(Uh-oh. Run-on sentences): Alex, I heard somewhere the Chinese, well some of them, count a child's age from conception. I don't know how they know the date, exactly, or maybe they don't need to, but sometime in here somewhere would make Helen a year old, in Hunnan.
April.....Any day but the first.
I know the subject makes Americans squeam, but I, myself, IMHO, personally, tend, sometimes, to think of babies as "people" before they dislodge. And the trail seems to go right back to a certain meeting of trail forks. A moment, a second or two, in the High Sierras, where they come together, two messengers, making one, a mind meld, and they get started right away, like building something in the movies.
Work work work.
Unsupervised. Diligent.
So, it's like back pay, bonus pay, to add all the hours together it took to build this wonder.
I once subtracted from my birthday ~ forgive me Rambi-ites if I brought this up before, I don't remember, ~ and I only have so many ideas, ya know ~ but I once worked backwards, very carefully because subtraction like that can confuse me and this is important to get the right month before opening the floodgates of scenery construction, but I figured out it was mid-August. And then realized, lo and behold, I could COUNT FORWARD three months and get the same date, I'm gonna get that G.E.D. yet, but they both resulted in mid-August so I was pretty sure.
Mid-August, huh.
Late summer. Hot night. Hot hot night.
I can't remember how I asked Mr and Mrs Squeamish, but their little clock gears went back real smoothly for old people.
"Mammoth Lakes" they said, in practical unison.
Hee hee! Wow! I am SO smart. Jane Pauley-Gauguin.
"Uhm.....uh......your Uncle's cabin."
Then I remembered I was sleeping there one night, when I was about 11, in a little old army-surplus bed; black tubular metal and a mattress with sheets and a dark wool blanket, and a bolt of lightning may have hit the roof. Honest, I don't remember what happened exactly, but there was a huge summer storm and the whole place lit up in the dark while my cousin and I were lying in bed. We were scared; I remember lying on my back with the top of the sheet pulled up in my hands like it was a piece of plywood that was going to protect me. The light was so bright I thought the whole corrugated roof had turned red for a second, from the heat, which I realize now isn't possible, being a genius and all.
But when they mentioned the cabin, two things flashed into my head ~ falling off crossin-logs, into the streams, and that lightning strike, my first really thunderous celestial event.
And then a third thought. Of a different thunderous celestial event.
And coming on the heels of the memory of the lightning explosion, fresh and log cabin and sage scentful, it looked the same. Like the two were "related". Or the second a metaphor, or reenactment, or illustration, of the first. In the black, the dark, the natural and confused "world", a brilliant explosion. A moment, of energy and seeing.
So.
There you have it, Doctor.
My illusions of grandeur.
( from "Thorazine For Thor" ) |
