Does a ten year old know that gravity has them?   

  

 

A cuckoo was in the backyard today -- feasting on the tent caterpillars feasting on the cherry.  It made no call, from neither right nor left.  Which is fine -- omens make me nervous.

Porter's back

from a week at camp.  Nine boys at Medicine Bow, but three with mean streaks.  It wasn't Lord of the Flies, but no repeat of last summer's idyll, either.  I had a feeling we should have sent him to that riding camp.

He doesn't seem troubled by it -- just disappointed.  Not just by the obnoxious trio, but the thunderstorm warnings that derailed the island campout, and the heavily fletched "flu flu" arrows that offended his archer's heart with their sluggish inaccuracy.  It may be that after a few days he'll remember the positive things as well . . . 

Scouting may have a national organization, but it is still profoundly local.  And it runs on a spectrum from old-fashioned outdoorsy to paramilitary.  The manly virtues can be stressed and intermixed in various ways, some that build strength of character and some that tear it down.  You see part of that spectrum among the troops that gather in a place like Camp Yawgoog.  I'm Den Leader of Porter's den, because he wants to do scouting, and I don't want him in some volunteer fireman's idea of a military unit.

Nico's pictures

                      

                                

                                               

Independence Day

A good day to reflect upon the patriotism of rebellion.  The language of patriotism and liberty has too long been treated like property by people who mean exactly the opposite.

We've woken from our complacency to find ourselves living under a government that tortures and imprisons people disregardful of whether they are innocent or guilty; that breaks its own laws to spy upon its citizens; that builds its rule to enrich the few and impoverish the many; 

that degrades and disregards science and knowledge and democratic debate; that treats the young as raw material to be wrung for profit.  

A patriotic stance toward such a government means contempt, derision and a profound commitment to reform and revitalization.

Happy Birthday, America -- across 232 years there are bound to be some rough patches.

Photos by Nico B.

The sea was rough

in Narragansett Bay.  The lifeguards' yellow flags whipped in a stiff breeze.  (I don't think I registered what that meant.)

I was encouraging Nico while he taught himself how to boogieboard in the shallow surf.  But finally, annoyed by waves splashing coldly onto my dry shoulders, I told him I was going to go for a swim and I'd be right back.  Monica would watch out for him.

I was quickly out of the shallow surf and into deeper furrows and bars -- swimming down amid the tatters of seaweed torn from some undersea rock somewhere and being shredded further in the violence of sand versus water.  It took only a few moments to realize that there was a massive current under the waves and it had me.  On the surface, I struck out toward the beach, stretching a foot downward for the reassurance of a foothold that wasn't there.

Soon, I was making all the headway of a cork bobbing in the surf.

As my breaths came louder and rougher, I felt a twinge of panic.  It wasn't fear of death, but a fear of the humiliation of being rescued.  Fear of being the man who matched his weak swimming up against the undertow.  Or worse, of being the fool who hadn't even known such a contest was in the offing and swam blithely out as though the sea were a great, domesticated bath, rather than the indifferent and merciless deity that it is.

Maybe my swimming had an effect or maybe the waves just consented to cast me forward rather than back, but my toes rasped the bottom and I walked and swam and thrashed my way back in.  

Humbled but happily un-humiliated.  

(An epitaph worth living up to?)

                 

                                                                               Photo by Nico B.

tuesday morning

Gray Cat

Black Coffee

Green Garden

Silver Hair

          

Photo by A.B.

And naked feet

on stones that echo with

the night-cool.

Oh, Nico, your abuelo is getting old!

It's good. 

 It's good that you are old. 

 That shows you have survived

 a long time.

Long hours for the webelos scout

Porter was up at 6:30 this morning.

Probably the longest day of  his summer so far

Counting the minutes until 4 o'clock when I had promised

 to take him off to Camp Yawgoog.

Enemies

I am implacable -- a ruthless harasser of my enemy.  A tangerine hued nemesis called the oriental bittersweet.  Not the tethering vine, the round-leafed sprout, the dark leaved, woody, sun-starved shrub.  Those are only its most superficial disguises -- its forays into the light.  

No, I know that the soul and body of my enemy is the orange root-vine lurking, linking dark redoubt to dark redoubt underneath the moss and fallen leaves.  I snap the shoots, cut the vinestems -- attack the supply lines for sugar and carbon.  But it's only when the hairy, orange rootbody comes up that I feel the grim, satisfying pang of a blow well-struck.

Last summer's challengers, the poison ivy and the greenbrier still send out their scouts and their sneaking runners, but I dispatch them without malice.  I have my enemy.

Mark Twain on George W. Bush:

"His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket 

and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere."

Photo by Nico B.

Nico's view: a six-year old takes the camera

Catbirds stood by for the rosy flesh of discarded melon.

M. snapped asparagus spears from their bed beneath the rhubarb

Photos by Nico B.

Shattered sky sected

by fractling twigs.

April's foetal leavelets

seep stainlike from

the inkish 

and interstitial wood.

My fingers' own

banal opacity becomes 

the thirsting, thrusting gap 

whereinto gouts 

of sharded world will pour.