Baseball, Flowers, Beard

Attached is a picture that I took with my phone. The quality is low and the composition is rough. But it says a lot about the spring here in Syracuse for me this 2009. You’ll see the flowers which give the month away. Like a hiaku (in which one technically must mention a season), there is an allusion to this early tentative spring. Like the Indians, I can frame this period not by the mechanical techniques of a calendar, but by the flora or fauna that are expressed. I decided to go with flowers because if I went with animals like the Indians, I’d have to call it “moon of the smeary road kill corpse,” and that has little zing to it. So flowers it is.

These flowers (are they daisies?) were growing wild by the side of road where I commute. This is what they look like when you stop. Usually they are a tiny smeary field of white dots; usually I’m travelling at 70 mph. Today, though, I looked around at the bottom of the empty exit ramp and threw the car into reverse. I once knew a guy who liked to race his car in reverse, and he sort of scared me. But I was channeling him today as I expertly whipped my car up to nuzzle the curb (and the flowers). And I picked some. To hell with rushing.

To hell with rushing, he said. But he lies. He rushes where ever he goes. He even rushes when he sleeps. It is not healthy.

There is an innocent baseball there, partly because it by default in American culture stands for innocence (kids, moms, healthy competition, growing up, families, America, and summertime) and partly because that particular baseball has done nothing wrong. It did not participate in an bombing attack on cat or dog, nor was it smeared with a dab of vasiline to make the curve ball curve. So it’s clean. And it also reminds me of my kids’ baseball games, in which they stand for hours in the field or succeed or fail so very visibly and powerfully. It’s the summer of baseball, with both of them in it.

There is a picture of the building where I work for the Seven Valleys Writing Project, a wonderful place, and I like the wobbly, wavering quality to this picture, originally taken on an iPhone and sent to me, then printed at home and rendered in a picture I, in turn, took and posted here with my own cheapo phone. Something uncertain, something unusual about the image. It looks like memory would look if it were visible as it fades. It looks like the word "redolent" and "adumbration" together.

So that’s spring here. Sort of quiet, full of the holes that early spring leaves in the day, moments of quiet and reflection.

Love ya.

DF