projects

“Because I am making progress.”
            — the cellist, Pablo Casals, when asked why he continued to practice into his nineties

Like many people, I think about water a lot. We like to look at it, to stay alive because of it, to be afraid of it, and we like to jump into it. Growing up on an island, the ocean’s restraints taught me that if I kept walking in circles, I’d eventually get to where I was going. Water was right about that. Sometimes a group of us’d be looking for a party and end up at a completely different party; I guess the “wrong” one because we weren’t technically invited, but that’s where we ended up. And who’s to say we should wait to be invited to any party? Happy accidents meant we were walking in spirals, not circles. We were getting somewhere.

A few days ago, perched on the edge of a pool and snapping goofy-as-shit goggles over my eyes, the competitive swimmer in the next lane told me it bored him to just swim laps back and forth the way I do. He said he needed a goal – winning, not losing – and he needed competitors to push him toward that goal. “Today, I’ll try to beat my best time,” the guy said. “That’ll be my win.” He kinda made me feel like a loser just talking about it, but when we jumped into the water and he raced past me, splashing like a drowning man, I didn’t feel like I was losing, really.

In the ocean, choppiness is at the surface and so is flatness sometimes. Underneath that, when you dive down? I haven’t found the dark, quiet peace that more enlightened people speak of. As far as I can tell, that’s where it’s all happening. That’s where life is. When a person is choppy on the surface or flat, dive down: that’s where they really come to life, always. In muted color and slippery fish.

50FootWave has a song called “Diving” that I never really understood before: crawl into the bedroom/the filler hours taste like flowers/come clean. Landlocked love as water. Dive under the covers, under the days. That’s where life is.

Watching my swimmer friend torpedo past, racing to a finish, I wondered how it could be a “win” to leave the water sooner. I love it there.

I slowed my bike down to watch an old guy wearing a sandwich board sign slumped over on the sidewalk in the New Orleans summer heat. He was not quite standing, not quite falling, but didn’t look…well. The sign seemed to be kind of holding him up.

So I pulled my bike over and asked if he was ok. I asked quietly because I’m shy though, so at first he didn’t hear. Also, like I said, he was old. Real old. And a streetcar was rattling past at the time, which sorta drowned me out. I almost got back on my bike to let the old man return to his slumping, uninterrupted. But before I could do this, he looked over at me.

When he lifted his head, his floppy old hat hid his eyebrows, but pulled his eyes up as if he were very surprised. Or maybe he was surprised, I dunno. “What? Okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. Are you ok?” I noticed that his sandwich board had sandwiches on it. Which I know is not why they’re called that, but I still think it’s worth pointing out.

“I’m teaching myself to read upside down,” he explained. “‘S hard.”

Nodding, I tried to look ready to ride away. Didn’t think he was gonna talk to me, just like, nod or something. “I bet.”

“I smash my face down like this?” he said, giving himself a triple chin and no face, as his hat covered everything but the chins. “And I can read, ‘grilled cheese, Reuben and club’ but not much else. Think I saw, ‘pickle’.”

“You did.” I pointed to “pickle.”

“I even read the newspaper upside down,” he told me. “Sometimes. Just to practice. I find a newspaper and read it upside down.”

Trying to picture a crazy old sandwich board dude sitting on the curb and reading an upside down newspaper made me wanna leave even more. I placed one of my feet on a bike pedal as if I were busy, had busy places to go. “That must be hard,” I said, looking the other way.

“It’s certainly not worth the effort,” he sighed, removing his hat and wiping his forehead with a spotty forearm. His eyes were indeed surprised; they just stayed that way, wide open, even without the hat.

His sigh kept me from going anywhere. We stood on the sidewalk in silence for a few seconds. “There are glasses you can wear that reverse the image of what you’re seeing,” I offered. “You could maybe get some of those.”

He squinted until his wide open eyes were almost closed shut. “Why would I do that?”

“Well then, upside down things’d look right side up.”

He shook his head. “Wouldn’t help much with my training.”

“No, I guess not.” I spoke slowly in case he was crazy or drunk or addled, ’cause he seemed all three. “Plus – and this is cool – your brain eventually reverses the image, so when you walk around without the glasses on? Everything’s upside down.”

The old man stared, leaning his chin on the sandwich sign. “Daiquiri’s do that, too. Say! Wouldja get me a daiquiri? I could pay you later.”

I laughed. “Sure.” There was a daiquiri place up the street and I figured it would get me out of this conversation. “You allowed to drink on the job?”

“We’ll find out!” he giggled.

When I returned with his daiquiri, a light rain was beginning to fall and the old dude has resumed his slumped over posture – back to his training, I guess. Or maybe hiding from raindrops. “Hey!” I tried to shift him by holding the drink under his chin.

He didn’t react and didn’t take it, just took a sip from the straw like a toddler would. He kinda smelled like a toddler, too: powder and pee. Plus smoke and booze. Like a toddler with a few bad habits. “Hamburger,” he said. “Except from the picture, it looks like they serve it on toast, which is incorrect. Not classic form.”

I pushed the daiquiri into his bent, spotted claw and looked into his remarkably unlined face. “Cheers!” I said, meaning, drink up, turn upside down and also, bye!

“I ain’t old,” he said, sounding pissed off, “i just look it.” This made him mad. “I ain’t tired, I just feel it. I ain’t even…” he trailed off. The rain was falling harder, his floppy hat getting floppier. “It’s upside down. All of it.” He stared off angrily and sucked down half his daiquiri.

I had no idea what to say. It IS all upside down. Shouldn’t be. No wonder he’s pissed off. Waving, I took my leave as the rainfall became a rainstorm.

A few hours later, I rode past him, across the street; he didn’t see me. His daiquiri cup was smashed on the ground, his chin back on his chest, his hat dripping.

Walking my son, Wyatt, through the park to a concert he was about to play, I whipped pancakes at squirrels until one squirrel with half a tail figured out they were food. We watched it struggle to carry a pancake over to its tree, grabbing it in his teeth, then gripping it with his paws. He tripped and fell a couple times, turning the pancake around and around as if it might become more manageable if he held it at a different angle. Squirrels are geniuses, in my opinion, but evolution hasn’t fully prepared them for the pancake, I guess.

“I’ve seen ’em wrangle slices of pizza…” I said, feeling kinda bad.

“Slices of pizza are triangles,” Wyatt pointed out. He was hopped up on pre-show jitters, as was I, because I’m his mother. We’re fairly silent people, me and Wyatt, so on a not hopped up evening, this walk would probably have been in silence. Even nervous, though, our conversation was very quiet and slow; the squirrel barely noticed us as it worked, flipping its half-tail from side to side in frustration. Nimbly, it folded the pancake in half, then attempted to push it up the tree. I was impressed. “Brilliant!” I breathed.

Wyatt nodded. “I’ve been thinking about kindness and ghosts,” he said. Note: this is a very Wyatt thing to say. He was born without the segue gene.

“Yeah?”

“And the ghosts of kindnesses.” He paused in thought. “I know kindness is important, but what is it?”

“Uh…we may not have that figured out yet.” I studied his beautiful face in the dimming light of Audubon Park. “Take missionaries, for example.”

“Sort of what I meant. People live with a lot of those ghosts. How do we keep our kindness from being bossy?” He was looking for life advice and I’m his mother, so…deep breath…been on Earth longer than him, must have something to say.

The squirrel tripped and fell on top of his pancake and we both winced. “Small, quiet kindness is generally not too damaging,” I told him. “And still real important. As long as you aren’t telling someone to be like you or think like you, right?” He nodded. “We’re all stuck here on Earth, which can be pretty hard. So we work on ourselves to make sure we’re not hard on each other. And then we take action.”

Wyatt stepped gingerly toward the squirrel. It looked up in interest and fear, eventually abandoning the pancake for the safety of its tree. Wyatt then tore the offending pancake into bite-sized pieces, which he balanced carefully on the lowest branch of the tree. The squirrel watched his small, quiet kindness, clearly baffled.

Before we crossed the street to the theater where Wyatt would play his concert, we looked back and saw the squirrel methodically gathering its mini-pancakes and scooting up the tree with them. “So we work on ourselves…but not for ourselves?” he asked. “For each other…?”

“Is that what I said?” Wow, that’s good — remember it for the other kids. “Sounds better when you say it.”

“If that’s the case, we have a lot of good ghosts to learn from.”

“‘From which to learn,'” I corrected, checking for traffic. I’ll never, ever let a child of mine cross the street alone, no matter how old they get. My arm always shoots out and knocks the wind out of them. “We have to look in the right places and listen to the right stories for inspiration.”

By the time we crossed the street to the Neutral Ground, where streetcars passed us on either side, the sun had almost set. The streetcars were glowing and full of people — some laughing, some talking, some just staring at New Orleans going by — a little, mobile cross-section of humanity. Then Wyatt held the theater door open for me. When do boys start holding doors for their mothers? 

When Wyatt met up with his fellow musicians, they greeted him warmly and absorbed him into their midst, which was my cue to disappear, just like summer camp and swimming lessons. Before I could go, though, I noticed Wyatt’s face calling me over to him in that Wyatt way, when he just sort of…vibes you to him…for another segue-less journey into Wyattland. “Yeah?” I asked him.

“Earth’s not so bad,” he said.

“No,” I smiled. “No, it isn’t.”

That night, I sat in the theater, trying in vain to absorb all the frantic and peaceful goodness that happens when people work and then take action. So many gifts here, it’s almost overwhelming. I mean, as overwhelming as all the tears and trauma, at least. Good, ol’ Earth. It’s not so bad.

I stopped trying, closed my eyes, and let it spill over me.