Foliage and Fear

If the world were a snow globe, a five-year-old kid must’ve taken it and shaken it like a maraca on Cinco de Mayo --- because stuff is WEIRD. But, God, isn’t it always?

So as I take off from JFK on October 31rst watching the costumed and candied populace of these great States—I might feel like Gulliver fleeing the Lilliputians. But then that leads me to ask… what the heck is next?! Brobdingnag? Laputa? Balnibarbi?

Or home?

And as for the “weirdness”; I don’t feel at liberty to qualify. Not even necessarily a bad weird—but what can I say when I’m sitting in Vermont at one o’clock in the morning after a foliageful fall day, merlot in hand on a ooshy green reclining chair watching CNN with my grump-pa and the words “Nuclear” and “Arms Race” sneak up on me? It’s enough to tip a wine glass over. Thank you, North Korea. Thank YOU, world.

But there’s that and then I go on the next day and I’m looking at New Hampshire from the top of a hill in Vermont, and the leaves are bright, especially the reds because of an early frost, and the hill head is bare and windblown and the sky is extending into a blur and 24 hours later it’s 5:10AM and I’m on a train from Albany to NYC, watching what an ex of mine called “a dimming pile of nostalgic waste” float along with me down the Hudson into the sewage smells and smoke of New York City.

But then last night I take the express 14 home, which I never do because it runs so rarely in the eves. And, we’re going down the east side, flying, doing god knows how many miles per hour, and the great light in the sky is turned down just a bit, romantically, the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges delicate in the foreground, electric lights streaking past in the forms of TV through curtained windows and red brake lights, reflecting endlessly in side-view mirrors, the grey-blue smudges of evening clouds dense in the background like the silhouttes of soft mountains --- and downtown sandwiched between, but by no means overcome… and it goes on and I feel like it’s all so damn beautiful and I’m sad I’m leaving it but I think what I’m getting more and more now is this:

That it’s weird, everything, it’s beautiful everywhere and you just have to have the eyes for it, and the mind to take it all in, and adapt to it… like water.