Ah shoot it’s nearly been a month and what to say!
On a Saturday too... Suppose I should peruse pictures and journals and contemplate all Saturdays of Past, what then?. And I bid you think: how many Saturdays have thine eyes be-winked? And how many of those swam, sung, slurp’d and slept through? How many spent in company of friends, or strangers who'd later become friends, or all alone with only your woebegone face in the mirror brushing teeth? How many Saturdays spent on mountain tops, waking cold to nylon walls of tent and sky, or wandering with full pockets in halls of malls or making Sunday plans in corner booths over stack a pancakes? But besides yourself how many Saturdays are being right now lived across the green and blue globe? I’d like to take my hand and spin the globe and while it’s spinning touch my finger down, and wherever it lands I say, “Saturday in Slovenia of course!” For example where are my Saturdays in Spain I had and loved but lost? I spent a few in Canadia not many… And what’s the business of a calendar anyway? In the morning you know a Saturday’ll last forever, when the sun comes peeking through blinds you see her hiding there, toes poking out from underneath big heavy drapes you spy her there… Like scrubbing my left ear and accidentally turning some hidden valve in there which looses all Saturdays to come swooshing around my temples in plain memory’s view:
May 16 ’09 one of the first I see (picture above to prove it):
“On this particular morning E and I awake perfectly bleary eyed and discombobulated from sleeping like tombstone’d mummies on hard-packed dirt and rocks – but waking up like born again persons wearing smiles. Taking once more that salt bath in the sea splash offered exclusively in West Italia for a limited time only. Breakfast with the boys (eggs over toast is translatable) before kayaking through limitless sea blues and sea breezes feeling free. Afterwards running into Wil and the gang on the beach and going with them to big pizza feast. Talks on trains and rocks down by the water in Riomaggiore, after which we say a few good-byes naturally.”
Or September 18 ’10 so ordinary:
“Cleaned the house today all favors and flavors – and 't was a dust bunny siege! A grit and grime guerilla war. Man the laundry ahoy there! Man your scally-rags and swing the jib-broom! All for one and whitely done. Sparkle shine into the horizon victorious – plop down and read a book.”
Or just a few, not so long ago May 28
“In a hotel room where all’s familiar,
morning juice and a hot shower does
healthy for the soul.
Headphones in and hanging heavy on every word of
“Slaughterhouse 5” (once a year)
While childhood brothers Mike and Joel,
(also having just hot-showered their hearts clean)
lay watching hockey on the box
chatting casually like they did 15 years ago
on floors of homes rug’d and safe.”
Or the very next week as I’m trying ta leave town but get caught in a mad carnival of memorial day yard sales:
“Zooming through streets of Saturday Wrightwood to music, saying to myself, “out of the way pa!” and “where’s the junk, joe?” and all the stuff-hungry families meandering on manicured lawns saying “honey, should I?” and “a nickel for another yah?” and “well hell, it fits me well!” and through all this comes me zooming ‘round corners and up hills, skirting rows of parked cars and parked junk, whole hordes of men with junk in their eyes and poor children destined to ingest junk... but there goes me whip, revv, zoom! Finally bursting into the open freedom downhill descent towards L.A. and Old Friends and Miss Pacifica too, another weekend in the railroad earth ahead.”
How hilarious and sad and lovely those past Saturdays, those past me's and you's - which would I could contain each one in it's very own snow globe, I'd line the walls and bookshelves all of them... and at any point in time I walk up and peek inside one to view a 'former me' and a 'past you' playing ourselves and spinning around to music while Saturday snowflakes swarm overhead... every Saturday I ever lived... I peek in one and see us sitting around with bottoms to sofas, conversing absentmindedly as if there's no snow overhead at all... and I've got 'em all lined up in rows and rows and shelves and stacked high, so as I grow older the house becomes filled and cluttered to the roof with snow globes! - globes in cabinets and across the mantel and heaped in corner piles and photos of more snow globes hanging on the wall and snow globes in the fruit basket... and coming home from work in the evenings I put coffee to boil, begin a fire in the woodstove, pluck a globe from off the dinner table, walk across the room and go "pahloomph" into my easy chair, set my globe upon the arm rest to light a pipe, pick it up again, study with sadness, raise an eyebrow in question, then turn it upside down and chuckle to remember another Saturday I'd forgot, and I bet I'd peek in there and ask out loud as if anyone could hear me, "aren't you cold in all that world of snow?"
