July 31 2026: “The Girl,” Struggles, “Rafter”

Yes, I am still alive.  I have received some messages from friends and acquaintances who were worried about me because I have been a non-presence for most of this month.  My only answer to the question “Where have you been?” is simply that I needed a break.  So perhaps I should have titled this post “What I Did on My Summer Vacation.”

When I was a kid, the months of June, July, and August were my favorite.  No homework or studying.  A relaxation of strict bedtimes and curfews.  Just endless days and nights moving at the pace of a glacier.  As you get older, I think time has a way of speeding up.  When you’re born, you’re a ball balanced at the top of a hill.  With your first breath, you start rolling, slowly at first, imperceptibly.  As hours, days, weeks, months, and years go by, you pick up speed as the hill becomes steeper and steeper.  I’m so far away from the top of that hill now that it’s barely visible.  Like the top of Mount Everest seen from India.

Marie Howe writes about her childhood . . . 

The Girl

by: Marie Howe

So close to the end of my childbearing life

without children

—if I could remember a day when I was utterly a girl

and not yet a woman—

but I don’t think there was a day like that for me.

When I look at the girl I was, dripping in her bathing suit,

or riding her bike, pumping hard down the newly paved street,

she wears a furtive look—

and even if I could go back in time to her as me, the age I am now

she would never come into my arms

without believing that I wanted something.

Adulting kind of sucks at times.  When you’re childing, you don’t (or shouldn’t) have things like car payments or mortgages or addictions or grief weighing you down.  Perhaps that’s why summer vacations seemed to last for eons when I was a boy—time just stops when your only worry is whether the ice cream truck will come by.  Like Howe, I don’t think my younger self would want anything to do with my older self.  I’ve become the grumpy guy who doesn’t want people walking on his lawn.

The biggish adult thing I’ve been struggling with in the last month or so is sadness.  My sister Sally’s birthday was July 17.  She died on August 19.  Since her passing, during this timeframe every year, I always feel heavy.  Some years, the heaviness descends, and I don’t even realize why I’m feeling low.  Like my body and unconscious mind are aware of it before the rest of me catches up.

I finally realized about four or five days ago that I’m in the midst of this heaviness.  Then everything made sense to me.  As a kid, I didn’t experience a whole lot of real loss.  Some older relatives, sure, but grief stayed away from my immediate family until around 2014, when my brother died.  For a clan as big as mine (nine siblings in total, including myself), we were lucky, I think.  Statistically, we should have experienced  death a lot sooner than that.

But death has been with me for a long time.  I was a strange kid.  From a very young age (like 12 or 13), I’ve had my funeral planned out, from the songs to the eulogies.  I’ve kept that practice up, updating the plans over time.  Maybe that’s why I became a poet?  Just sayin’.

This morning, I’ve been dealing with another adulting thing—a plugged sewer.  I have a couple guys here who are currently cabling the sewer line.  I think they’ve got it unplugged, but now I’m waiting to see how much it’s going to cost me.  That’s the kind of shit (literally) old people deal with all the time, and that’s why I’m going to reiterate:  adulting kind of sucks.  

As a kid, I never had to worry about plugged drains or busted toilets or brake jobs on cars.  In summer, I just threw on shorts, wolfed down breakfast, and headed out the door until sunset.  So much simpler and easier.  I let my mom and dad take care of business while I got into stupid, adolescent mischief.  I never realized how good I had it.

Nowadays, when I open my phone, I run across obituaries of high school classmates on my Facebook feed.  This happened one morning a few days ago.  I found out that a really good guy with whom I graduated passed away after a short cancer battle.  I just sat there, looking at his picture on my phone screen.  It was a moment of adulting colliding with childing.  Remembering us as teenagers, only worried about how to score some beer or weed, versus us as adults, constantly worried about discolored moles and weird abdominal pains.  

That’s what I’ve been dealing with this last month.  Lots existential angst.

Earlier this week, dropping my wife off at work, I encountered a brood of wild turkeys on the side of the road.  I pulled over and watched them for a little while.  A friend once told me that turkeys represent coming abundance and wealth.

Saint Marty would settle for peace of mind and an ice cream sandwich.

Rafter

by: Martin Achatz

What does a flock of turkeys in the wood

portend?  Some say the toms and hens foretell—

all plump and regal, each a plumed god—

a coming fortune, gold and pearls to quell

the hungry tongues of want and jealousy.

You press your starved lips to maple trunk

to slurp its sugared blood so greedily

your belly swells with sweet thanksgiving, drunk

enough to swing a psalm or write a poem

to waddles, claws, and snoods, to oracles

of seed and grub and acorn.  Ancient Rome

had Juno’s peacocks, Neptune’s salt-soaked gulls.

I have a gobbler host in this wild space,

to peck and scratch and preen in feathered grace.

February 16, 2025: "Size and Sheer Will," Peter Pan, "Hide and Seek"

I remember seeing Walt Disney's Peter Pan as a kid.  (Yes, I know, I know.  The depictions of Indigenous stereotypes in that film are very problematic, but I was a kid and white and male.  I had the world in the palm of my little hand.)  Peter says at one point, "Go on! Go back and grow up! But I’m warning you, once you’re grown up you can never come back.”  That line terrified me.  Growing up was scary, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it.

Sharon Olds writes about her son's rush to grow up . . . 

Size and Sheer Will

by: Sharon Olds

The fine, green pajama cotton,
washed so often it is paper-thin and
iridescent, has split like a sheath
and the glossy white naked bulbs of
our son's toes thrust forth like crocus
this early Spring. The boy is growing
as fast as he can, elongated
wrist dangled, lean meat
showing between the shirt and the belt.
If there were a rack to stretch himself, he would
strap his slight body to it.
If there were a machine to enter,
skip the next ten years and be
sixteen immediately, this boy would
do it. All day long, he cranes his
neck, like a plant in the dark with a single
light above it, or a sailor under
tons of green water, longing
for the surface, for his rightful life.

Olds touches upon one of the great mysteries of being a kid:  that insatiable hunger to be an adult.  Her son wants to hop in the DeLorean and travel to his sixteenth year.  No passing "Go."  No collecting your $200.

Now well into my adulthood (my son says I'm ancient), I still don't understand young people rushing to join the "real" world.  If they haven't looked around recently, the real world kinda sucks.  Why would you give up curfews and homework and summer recess for taxes and colonoscopies and timeclocks?  It's not really a good trade.

I'm with Peter Pan on this one.  If I could purchase a condo in Neverland, I would.  I don't want to pay to get the brakes on my car fixed.  Just sprinkle some of Tink's pixie dust on me, and let me soar around Big Ben.  Sure, kids have their own brands of hardship, and sometimes adult problems impinge on the boundaries of Neverland, but, overall, kidding is a lot more fun than adulting.  Adulting sucks.

Sure, I can stay up as late as I want.  Drink alcohol to excess legally.  Smoke weed until the neighborhood smells like a skunk sanctuary.  But I still have to get up in the morning and go to work for eight or nine or ten hours in order to pay the mortgage and put gas in my car.  Remember those dinners that miraculously appeared on the table when you got home?  You have to cook those dinners yourself now.  And set the table.  And wash the dishes.

I think you're seeing my point now.  Hold onto your inner child as long as you can.  You'll have plenty of time to practice for death later.  

Saint Marty wrote a poem inspired by Peter Pan for tonight, based on the following prompt from The Daily Poet:  

Begin writing a poem about your shadow, but don't stop there.  Describe the shadows of what you see around you:  robins, sheds, skyscrapers, park benches, soda pop cans.  If you want, take it a step farther, describing the shadow your father casts upon you or your shadow self.

Hide and Seek

by: Martin Achatz

I once lost my shadow

when I was a kid.

One second, it was

hot on my heels

as I ran down

an alley, the next,

it had vanished

like a snowflake

on an eyelash.

I searched for days,

under maple

canopies, in closets.

I opened cupboards,

crammed my face

into the darkest

places I could 

find, thinking 

shadow called

to shadow.  

I even looked

in my dad's 

underwear drawer

because I knew

he kept his shadow

in there at night,

folded like a pair

of socks beside

his Fruit of the Looms.

My shadow was

nowhere to be

found.  I'd almost

given up

when my mother

handed me my

laundry to be put

away, and there 

it was, washed,

ironed, and dark.

The afternoon sun

was still bright,

so my shadow

and I went

to the beach together,

waded the shallows

where phantoms

of minnows

swarmed, nibbled

our toes.

Art by Kristina Craig