February 29: "Random," Leap Day, Control Freak

Billy Collins plays darts . . . 

Random

by:  Billy Collins

Tossing a dart

at an open encyclopedia,

I happen to hit a flying squirrel.

Their kind, the entry explains,

as I close in,

are seldom seen

due to their nocturnal habits

and high dwelling places.

So much there to admire!

It isn't easy to find something interesting to write about on a daily basis.  It often feels like throwing darts at an open encyclopedia, as Collins does in this poem.  He ends up writing about flying squirrels.  Tonight, my dart has landed on leap day.  

In my time on this planet, I have lived through 14 leap days.  (Yes, you can now figure out how old I am, which is right between "ouch" and "boing!")  I know some people who take this gift of extra time very seriously.  They make a point of leaping every February 29th--doing something they have never done before.  Sky diving.  Oil painting.  Cake decorating.  Distance running.  Poetry writing.  

I've never really taken a leap of faith like that, and I'm not about to start today.  I'm a creature of habit and routine.  Purposely upsetting the applecart of my life is not a practice I enjoy.  Perhaps its a matter of control.  Translation:  I'm a control freak.  I eat the same breakfast every day.  (I'm also an insulin-dependent diabetic, so that helps me control my blood sugars.)  I watch the same movie for weeks on end.  Read the same poems over and over and over.  Know what I'm having for dinner tomorrow night and the night after that.

About the only leap I will make today is into my pajamas.  I've reached the age where a good night is sitting on my couch in my PJs, eating a bowl of Special K, and watching Netflix.  I'm still a night owl.  Have been most of my life.  Falling asleep before 1 a.m.--now that would be a leap for me.

I have friends who do crazy shit all the time--ski jumping, ultramarathoning, voting for Donald Trump.  Perhaps those same friends think that writing poetry is crazy shit.  Maybe it's all relative--one person's leap is another person's everyday.

Saint Marty hopes the next time he throws his dart at an encyclopedia it lands on "nap."

April 29: Delousing Station, Creature of Habit, Tight Times

Billy and the rest were wooed through gate after gate, and Billy saw his first Russian.  The man was all alone in the night--a ragbag with a round, flat face that glowed like a radium dial.

Billy passed within a year of him.  There was barbed wire between them.  The Russian did not wave or speak, but he looked directly into Billy's soul with sweet hopefulness, as though Billy might have good news for him--news he might be too stupid to understand, but good news all the same.  

Billy blacked out as he walked through gate after gate.  He came to in what he thought might be a building on Tralfamadore.  It was shrilly lit and lined with white tiles.  It was on Earth, though.  It was a delousing station through which all new prisoners had to pass.

Billy did as he was told, took off his clothes.  That was the first thing they told him to do on Tralfamadore, too.

A German measured Billy's upper right arm with his thumb and forefinger, asked a companion what sort of an army would send a weakling like that to the front.  They looked at the other American bodies now, pointed out a lot more that were nearly as bad as Billy's.

Another lengthy section from Slaughterhouse.  Billy being herded through the prison camp with other American prisoners, toward a delousing station.  Now, Billy knows he's going to survive.  In fact, he has already survived, gotten married, become a father, and been abducted by aliens.  Certainly, he also has knowledge of concentration camps and the Holocaust.  Yet, this delousing station is frightening.  It could be a gas chamber.  In description, it certainly fits the bill.  The shadow of genocide looms in this passage.

I have written about Billy's unique perspective on time before.  The fact that the past, present, and future are fairly liquid states for him.  Yesterday he was born.  This morning, he's a German POW.  This afternoon, he may die.  Tomorrow morning, he'll be seeing patients in his office.  Billy doesn't fear death or tragedy.  He's not going to die in a German gas chamber.  Billy already knows what has, is, and will happen.

I have never been a big fan of uncertainty, as many of my faithful disciples know.  I am a creature of habit, embrace daily sameness.  When a new school semester starts, I quickly work to establish a schedule for my days and weeks.  Having two full-time jobs sort of requires ruts, tire tracks that I can follow easily for a few months.  And it's comforting to know where I have to be next Monday morning at 6 a.m., when I have to teach on Wednesday, what my office hours are on Tuesday.

Soon, I will be establishing a new daily schedule for myself.  The winter semester is coming to an end, and I'll be transitioning into summer mode.  No teaching.  Early work days.  Afternoons of relative freedom.  Time to read what I want, without having to grade it for grammar and organization.  And, of course, the loss of a teaching income for four months.  Tight times for this saint's household.

However I will enjoy the warmth and sun and relative calm.  Sure, about mid-July, the money worries will be piling up, and I will start counting down to that first paycheck from the university in August.

Right now, though, Saint Marty is thankful for the prospect of his summer rut, with all its hidden secrets in unlikely places.

May 24: Dirty Lice. Tornadoes, Temporal Disjunction

It's all I can do to stand.  I feel dizzy, drawn, mauled.  Below me the floodwater roils to a violent froth that looks like dirty lice, a lace that continuously explodes before my eyes.  If I look away, the earth moves backwards, rises and swells, from the fixing of my eyes at one spot against the motion of the flood.  All the familiar land looks as though it were not solid and real at all, but painted on a scroll like a backdrop, and that unrolled scroll has been shaken, so the earth sways and the air roars.

Dillard is talking about the effects of Hurricane Agnes on Tinker Creek.  Floodwater, walls of it, driving everything downstream.  Trees.  Bushes.  Chicken coops.  Dead horses.  Dillard finds it disorienting, her familiar landscape turned alien, rolling and unstable.

I had my own mini-version of the Tinker Creek flood this afternoon.  The Upper Peninsula of Michigan was assaulted with thunderstorms and tornadoes.  Now, this may not sound like anything unusually noteworthy to my two Constant Readers, but tornadoes are not normal occurrences in the U. P.  Our landscape isn't really conducive to tornadoes, thank goodness.  Blinding blizzards, yes.  Ice storms, certainly.  Twisters, however, belong in Kansas and Missouri.  Not in my little piece of rock jutting into Lake Superior and Lake Michigan.  

Yes, for a few hours, the world was a little disorienting, like Dillard's.  I ran an errand in the basement of the medical center where I work, and I found the entire lower level filled with evacuated patients and employees, waiting out the tornado warning.  Weird.  People were laughing, texting, and emitting funky scents.  I thought to myself, "This isn't an emergency.  It's an unexpected afternoon break."

I had an earlier disorienting experience, as well.  This morning, I worked for the first time at my new/old job for a couple of hours.  I hadn't slept well, was up three or four times during the night.  When I got to the medical center, I did something I hadn't done since my sister died:  I took the back stairs.  This may not sound earth-moving, but it was for me.

You see, my sister walked those stairs every weekday for close to twenty years.  Two flights up to the second floor, dressed in her scrubs, carrying her Diet Coke.  My sister was my boss at the surgery center for 17 years.  She was a creature of habit (like me).  She parked in the same spot every day, took the same route into the building every day.  Opened her office and turned on the light at the same time every day.

So, when I walked the stairs and walked through the doors of the surgery center, I had this moment of disconnection, as if I'd stepped back in time.  For a few seconds, I actually expected my sister to be sitting at her desk, looking over her glasses at me, telling me to get my ass to work.  It was only a few seconds of temporal disjunction, but it made me feel like I was . . . home.

I got to work.  Fell into a rhythm.  Started remembering things.  It was good.

Saint Marty is happy.  Mark this day on your calendar.