Sequitur: Explanations and Stories

I would like to offer this explanation. I believe everything is connected. And if only in my own mind, everything follows not unlike summer following two dips of ice cream in one bowl. It would not have been necessary to mention these preliminary thoughts, perhaps, but there they are anyway. Whether some had been left out would have hardly have been of any consequence, but what, on the other hand, should I have omitted or forgotten?

And what if my wife and I hadn’t gone to the lake, on the second perfect day – an evening in which the sailboats heeled over, came about, and then headed back? Or the next evening, if I hadn’t run into a young man - who had once been with the women he’s no longer with – those two who are no longer the couple I met by chance on a much earlier perfect evening way back in the spring? Does it matter that the burger I ordered was called Smoke and the one he ordered called Fire – or that he had a corn dog on the side? And how about earlier, in the morning - now I’m speaking mostly of the day hard at hand - I had typed some words about stories. Or was that the day before?

Nevertheless, having said all of that, I looked out my window overlooking my fish pond where I had a few hours before explained to a woman - with whom I had pruned rose bushes at the church earlier while that very day was still quite cool - about how I folded the rubber liner into the deep hole I had dug in the ground so that it would all hold water. Sometimes you need to get up pretty early in the morning, but, I must confess, I probably didn’t need to mention that either. Still all of this happened, and, at least in my mind,  it connects to what I am trying to explain to you now.

A good friend, you see, has this theory about explanations and I just finished reading a book about stories. And after I’ve finished the one I will tell you the other. If you look carefully, I think that you will see that I’m really talking about the same thing, although there are always significant differences if you look carefully.

So if I have a point, you may have to find it for yourself. It’s not as if art imitates life - at least in the beginning - although later the two become quite entangled. I have gone in this bit of writing and put the cart before the horse to tell you quite bluntly that words can be dropped and pulled to express what we think and feel, and that if any of this makes any sense, it won’t be entirely up to me. It’s all a game we play – writer and reader, (I’m telling you this straight out), and before I finish this explanation, I’d like to thank Mr. Frost and Mr. Eliot, without whom none of this might not have happened, but it did. And Don’t Stop Please, a band of young musicians, whom I first heard playing and singing on the sidewalk in front of Weaver’s on a perfect fall afternoon some years ago. And, of course, my wife – there was a chance meeting if there ever was one. And while I’m running along, thank you to my parents, without whose love I wouldn’t even be here, he smiled.

I could go even further, I suppose, and thank the stars winking overhead in the night sky as they are rushing fast away - and yet things come together.

Now I’m afraid my explanation is not as clear and complete as it might have been, but I promised you a story. It happened like this:

It was on the fifth perfect summer day in a row, and I’m mostly talking about the weather. But I believe that all things are connected – somehow - so a little spillover into other subjects should be expected. I was walking to the river a little later in the afternoon than usual. Up in the Gazebo in South Park three boys were kicking a hacky sack. As I passed, I watched a younger boy clambering up from the outside. I heard one of the older boys ask him if he wanted to join them. “It will help your skateboarding, ‘cause you have to use your toes,” he said.

I smiled at how he tied things together and I thought about turning and climbing the steps to see if I could join in, too. I probably doubled each of those kid’s weight, and tripled, maybe quadrupled, their ages.

Then one boy kicked a little too high and the hacky sack sailed over the railing and down off the far side of the Gazebo. I heard a mingling of exclamations and I turned. And in a few steps - I suppose close to a dozen - I reached the hacky sack in the grass, picked it up, and tossed it up and over to one of the taller boys.

“Thanks, man,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” I returned, already walking away into a nearly perfect day. I was grateful enough that they had let an older man join in their play.

And so then, farther along, only a few blocks, I suppose, two men my age that I recognized were sitting on a concrete planter box in the late afternoon sun. They expressed only a very few handwritten words on cardboard. When I stopped and mentioned something about the perfect weather, one told me that the radio had just said that there was a 20% chance of rain later that night.

Not much, but it would be welcome, I thought to myself several minutes later as I looked over the railing. The river down there and extending out to the horizon was lower than the day before. And tomorrow will be Wednesday.

Not much of a story, but thanks, anyway.