The Orionids

The earth is passing through the ribbons of detritus that Haley’s comet leaves strewn along its orbit – so the Orionid meteor shower was on.  At 10:30 Orion is somewhere behind the oaks, but a meteor streaked up between the Milky Way and the Pleiades, just above the trees, so I chose there to look.  I sat in the yard with the black cat companionably beside me and as I gazed at the sky we listened to the leaves upon the ground.  They rustle as each one curls up in passage from autumn gold to brown leaf litter. 

Though I could see my breath even against the starlight, tree frogs were still croaking from their barky redoubts.  Thin, checkerboard clouds rose insistently from the southwest.  An owl hooted excitedly to the east.  A pack of coyotes yowed and yipped in the distance.  The black cat paid them a momentary attention.  Before the clouds swallowed up the Pleiades completely I was rewarded with a great arcing meteor, just trimming the tops of the trees across the northeast.  It left an afterimage upon my eyes and I went in to bed.

Porter strolled past with the clunky watch he always wears and Monica and I started talking about how cool watches were when you were 11 years old.  I tried to remember when I'd stopped wearing (or even carrying) watches.  And that made me think of one of the handful of crimes I've committed.

It was in a small college course at Penn -- a language and philosophy class I think.  And in the middle of the seminar a piercing, beeping alarm went off.  A girl to the side of me fumbled with her watch, turning bright red as the beeping continued.  The Professor pointedly paused his incomprehensible lecture about Wittgenstein and stared at her as the increasingly desperate girl struggled to shut it off.  At some point I realized that she wasn't going to succeed, because the beeping was actually my own watch alarm coming from the bag by my feet.  But the sound was hard to localize and I knew that it was about to cease on its own, so I opted ignominiously to stare with the rest of the class at the girl for another few painful moments.

The first crime that I remember was stealing from Melvin Alleman in Kindergarten.  The teacher had unrolled long rolls of brown paper onto the floor for us to paint on.  It was near Halloween and we created a parade of monsters and fantastical creatures.  The boys painted one and the girls another.  A day or two later they had dried, and the two "murals" were given out as prizes for something or other.  I won one and Melvin won the other.  The problem was that I had won the girls mural.  Melvin sat in front of me with the boys' mural rolled up in the basket under his seat.   It was a less enlightened era and I had no interest in the girls or their mural.  I fell to temptation and somehow surreptitiously switched the two.

For years afterwards, until my parents finally threw it away,  that roll of brown paper up in the attic with its smudgy, peeling and cracking monsters would remind me of my crime against dim, kind-hearted Melvin.

In case you thought this morning's frost was made up of nothing more than tiny, jagged crystals . . . .

h/t Balloon Juice

We took the long weekend in Vermont to catch the golden end to the autumn leaves.

It's a quiet evening at home. Last night's wind has given way to a clear, cool night.

Monica is reading aloud to Nico a manga version of Romeo and Juliet.

Porter has finished his homework and is engrossed in a novel of dragons and boy-kings. The snake is coiled in his den, the guinea pig is munching in his little cot. The cats roam the dark.

After Saturday's downpours, Sunday was clear and warm and full of priceless, late-season sunshine. We spent the afternoon at the winery's harvest festival with Jiri and Sarka and their boys. We all plucked sweet red grapes from a vine. Like the seasons last hummingbirds, the four boys ran and drank Mexican sodas and sucked on honeystraws, and ran some more. Porter merrily stomped grapes in an open half cask. Nico and Jacob danced in front of the band. Showmen both, they soaked up cheers from the crowd, while Porter shook his head.

Monica finished work at 4 and joined us for a drink of wine, a tostada, and then we were dancing into the dusk.

Charles and Patty eventually brought Nico and Anya back from their friend Indy's birthday party. (Nico reckoned sadly, that now he's the only remaining 7-year old in 3rd grade.) The kids, including Estelle and Porter were full of plans and energy, but all parents were tired from a long week of turgid family logistics. So we shooed off Patty toward home to have a bath and plied Charles with beer. (the Sam Adam's Imperial Stout I bought is too strong, but combined with a Wolaver's ale it makes for a fine black and tan.) And Monica brought out mushrooms salvaged from the Nature Center's festival to make an impromptu pasta dinner.

Went out last night for some music at URI -- Odaiko New England, a band of taiko drummers.

I think the bones of my skull may still be resonating.

After 10 weeks with us, Alberto departed for California -- his two bags packed, his pension full in his pocket. A few last cool, pretty days to give him a dash of autumn -- but nights were dipping to the 30's to give him extra impetus. Now no one will spoil the cats with tinned food and the kitchen will no longer magically clean itself. And the stories have stopped.

For occupation and exercise, he neatly stacked for us two cords of wood, but now we have a third.

Over at Balloon Juice they are composing a left-blogospheric dictionary. Last night they were discussing the current meanings for "liberal" and "conservative." But I stopped reading at the 6th comment because I think El Cruzado nailed it perfectly:

Conservative: anything that self-proclaimed conservatives like or are in favor of.

Liberal: anything that self-proclaimed conservatives dislike or are against.

Anyone looking for a more coherent or consistent stance is missing the point.

Sunday morning brought a breezy, leafy rain. Betty's sermon was about the church as a container for growing one's heart. She donned a beflowered gardener's hat, mud-stained gloves and brandished a flower pot when the children gathered around her.

And later after the children were gone she expounded on one of her favorite names for us, faith community. I'm not sure that I followed everything she said about faith and how it is lived. I agree that one of the welcome things about church is that it is a faith community, but I get a sense that I was working from a narrower (I might even say crisper) definition of what faith means. To me (as a scientist and son of a science teacher) faith is irrevocably about the unreasoning leap one takes when one reaches the outer limit of reason/science/empiricism -- call it what you will. Unitarian-Universalists generally value that reasoned, material-experience-based working out of life's questions and answers. And that may make them interesting philosophers, humanists, neighbors, activists and so on.

But what makes them a UU is often-enough an act of faith; is as Betty put it, laying the heart down on a set of principles. These principles don't have to be (and I think can't be and probably shouldn't be) reasoned out, or argued for, or proved in some objective sense. The act of faith is taking that leap and saying that, "I don't need proof that every human being deserves my love and respect -- I'm just going to lay my heart down on that precept and simply declare it so."

(Of course, what I see as a leap of faith, other people experience as knowing what is ineffably true, and that creates some tension when the term faith seems a disparagement . . . .)

There's nothing inherently constructive or activating about leaps of faith. Most people's acts of faith are pretty misguided and counter-productive as far as I'm concerned. But when you have legitimately taken reason and argument as far as you can take them -- and you've looked into the word-less and reason-less regions of self and other and found a place beyond that, where it seems right to lay down your heart -- then faith is the act we have.

And a faith community is nothing more than the band of people that happens when a group of people make the same leap.

Maybe that's what Betty said and I just needed to put things in my own words, or maybe she was adding something to that. In any case I can thank church and leafy rain for once again for keeping the spiritual and philosophical juices flowing . . .

Monica, Alberto and Porter climbed into the car and headed for Vermont to see the maples turning orange and red.

Nico and I headed to Connecticut, to the corn maze in Preston where his class was gathering for the fall social. B. had a few things organized for the kids, like visiting the calves, a hay ride and pizza.

When it comes to supervision, parents at the school keep their kids on leashes of varying lengths, but I gladly let Nico off to do as he liked -- which was to race immediately off into the maze. This was annoying to some of the parents who were trying to keep their kids from disappearing until after the pizza, etc. But I was coming off three days fighting a bad cold and just wanted to sit in the glorious September sunshine. Besides, cornfields remind me too vividly of the wilderness of childhood, and I had no interest in interfering in Nico's day.

Eventually all of the kids would disappear in the maze -- some with adults attached, some without. But one of the themes of the idle, pleasant, desultory parental conversation was about how much free reign to give kids. Some feared that a child who merrily wandered the maze, might panic as soon as they decided they wanted out. Others feared that they might meet harassing teens in the maze. Others, like me shrugged it off and saw our prejudices confirmed each time happy, sweating kids emerged from the maze to grab a drink or to show how many stamps they'd found. We'd get reports on who they'd run with or run into in the maze.

Alejandra was one who worried, though she had let her son, Matteo, go off with a group of the others, accompanied by an adult. When she heard from others that he wasn't with that group any longer, she contained her worry. Time went by and no one reported seeing him. Finally, the afternoon was stretching when Nico came out and sat with me. Alejandra asked him if he'd seen Matteo and Nico said, "He was with us, but then he separated from us." "How did that happen?" asked Alejandra. "He went off with some guy." "Who?" Nico didn't know -- hadn't seen him before. It was some man who said he'd show him where to get one of the stamps.

Adult faces went suddenly stony, and the worst fears of parenthood didn't need to be voiced. Alejandra and B. were out of their seats heading for the maze. I was talking seriously to Nico to make sure he wasn't making anything up - that Matteo had gone off with a strange adult.

In the end, it turned out that it was the farmer who had taken Matteo and Nick around the maze showing them each and every stamp station. (Nico had not recognized him because he hadn't gone on the hayride.) But there was an unpleasant 10 or 15 minutes as a half-dozen parents went around calling for Matteo. (I suspect, as I kind of hope Alejandra doesn't, that Matteo ignored the calls for at least a while because he was on the trail of the last of the stamps.)

Nico hadn't seemed troubled during the search, and had happily helped call out his name from a bridge with Annabelle and Anya. But before we left he hugged Matteo from behind and began to cry. I asked him why he was crying and he said because he'd been afraid for Matteo being lost. Matteo looked wide-eyed at his mother who knelt to comfort Nico and told him, "that's exactly how I was when I couldn't find him. I felt terrible and I cried, too." Matteo asked her seriously, "You really cried? Like tears?", turning where Nico still gripped his shirt. "I stood on the bridge there and I cried," she told him. I don't think she had, actually -- I think she'd gone steely. But I know she was grateful now to Nico, who had made Matteo so suddenly aware.

Culebra, the newest member of the household . . . .

Sometimes my membership in a Unitarian-Universalist church doesn't sit comfortably on me. And today's service, which dwelt on Universalism, and God and salvation -- and hearkened back to the sect's history of Christian dissent found no welcome in me. It didn't help that Nico was in an uncooperative mood and sighing from boredom and weary misery beside me. Reverend Betty's distinction between a capricious God and an all-loving God had no resonance for someone with no interest in questions about gods or whether or not the Universe is a welcoming or indifferent place. And the old-fashioned hymns, which I should have at least taken as entertaining historical artifacts simply pushed me away further -- one of them was a temperance hymn -- Touch not the cup!

So, I was in a souring mood, and when Nico grumped about sticking around for the picnic after, I took the opportunity to grump back, and we all left -- with me angry, Nico on the verge of tears and Porter staying out of it.

Hours later, in the afternoon, I found myself in my true church. I sat on a granite boulder along a flooded woodland pond. The beaver's berm of sticks and mud and stones zig-zagged over to a rocky outcropping that was crowned with maple and beech. The black branches and the leaves of green and yellow and red were twinned with perfect felicity in the blue black mirror of the lake. Invisible minnows below made ripples. And circles that were as sharp and perfect and deep as cut-glass over-wrote the fractal geometry of leaf and branch. I don't think I've ever seen anything more beautiful.

Above the gurgle of the escaping brook I could hear the whistle of an aggrieved duck and the laughter of Kingfishers. A green heron, hunting upon a raft of lily pads was startled by a diving cormorant, and stretched its beak heavenward, bitternish, as though blending itself to an imaginary stand of reeds.

So, the summer passed. I won't try to reconstruct the sequences of swimming; days spent at the computer or upon the lawn; meals eaten; arguments won, lost and discarded; road trips and visitors; things bought and given and thrown away.

The boys grew not just taller, but more complicated and rich in words and experience. Monica's unhappiness waxed and then waned -- and my own sloshed tide-like in response.

Storms came and pounded the beaches; dragonflies came and succeeded the spring's plague of mosquitos; I pried into the thought processes of a thousand culture-bound informants; and the paper wasps methodically peeled away the weathering skin of the garden furniture.

And the summer passed.

Photo by Porter B.

A Spam-folder poem, from our gmail account, August 6, 2009

Rangy milky sty,
cubby rangy petal.

Unhung puzzle rotor.
Unhung glance old squeak!
toot rotor unhung packed!
unapt dine!
Recede,
endup milky spark!

Wroth purl,
thin rangy borax pigmy!
Old quick, old runt, eat eat.
Gutter chaw dhurry frame.
Wroth captor pigmy,
diddle met, diddle toot.

Frame runt.

Unhung spark sty.
Cubby croon, packed unapt.
Eat number,
perk unread,

accede!

a earlier poem from the third week of June:

Time for perfection, Oakery;

Airy mumps tithe

lumpy oared crowd peel,

Aerate glover glover Dr. MaxMan,

the pleasure she only dreamed about.

Elan potboy bounty,

Sniffy fetid pupa,

Act like a hero.

Gooey grouch sap;

Faced, he can be no companion.

Anatomy of a pretty good day.

I slept in until nearly 8 -- so uncharacteristically late in fact that Monica asked me if I wasn't feeling well. But no, I was just feeling well-rested.

After she had left for her last day of camp, I cut slices off a round of durum bread, and made scrambled eggs for Porter. Just toast and black coffee for myself. It was a crisp, clear, cold morning and Porter wore a winter vest at the breakfast table.

I settled down with the laptop to read a few blogs and skim the New York Times. Alberto was on the other computer reading El Colombiano and Nico was navigating on the iBook for some game he was playing. But the internet connection cut in and out, so when Alberto returned from delivering Porter to the horse farm (after his stop at Pete's grocery, where he spent half an hour buying his lottery tickets and chatting with the staff and with the tourists), I drove the five miles down to the coast to a coffeehouse with wifi.

The day was warming up and Route 1 was filling up with summer traffic. I'd already drunk too much coffee at home, so for once I was pleased to see iced coffee that was mostly ice. We had a minor report due out this day. Axel was down in New York scrambling to put it into final form and I was combing the data for support for the propositions we were making about the best ways to talk about the government's role in the economy. (Our original propositions collapsed a few days ago, when the data turned out not to support them -- or more specifically the approach we'd been exploring had turned out to interact in unfortunate ways with the public's current, top-of-mind model of the government's role, namely, all the damned bailouts.

Fortunately, we discovered another promising route from outside our research cul de sac.) It turned out, surprisingly, that integrating the idea of community colleges as an example of the government's role in the economy created all kinds of positive effects in people's thinking, and so we were re-writing and quickly integrating control data that we'd generated the night before. But I also had to launch some internet surveys testing a couple of promising gambits for another project about counter-terrorism, torture, detentions, surveillance and ethnic profiling. We were already deep into the subjects' database on this one, and I needed to wring more male conservatives out of it.

Back home at about 12:15, Nico was still in pajamas, drawing some grand narrative on five feet of old-style perforated computer paper that he'd found somewhere. I hollered at him to get dressed and the three of us soon piled back into the car.

Porter had been at Turning Pointe all week with the horses. Though the place is mostly about "therapeutic riding" for handicapped kids, they offer a camp a couple of weeks out of the summer for local kids to learn about riding and caring for horses.

(Porter first climbed onto a horse in rural Costa Rica, where it's a masculine pursuit, so he's a little perplexed about why here he's the only boy in a universe of girls and women.) Today was the last day and we were invited to come to a horseback play they were putting on.

It's only a couple of miles up the road and Porter handed us a handwritten playbill when we pulled up to the barn.

We met the horses, (Porter's mount, Cinnamon, was licking his lips and drooling a puddle. According to Porter he'd grazed on grass too close to a toad and gotten a mouthful of toad pee.)

Porter played the role of policeman in a short morality play of two girls who forgot about their horses and went off to play. Porter was still wearing his vest decorated with an orange felt badge. I think he felt the vest gave him a more official air. After a second act about moderation (too many apples for the fat pony) there were cookies for the humans and carrots and mint candies for the horses. Porter brushed and groomed the horses with casual competence.

At home the internet connection was working so I cleared a spot on my desk and se

t about checking the new data from the surveys I'd launched earlier. We were trying to get people to acknowledge the dangers of enabling government to combat terrorists in ways that disregard law and constitution. By 3 o'clock, I done what I could do, and the data was pretty good, especially given the challenge. I called Axel, to make sure he didn't need any more help with the report, and then yelled down to the boys to get their swimsuits and their shovels, we were going to the beach.

And the Beach Full signs were up for the town strands, but we slipped into the sand lot at Ninigret, a few minutes past four, when they stop charging to park.

The sea was quiet, with the waves breaking at the shoreline. Porter swam and I helped Nico, who's forgotten how to swim. He has not an ounce of body fat and sinks like a stone. Porter and I did some body surfing in waves that were big enough to ride but no so big as to pound us into the sand. We made a castle that was attacked by every fifth or sixth wave, piling sand until our arms hurt, rescuing the beleaguered tower again and again.

On the way home, Nico asked why his fingers were tingling and I told him we'd moved about 500 pounds of sand -- "And the ocean took back 475 pounds of that!" he said. I told him he'd sandpapered his hands and they'd be more sensitive.

From behind, I felt him touch my shoulder and my matted, wet hair. "It's like I'm learning a new sense," he said. We passed the shop advertising frozen bait, which brought on a long, fantastical conversation about popsic-eels, with chocolate glaze or slug-slime glaze and a dusting of thistle-spines. "Um, my popsic-eels still moving." "Better pop it back into the freezer for a few minutes." Porter was cracking up.

It didn't spoil anyone's appetite though. We stopped by Pelloni's Farm for an apple pie we'd special ordered (with less sugar). At home Alberto had made hot dogs for himself and the boys as promised. Monica had heated up potatoes and spicy leftover bluefish (that she had fished from the Sound just yesterday). So once we had all cycled through the shower and I had vacuumed up the sand from the bathroom floor -- we ate.

In the evening the boys took my computer. They've discovered how to use the Netflix instant viewing to watch TV. It didn't take long for the bad laughtrack of the "Wizards of Waverly" to drive me out of the living room (at least there are no commercials!) I'd been putting off investigating the boys little attic ever since Nico told me that some critter had made a mess in there. I was afraid that it might be the red squirrel that has moved in to the yard.

(In the mornings it sits in one of the trees sending down a cascade of chittering, buzzing red squirrel curses toward the cat Wilbur. Wilbur lays beneath the tree, looking inscrutably up every once in a while as though to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, were you speaking to me?") But there was no sign of the squirrel up there. A mouse had thoroughly chewed up something red and green, and I took the opportunity to clear out a garbage bag full of the boys older clutter, while they were distracted downstairs. At 8:45, when Netflix seized up, they joined me. For two boys so given to pack-rattery, they were pretty cooperative about clearing some things out. Their room had reached an unprecedented lever of clutter and chaos and maybe the idea that critters were going to start living in their stuff gave them food for thought.

But soon enough it was time for lights out and I joined Monica in bed and, eventually, in sleep.

And that was a pretty good day.