Acts of Kindness
I have to admit
It was kind of strange
for me to be hunched
at the edge of the lawn
like that…
On a Wednesday morning
After a Tuesday night-before
In a neighbourhood where
every sunrise-after
lulls the Land of Suburbanites
Into their becalmed state
Of being.
Of wakefulness.
It should not have surprised me
when a Good Samaritan approached
His footsteps cause for alarm!
I mean, what could I say?
“Just a minor heart attack.
The merest constriction of the chest
A barely measurable acceleration of pulse…
No need for an ambulance.”
What other excuse could I invent
that wouldn’t besmirch my reputation?
Why else would I be staring
into the dirt, beneath the parted blades of grass
As if I could see something down there,
couched in layers of smothering soil
waiting to be discovered by archeology
Even through the final act…
The ceaseless progress of decomposition.
“You okay?” he said
Summoning me to the brink…
To my moment of truth…
I could not tell a lie… could I?
Couldn’t make up something
that would make sense
of my peculiarities.
“Just watching a worm,” I said.
“Burrowing into the earth…”
“Found him on the sidewalk…”
“They always do that when it rains…”
He looked at me as if
I might have been another species…
Or the long-lost member of an extinct tribe.
“Feast for the robins.” he might have hinted.
And who was I to argue?
Playing at God,
Absolving myself
of the inevitable sins
we’re committed to
By being alive?
CraigSpenceWriter.ca
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Ptero was going about his business one evening, searching for nuts, berries and tasty insects to eat, when – whoosh – Bubo, the owl swept down and snatched him up in her talons.
He struggled and squirmed, but she held him fast in her powerful grip, and he knew he could not survive long. He had to think quickly if he was ever to see his nest again.
‘Bubo!’ he gasped. ‘Bubo, why would you bother eating a scrawny little squirrel like me. Winter has just ended, and I’m not much more than a skeleton right now. Let me go, and I promise to return to the very branch you snatched me from in three month’s time. Then I will be plump and delicious, and make a mouthful… er, a beakful.’
Because squirrels always keep their word, Bubo agreed to Ptero’s request, and returned on the appointed evening to find his prey, plump and well-fed, on the same branch where they’d first met. Bubo swooped down and carried him off again.
‘Bubo,’ Ptero pleaded this time. ‘Why would you tear me to pieces and eat me up now, when it is the season I am preparing to make many meals for you?’
‘Explain yourself, and be quick about it, for I am hungry,’ Bubo demanded.
‘It’s springtime, and I must mate. Soon there will be many of me scampering amongst the branches for you to catch and eat. Three more months, and I promise to return so you can me carry off a third time. But by then there will be many more like me for you to feast on.’
To Bubo this made good sense, so he returned Ptero to their favourite branch. ‘I shall see you in three months my little friend, then – sadly – I will have to gobble you up, for that is my nature,’ she said as she flew off.
So Ptero met a mate, and they had a family, and after the three months past he returned for Bubo to catch again.
‘What am I to say now,’ Ptero fretted, shivering with fright. He thought, and thought, but no new ideas came to him before Bubo glided silently overhead and snatched him up a third time.
‘So Ptero,’ the owl said as they flew away, ‘what reason are you going to give me tonight to keep me from my dinner?’
Ptero had nothing to offer, so he went limp in Bubo’s talons, closed his eyes, and prepared for his grisly fate.
‘Before I devour you, let me ask a question,’ Bubo said.
Eager to postpone what was surely coming, even for a heartbeat – and I can tell you, a squirrel’s heart beats very quickly when he is afraid – Ptero replied, ‘Please ask, and I will do my best to answer.’
‘What time of year is it, my scrumptious little friend?’
Now, to Ptero this seemed a silly question. But he pretended to be puzzled, and took as many wing beats as he possibly could to answer. ‘It is the season of long days and warm weather,’ he said at last.
‘Indeed,’ Bubo agreed. ‘It is also the season of abundance, is it not, when an owl can catch more food on a single night’s hunt than she could eat in a week.’
‘True,’ Ptero agreed.
‘And what season will arrive in three month’s time?’
‘Why that would be the season of falling leaves and withering fruit.’
‘So what might a wise owl do – and there is no such thing as an owl who-hoo-hoo isn’t wise – what might a wise owl do with a bit of prey, if her stomach and larder were already full, but winter was on its way?’
Ptero hesitated, fearful of making a guess. But he finally screwed up enough courage to say, ‘He might return a little squirrel to its branch and come back again in three month’s time, when his larder and belly will both be empty?’
‘Ah!’ Bubo hooted happily. ‘Excellent idea. Why, if you weren’t shaped like a plump little rodent, I might mistake you for one of my kind.’
And so for many seasons Ptero and Bubo have been getting together for their pleasant flights, and neither has figured out in all that time why one should eat the other. You could even say they’ve become good friends.
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This morning’s sun dawned on me, a bleed of light in the ambient air, impressing with its metaphor of glory.
And I asked: Is this the shining way… the path?
And I asked: How many dawns have bathed me in their blare of blinding light?
And I say: Dawning’s beyond conception.
I don’t remember my mother’s face, from that first day she held me swaddled in her arms. My earliest memories are assembled pastiches retrieved from jumbled collections, fading images in forgotten albums... Brothers, sister and me in defining moments picked from the scrabble of growing up... Growing old.
And I ask: Is this the past I wanted? My only possible inception?
And I say: Their love was good enough to endure a lifetime.
And what of my own sons, misunderstanding, misunderstood, good as me at finding fault? Is their's a future untold, stories in the making, or a history already that I’m to blame for?
In the midst of this day’s dawning a flight of geese honked and gabbled up our street; our suspiring phalanx of cedars, arbutus, and Douglas fir stood firm, and jagged against the sky; a frog croaked in the yard, awakening my admiration for ants, and beetles… and lowly worms.
My morning mantra harkened, urged me to complete The Circle…
‘We are defined by what we are-not As much as by Who we think we-are,’
The moment I sense my self I disappear, become part of the very nature that shapes my solitude... my joy, my fear.
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Some people walk right by Gwen’s place, and don’t even notice. They might be thinking about mortgages, or family problems, or jobs… or the latest national fixation, COVID-19. But Kirsten and friends weren’t distracted by any of that. The cold bright air made them happy, and the flutter of dark-eyed juncos at a feeder across the street… Until they were startled by the great, big, green Grinch nailed to the post under Gwen’s balcony. “Won’t steal my Christmas,” Kirsten pouted angrily, and everyone on the line agreed, even though Mrs. P, their daycare teacher, had to laugh. Snowmen, elves, and Santa himself crowded Gwen’s yard, too, fastened to sticks in the surrounding brick planter and tacked to the clapboard siding of her house. So Kirsten felt pretty sure that – as always – the Grinch would come to be a believer, too. It was Mrs. P who pointed to the painted rocks nestled in the grass along the planter wall. Kirsten figured they must be nice rocks, judging by their colours and shapes. “Life is short, eat dessert first,” Mrs. P read one. Kirsten agreed! “Less todos; more todays!” advised another. Kirsten’s favourite, though, was the one with the angel on it that said, “Believing is seeing!” Even though Mrs. P said “whoever wrote it got it wrong way round.”
About this Moment
Our neighbour, Gwen, loves Christmas, and goes all-out with decorations every year. This Moment was inspired when a gaggle of daycare kids all hanging onto a cord, with their daycare teacher in the lead, stopped to wonder at Gwen’s display. All I had to hand was my iPhone, so I took some pictures with that, and got one or two that were good enough to use. This is a fictional rendition. None of the names are real, and actual events have been interpreted to fit. Hope you enjoy.
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He’d never dived off Prospect Rock before, only jumped, legs and arms flailing, yelling like a banshee, anticipating the cold slap of the lake’s surface, and that alarming transition between this world and that… the world of summer sky, filled with clouds and birds and planes, and vastnesses; into that startling nether world of cold water pressing in, stifling your voice, forcing your limbs to straighten out, and your body into the shape of a dagger, plunged into an unknown. He’d never taken that shape, mid-air, hands clasped above – or, rather below – his head, feet pointed up into the sky, mind focused on the precise moment when he’d enter the water, not with a splash, but with a surgical penetration of the translucence between now and then, past and future tenses. Diving is a conscious act; jumping a wild, screeching, childish enthusiasm. You prepare to dive, imagine yourself arcing through space like a cormorant, parting the waters as if your steepled fingers could find the interstices between molecules, then point your flexing body into its precise curve through the fluidity of its new medium gracefully, missing the jagged formations imagined beyond the phenomenon revealed by light.
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Surely there’s enough room in the universe for everyone who has died.
That’s a relief, I suppose. It means there might… just might… be a heaven out there, even a god, who only need occupy a tiny corner of the 13 billion light year breadth of measured space and time… and who knows what lies beyond the known, how far we’d have to travel in our transcendental spaceships to reach the ever expanding membrane of infinity.
Language can say things it’s impossible to comprehend. Thirteen billion light years, for example. Uncle Franklin tried to describe the speed of light for me once. “If I flicked on a light switch, here in Chemainus, say at the tip of Bare Point, you’d see the beam – it’s a wave, actually, but for the sake of argument, let’s say you’d see that beam in just over a second, if you were standing on the moon, say in the Sea of Tranquility… one-point-two-five-five seconds to be exact, that’s how long it would take.”
Uncky Frank couldn’t have understood that most nine year olds wouldn’t have a clue what the heck he was talking about, of course. Or what the speed of light had to do with my father’s coffin, making its slow progress down the centre aisle of our church, borne on the shoulders of six strong friends and relatives. He was just trying to describe, after the fact, the theoretical speed a soul could fly according to his own theory of special relativity.
Mum and Dad used to laugh at Uncky Frank and his ‘weirdo theories’. “He should leave the science to Einstein, and stick to building houses,” Dad said. “He’s good at that.”
“His inquiring mind takes him to strange places,” Mum agreed, as if Uncky Frank’s brain was a poorly trained Pitt bull yanking him around on its leash.
They loved him, though. He was everybody’s favourite uncle.
“Your dad isn’t very far away, once you know ‘C’,” he said, sitting beside me at the wake. “That’s the constant that stands for the speed of light in a vacuum,” he added, when I gave him a puzzled, pleading look. “Three hundred thousand kilometres per second.” He smiled benignly.
“How far is it from your head to your heart?” he persisted. “Show me.” I put my left hand over my heart; my right on top of my head. “That’s how far away your dad is from you, always,” Uncle Franklin said. “He’ll never leave, and – at the speed of light – he’ll be with you in an instant, whenever you need him.”
Uncky Frank had a complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, on a special shelf next to his favourite armchair. He’d read it every evening, as if it was the world’s longest novel, from A to Z with occasional side-steps to look up an incomprehensible word in another article, then another word in the explanatory article, and another, and another, and so on.
“Unless someone’s reading it, these are just lumps of masticated wood, glue and fake leather, gathering dust,” he told me once. “Knowledge doesn’t reside in books. Squiggles on a page don’t mean anything until someone reads them.”
To his dying day Uncky Frank claimed to be an atheist. I visited him near the end. Gaunt, pallid, and weak as he was, he still smiled and gazed at me with his pale blue eyes. He could tell what I was thinking, and put his left hand over his heart; his right on top of his head. “That’s how far away from you I’ll be, if you ever need me,” he said.
I tried not to show it, but he laughed. “Just cause I’m what you call an atheist, doesn’t mean I don’t believe something. A few more days, and I’ll be gone, but I’ll live on in your memory,” he smiled benignly.
“And when I die?”
“You’ll live on in the memories of your friends, your colleagues, your family. And I’ll be a smidgen of that, which is enough for me.”
Uncky Frank bequeathed me his set Encyclopedia Britannica. I browse them from time to time, but there’s no reference to any history of mine in there, just antecedents. The speed of light hasn’t changed, though, and the time it takes a beam to get from Bare Point to the Sea of Tranquility on the moon.
End Note:
Writing is rarely a linear process. For example, this video has a typical pedigree. Yesterday I was working on Episode 43 of The Mural Gazer. In this scene Buddy paddles out onto Cowichan Lake, teetering on the brink of suicide. There, he encounters the spirit of Hong Hing, the Chinese merchant, bootlegger and gambling den operator, depicted in Chemainus Mural #4, who is tying to dissuade him. Although he’s alive and talking, Hong Hing is decked out as a deceased, oriental patriarch, and he’s floating to the forever-after on the mirror-calm surface of the moonlit lake.
I’m on aqua incognito for this description, so I started researching Chinese funerary traditions online, a fascinating glimpse into the rites of an ancient culture.
At the same time, I have been trying to get my head around Immanuel Kant’s metaphysical theory of Transcendental Ideals. Although that’s not the kind of subject matter you can throw undiluted into a novel, as a thematic undercurrent, I believe speculative philosophy enriches stories. And the rites I was learning about the Chinese belief in an afterlife, particularly the burning of Joss Paper and representations of things the deceased need to be happy in their new world, evoked by association Kantian proofs of god, heaven and immortality.
There’s no logic to the sequence that lead to The Speed of Light, but its origins do trace back to The Mural Gazer.
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I’m not a poet, but in this instance, a novelist composing a sonnet, taken from the mind of the protagonist in my current work-in-progress, The Mural Gazer. Buddy Hope has decided to take the final, life defining step of ending his life. But he’s not approaching this ‘task’ from the usual anguished trajectory. Instead, he sees it as a logical conclusion, a job that needs doing, almost as if it were a household chore.
I’ve been trying to figure out how he came to this conclusion. Many of us have contemplated the act of suicide, not as something we would actually do, but as a way of getting underneath, or behind, or into the meaning of life. That’s not where Buddy’s head is at. He’s simply tired, and doesn’t look forward to another thirty or so years dragging himself through a world that has no purpose, no sustainable joy.
To paraphrase someone very close to me, who chose Medical Assistance In Dying (MAID), Buddy isn’t living anymore, he’s just existing. He’s depressed at the prospect of carrying on, when every moment takes him farther from that time in life when he believed in his purpose as a father, a reporter, an armchair philosopher.
The question hanging in the air at this point in the novel is: Will Buddy’s recollections and contemplation heading toward his final act change his mind. He’s composed his parting letter, and left it on the dining nook table of the camper he’s been living in as his home-away-from-estranged-home. He’s saying his veiled goodbyes to family and friends, and is about to drive out of cell range to his chosen spot. Nothing he’s considered so far has dissuaded him from deploying EEK, his Emergency Exit Kit.
What Sense Reveals isn’t written to a particular person; it’s written to all the people he has known and loved.
Here are the details about some herbal ingredient in these foea.org generic viagra australia medications, avoid taking them in order stay healthy. online viagra order Men who feel more stressed may lose an erection during the time of physical intimacy. And when it comes to sexual pleasure, everyone wants to have sexual pleasure in their life. viagra ordination It also affects viagra professional canada your stamina and sex drive. From The Mural Gazer, Episode 56, News Style. Buddy Hope contemplates ending it all.
Thanks for checking out my first video post of Today’s Writes. This excerpt is taken from Episode 56 of my novel in progress, The Mural Gazer. At one level, it’s a philosophical but very personal take on suicide – not as a desperate act, but as the rational decision by a man who’s grown tired of living. So I don’t see it as a discussion of suicide per se, so much as an existential, inner conversation on the value of life without meaning.
Protagonist Buddy Hope is more sad than desperate. Sad, because purpose and meaning have drained out of is life, and the thought of continuing seems cowardly. He has arrived at this ‘to be or not to be’ moment, not in Shakespearean torment, but almost dutifully. The twisted irony of his circumstance is: his purpose in life has become to end it.
And what about those he’ll leave behind?
That becomes the real question. And Buddy doesn’t have an answer. He’s written his note. Said oblique goodbyes to his estranged wife, children, lover, and friends Bernice and Harry. But he knows his leaving will be a painful shock to them, and they will be left to struggle with the question: why? To wonder what they could have done to save him.
So another conundrum confronts him: Buddy realizes he has to commit a cowardly act, if he wants to discontinue his cowardly existence. His only consolation, if you can call it that? The belief that people will have to patch the fabric of their own consciousness with shared memories of him, and that mourning might, in a convoluted way, bring them together.
Is that a vain hope?
Today’s Writes are excerpts and reflections on some of my works in progress. They are an opportunity to share, and an invitation for people to participate in my story telling. Thank you for being here.
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Poetry, of course, stands on its own. In fact, one of the joys of all literature is the creative response it evokes in the minds of readers. Sharing our responsive impressions is now possible, and this is mine to Rosemary Ratcliff’s poem Our Changing World.
This video was produced for the Chemainus Valley Cultural Arts Society, where I volunteer as a communications guy. Collaborations like this help bring the arts in general, and literature in particular, to a larger audience.
If you want to simply hear her poem, and let its language activate your own interpretations and visions, hit the play arrow, and close your eyes! Then share what it evokes for you in a comment!
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Picked up the cat this morning to give his mourning hug listened to the breath of going in and coming out squeezed like an accordion his fur pressed to my ear listened to the resonance of going in and coming out listened to the purr of in and out
