time and place seem to be coats to put on and take off as the weather of life warrants - no more, no less.  for me they are something else...  something far more essential... something that hypnotizes with its evaporation rate and astounds with its funhouse mirror-like reflectivity....

we are two very different people, with regard to time and place and much else besides.  i can't easily imagine anyone whose life views and goals are more different than my own.  in so many ways, he seems the anti-jester...  or at least the anti-dan....  a breeding, money-making, republican fundamentalist living in one of my least favorite states in the union - and apparently loving it.

what unsuspected reservoirs of personal charm do i have which can bridge so many years and so many different kinds of distance...?  what secret geologic processes of biography have caused our very divergent subterranean streams to reconnect once more...?
 

his father died a few years ago.  relearning this fact in the course of our conversation,  my mind drifted back to a time before anyone it had met had ever died.

i think i was 5 or 6 before i first felt that strange feeling which comes from knowing that a body i'd seen living and breathing with my very own eyes had been permanently transformed into something quite different for reasons far less than obvious.

i was over 30 before a blood relative i'd known died.

now, i try to list all the people i've met who have come and gone like phantoms in a dream and i stop after reaching 50.  it is too much like walking slowly into a deep ocean, knowing that there's no way to walk back out, knowing that the rising tide of names and dates will one day submerge my own little head entirely and my funny little gasps for air will be replaced with a forgetfulness that precludes the memory of my ever having breathed at all....
 

thank goodness marcholia comes just once a year or so.

next year i think i'll try to overcome my fear of needles and get vaccinated against it, all the same....
 
 

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