the land was parched from the drought;
the skies held nary a cloud;
the crops had died;
the vines were withered;
dust filled the air;
it was his land, his fathers’ land,
dying without the rain;
nearly all of the folks around
abandoned their land;
his wife left with his son
to go back east to her family
where the land was wet and ripe
for living;
at dusk one day,
he walked down to the river,
about a mile and half away;
the old dog followed him,
as much to drink
from the shrinking river flow
as to be by his side;
he sat down by the riverside
on a log from an old dead tree;
he thought of praying,
but
gave it up:
he didn’t know what to pray;
he sat silently in the dust of twilight
and
then
he began to cry;
he was not sad;
he was not angry;
he just began to cry;
something unlike him,
he just began to cry;
he did not know
how long he cried
but
when he stopped
the land was dark,
the skies had clouds
and
he found his tears
were joined by rain,
the precious rain
running down the banks
to the river,
muting the dust,
irrigating the fields,
giving the land a breath of fresh air;
and
hope.
he rose and began his walk
back home to the small farm house;
the old dog followed at his side;
he slept on the swing
on his porch that night
to smell and feel the rain
and
wondered if his crying
had made his world all right.

Begun several weeks ago. Finished tonight — it took me a while to really escape.

i got footballed out this afternoon. To be more precise, i just got tired of sports today being determined more by manufactured rules, bad officiating (although their job is impossible with the subjectivity of vague rules), and penalties real or unreal.

Once again, i find myself out of touch with the way things are today. No, i didn’t walk to school for five miles in snow, but when i played sports, even golf today, i not only tried to avoid penalties (and i still believe that it is cheating to commit a penalty on purpose. — lord, lord, lord, does anyone use the phrase “on purpose” anymore). And if my team won because it cheated, to me it was an empty win, worse than losing.

Roy Rogers, Trigger, Gene Autry, Champion, Hopalong Cassidy, Topper, and Bob Steele would be proud of me. But today, i feel out of touch, behind the times.

Before the football extravaganza of inequity today, i did some work while Maureen lunched with a bunch of her friends. i actually put a dent in the to-do list, an anomaly, before watching the macho men act like whiny little cry babies. That’s when i said to myself i was done.

i decided to do something i don’t do often enough. i made a martin, took the fixings, and climbed our slope to the top. There, i looked out to the Pacific horizon. The setting sun splashed off of the San Diego skyline, Navy ships were silhouetted below. Point Loma loomed as a guide to sailors seeking refuge. Behind me, Mount Miguel loomed in the descending shadows as majestic.

The inclined path to our chairs will be more daunting in the future. Tonight, it was relative easy ascent. i wondered about the strange indentations in the path, paw prints. What kind of new breed of wildlife was now encroaching on our slope. We’ve had red-tailed hawks, owls, coyotes, bobcats, Southwest rattlesnakes, king stakes, groundhogs, polecats, tree rats, and even a fox or two over thirty-four years try to claim that territory. Their kind have backed off recently.

But these tracks were none of those.

Then i remembered. Right before i celebrated turning old, i heard a noise at the top of our hill while i was working on a project in the backyard. i looked up to see a slender young woman walking on the old hiking trail. This used to be a common sight. Hikers and horse riders would even stop and rest in my little sitting area at the top, enjoying the views. But the open space maintenance boys let the path through a grove of manzanitas down the hill from us grow over — damn near killed myself about eight or nine years ago, like the bozo i am, trying to struggle through the thick limbs and overgrowth. i surmised she must have come up along the neighbors’s fence lines, she had what i thought was a goat on a leash. Another pranced, unleashed, behind. i thought they were goats. Upon reflection, i realized they were too large to have been goats. i am pretty sure they were llamas. They were gone by the time i got Maureen and Sarah to look. There is something in that moment, i think is an important message to me. i don’t know what it is.

It has been a couple of weeks ago since i started this whine turning into an appreciation of where i am. Many things have changed. i turned old and celebrated it. Maureen and i have dined in serveral new wonderful places. We have reconnected with friends. The storms came in rolling, rolling, rolling. Our choice of a home, which never included location in concern of rain was made 34 years ago. It certainly was a good choice in that regard. For all of the folks who have expressed concern, thank you, but we live on almost the top of one of the tallest hills in the area.

Our concerns about such storms are mud slides, which Maureen mitigated with bougainvillea, ice plant and mulch, and we’ve greatly improved our yard drainage system. So we are in pretty good shape. Then midday, we got that cannot-be-ignored warning alarm on our phones that told us we were in a tornado watch. A what? A tornado watch in the Southwest corner has never, ever happened. But it did today. False alarm. It went away — oh lord, would i like to go on a rant here about folks taking sides on what the weather is and what causes it instead of working together to minimize the negative, or at least as much as we can, but then, i just can’t bring myself to that right now.

Bottom line: we are okay. The weather is breaking but we ain’t out of it yet and folks at lower levels and to the north of us have been hammered. We are mulling over how we can best help out.

About ten days ago, Craig Augsburger, who worked with Maureen during her career, loaned me a book, a special book. Joshua Slocum wrote it after circumnavigating the world on a sailboat he rebuilt in the late 1800s. i am entranced. i am connected. i have escaped. And later this week, i’m hoping to see that young woman walking her llamas on the riding /hiking trail on the crest of our slope.

Once several decades ago
there was a boy named Bart,
who was as ugly as a fart.

(How, you ask, can i know
a fart is ugly; but it is so:
i have not seen one,
but i’ve heard and smelled one:
they must be ugly, it must be;
they’d be ugly if we were allowed to see.)

So back to this guy named Bart,
who was as ugly as a fart,
Bart also was the clumsy sort,
beyond awful at every sport;
the girls went after the handsome heroes,
not after boys who, like Bart, were zeroes.

So Bart came up with a plot
to get girls to chase him who were hot;
he turned his baseball cap around,
showing all the handsome boys in town;
Bart told them it was cool to wear
a cap backwards and showed them where;
a few copied Bart, then there were many
who turned their caps around like a ninny.

Of course, now all the boys looked funny,
with caps backwards burning faces when sunny;
the girls saw this fad and were confused;
they did not know what to think of Bart’s ruse.
So now, the girls go after all the guys
wearing caps backward as if they were wise.

They even started dating Bart
who remained ugly as a fart.

have you ever heard the green grass growing
in a glen among the trees?
have you ever smelled the rain a’coming
on a Southern August morning?
have you ever sat on a grassy slope
watching baseball in the spring?
have you ever cast a flyrod in a pool
on a creek chocked full of bream?
have you ever played mumbly peg
with your jackknife under an elm?

i did a long, long time ago;
moments i cherish;

i fear there are few who have such memories
with the changes we have had;
perhaps there are adequate substitutions;
i do not know if the replacements meet
the memories that i have,
but
lord, i hope that they think they are
because
mine have made me whole.