Not quite Indian Summer Saturday, October 05, 2013

 

 

I wake early to rising heat – this technically not Indian summer since that usually arrives after the first dip into frost.

The news feed talks about snow storms in the mid-west, making mockery of the sweat dripping from my brow.

I don’t remember what I dreamed, only that I did, and that they felt good as if I strolled through some landscape that was not a jungle of heat or a frigid sheet of ice.

This is Saturday, which means I do my usual chores, bank near the Basics on JFK, Coach House for reading of the weekend papers, Salvation Army (I must remember to load the car with donations as part of my reducing possessions project), and finally Columbia Park where I still have to decide if the Dollar Store on my agenda or the Staples or Shoppers World before ShopRite for food.

The ritual is so engrained after so many years I could walk through it in my dreams, although at times, after the Coach House, I sometimes skip Salvation Army and stroll the streets of Summit Avenue in Union City, where life stirs a little later than I do, and people pop out of cars to wait for the shop keepers to open.

This part of the city is like a little town, and I have come to recognize many of its inhabitants, even though we do not likely speak the same language or know each other’s names.

I like the walk on rainy days or even overcast days, such as today, wandering up as far as the new high school and back when I haven’t done my usual Saturday morning yoga.

I’ll probably take that walk today, although after a brief thunderstorm last night or the night before (my memory is going) we do not expect rain until the aftermath of some one-time tropical storm in the south works its way into our part of the world.

By this time next week, I’ll be waking up in Cape May – another ritual like my spring time and August visits to Woodstock, filled with renewal and thankfulness that most people reserve for New Years.

I have a lot to be thankful for this year, though during this walk through these streets I will likely ponder this, making some informal list that I’ll totally forget by the time I feel the sea breeze on my face and smell the ocean again.

God, how I miss the smell of the sea!

 

 


email to Al Sullivan

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Take me to the river July 7th, 2013

Image
  I'll go into the possible inspiration later for this poem she posted today for now she is once more delving into the concept of a row isolation and the struggle to retain strength during several years of adversity her geography is located next to a river named after Henry Hudson as she draws on an important metaphor for life as she lives it similar to an earlier poem that had her kneeling beside the sea in order to let things go, she can no longer retain in her life the wide Hudson with its never ending ripples sits on her doorstep a safe place she goes to breathe new life into her war worn bones and hot raw nerves she goes to the river side to keep from bursting what she is full to spilling and to avoid leaking out and wasting the essence of survival she cannot afford to lose the last few years she says have been truly deep and rough like the storms that rip across the river at times I'm strong she writes but sometimes I'm tired on the shore she watches the ships...
Read more

Hoping for the best June 24, 2013

Image
        I feel sorry for everybody involved in this trickle up game, not just the so called victims (we walk into    these things with our eyes open and are taken advantage of only because we have our own lusts we can’t control), but also our poet, who knows no other way of life, and must abide by the rules of a game she finds herself stuck in – and must do what she needs to do in order to retain any sense of self-worth. This is what she is, and this is what she must do. But even at her worst, her poetry suggests she is hardly the rascal the congressman’s PR person makes her out to be. She plays the hand of cards she gets dealt. She sometimes misreads the deck, such as assuming that her chef friend in New York was competent, when he was anything else but that. She also leaped onto the bandwagon when it came to our former temporary boss, assuming he could do more for her than it turns out he could, his temporary condition making him of little more use than a...
Read more

Ships that pass in the night July 9, 2013

Image
  A mentioned yesterday, there is more going on in regard to her latest poem than just the content. Again, we come to the possibility that our posts are somehow some kind of secret communication, wishful thinking on my part, of course, because I know she really hates me. I suspect I am deluding myself with hopeful thinking that she has maintained this one thin thread of communication between us, though this poem adds increasing evidence to that illusion – since I posted a poem that in some respects foreshadowed the one she posted this week. My poem included a video of me wandering a small beach in Jersey City near Liberty State Park, and was intended as a response to even earlier poem about borrowed lives. The poem goes I find no path among these river stones, so I make my own, turning this way then that, side steps that lead me nowhere, then back, my life made up of clumps like these small eddies filled with seaweed and people I need, but never see again when I move ...
Read more