Perceptions On a Summer's Day (may vary)

He watched the path down where the it came out from under the buckbrush. Something just out of sight was coming towards him. It was much louder than he would have thought anything that would fit under there could be. True, the sound of it's passage, more ambling than charging, seemed louder because of the many seasons' worth of fallen oak leaves there.

Little Head-Bob the owl sat on the black oak branch some thirty feet up from the ground. He listened with unease, even though he knew the odds of anything down there being a threat to him up here were pretty slim. He was learning gradually to not make rash moves over hasty conclusions about what were often, really, non-threats. 

More than once he had leapt from the safe comfortable nest into the roaring campfire, so to speak, just to get away from nothing. When he told this observation to his mate she responded that he had gotten awfully wordy, no doubt from spending too much time around humans. 




The old turtle paid attention to everything as he moved through the woods. He felt the brittle crackling of the dry leaves under his feet and the small sticks scraping along the sides of his shell. He heard the wind in the trees. He smelled the prickly pear fruit, just ripe, up there next to the sandstone place. 

He might enjoy that if he got up there, perhaps even this afternoon if he kept a steady pace. He couldn't see that far with his near sighted turtle-vision, but he could certainly almost taste the cactus fruit. Were prickly pears worth traipsing around out in the open up on the sandstone? He knew sometimes hungry coyotes howled there in the night.

He stopped and thought about that and about the great horned owl sitting in the tree on the edge of the little clearing just ahead. He drew into his shell then, closing the door in front of his eyes. 

It had been many seasons since he had, as a tiny shelled hatch-ling, crossed paths with a great horned owl. He had survived that then and he was pretty sure it was no real threat to him now. Still, it made him anxious. 

Turtles' long memories gave them plenty of things to think about, plenty of things to stay in about. At least Bobby's memories did. There in his cozy shell, insulated from outside concerns, he fell into a half dosing kind of sleep as the morning turned to noon.



Bob dreamt of walking the path through the woods on the hill, up towards the old sandstone. His perspective seemed curiously skewed. He was seeing the woods from a bit above what he thought of as his normal perspective. Still he was not up as high as say, a bird gliding through the trees searching for poor slow little things to pounce upon. He saw himself wondering why he had thought of it that way. Walking along in his dream he hummed an old tune about a broken arrow and a bottle of rain to make himself feel calmer, but then he couldn't remember why.

He bolted upright in his bed wide-eyed at the sound of one word, one syllable spoken loudly, somewhere in the room right there next to him. He looked over at his wife. Sound asleep, she had her head buried under the pillow. She had surely not made that sound. The room was silent now. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears. The Ring said nearly nothing. Just *

He got out of bed and walked into his son's room. Nothing. He walked down the stairway, through the living room, the dining room, the kitchen. Nothing. He blinked once, slowly, there in the kitchen, in the dark.



Bobby shook himself awake inside his shell and opened his eyes. It felt as though something had been reset in his mind, in his... feelings. Never mind, he saw himself think. He could feel it was warming up out there now and he opened his shell and started off through the underbrush.

He vaguely recalled being anxious about something that had startled him. Some sound, some sharp intake of information, unsought and unprepared for.  He stepped out of the concealing brush.

Owls didn't need to concern him now he thought, though every now and then one might come down to rasp stark warnings about the nature of crows and clack it's sharp beak at him. They tended to vocalize their opinions too much he thought. Most things did. The old turtle walked resolutely past the big owl's perch as it watched him now, in stony silence.

Bobby liked the mourning doves though. Their soft murmurings as they tucked each other in, to keep safe through the night, comforted him greatly sometimes. The sound meant something tender, and hopeful, and brave.

It reminded him of the promise of spring, heard and tasted even in the chill fall air as he would be going into some dark den to hibernate, perhaps never to come out again.

He smelled the sweet prickly pears again as he stepped out of the trees, up onto the warm sandstone, and into the full open sunlight. 
He heard the mourning doves cooing softly, somewhere, just behind him.







For your listening pleasure:
"Broken Arrow" Robbie Robertson, Acoustic cover by Mr. Brad Cole

 

Two Shots, Extra Sugar - Portland

He handed me crumpled page, hand written, both sides - "just a memory of mine. Was just so, I tell you three times".

I'm sitting inside Powell’s Books, in World Cup Coffee, and I think it must be summer, and some year not yet long past. A young woman in a Pokemon t-shirt sits poring through an overstuffed binder of game cards next to two guys who are discussing Stephen Hawking as to quantum graphics.  

The two men speak of "Project Xanadu", and what a fiasco that was. Another guy is talking to a kid who has a Canadian flag sticking out of his tartan plaid day-pack. The man is telling him about selling his BMW and buying the cargo bicycle of his dreams. It will have laser-filigreed meteorite-alloy disk brakes. The Xanadu-Hawking guys shake hands and leave, each drawing a phone as he goes. 


I'm watching Bob watching out the window, as a sidewalk river-current of humans, mostly, moves steadily by. Across from me, out of the blue, Pokemon girl says the cards go in a story she's writing. “Writing is good,” I say. She doesn’t say anything in response but her eyes look up towards me without looking at me. I worry that I’ve intruded or perhaps just said something stupid. I feel the otherness wafting off her, coming in waves, and I feel my own place in this realm shift again, just a bit. 

Outside, a girl with magenta hair and bright green cat-eye glasses stops on the sidewalk. Her bracelet matches her glasses as she reaches in a pocket of her orange dress to give a couple of folded bills to a guy in a wheelchair. He is wearing a POW/MIA ball cap. He smiles at her and they exchange a couple of sentences before moving on. As she starts off her stride catches, just a half-beat, as she’s thinking she’s just heard an owl, right here downtown of all places. Looking around I see eight laptops and six pads being used along the counter that sits against the big windows. There are way too many books being read in here to count. It is Powell's Books after all. No one else in here has seen her, or heard her wondering that.


"Today is a good day to wear green" Pokemon girl says to the young guy with the flag as he’s passing by. She asks him where the flag is from so he explains it's from Quebec, and worn in support of school loan debt protesters there. She blinks at him, that slow hardworking blink that signals shifting gears, jumping tracks, or coming to an abrupt halt and says “Something is coming.”

He quick, looks around behind him, thinking someone wants to pass. There’s no one there. “Excuse me?” he asks her - “Something is coming, something slow and huuuge” she says drawing it out making it huge-er, and then goes back to flipping the album's pages. Flag-kid glances around, catches my eye, gives me a questioning look. I try to give him one back that says “Hey, I’d listen to her”.


He looks back down at her. She's now inspecting a card with a magnifying glass, and he tells her to have a nice day. She just looks up, smiles and nods, as people sometimes do when they’re immersed in something on headphones. She is not wearing headphones.  All this time, Bob, he hasn't said a thing, made a motion, maybe breathed. He gets up now from his book, stretches a leg down and out behind him, then the other, like some big old bird of prey, then pats me on the shoulder, heading off to Mysteries. 

I wonder if all that just happened. Then I realize nothing unusual has just occurred, because this is Powell's, this is Portland. I take that impression out and roll it around to look at it. I wonder if part of that feeling comes from my Native American genes, or if it just means I truly belong here now. Either way “Something Big is coming”, said as one might speak of major geologic events or whole cultures disappearing, and yet said absolutely casually? It's really not much more of a surprise to us than “Tomorrow is another day”.

I pick up my coffee, pressed Sumatran, two shots, extra sugar, and go. Something large flies by overhead, on silent wings.

Heres a video from Portland:  Thomas Dolby, live at the Kink.FM Bing lounge - She Blinded Me With Science

Where I Have Just Come From - Letting Go & Holding On

    

Little Head-Bob ducked his head against the blowing rain, dug his talons into the bark of the elm bough, and leaned against the broad tree trunk. 

He could see into the house by a lamp left on in a bedroom. Something about the young man sleeping there seemed familiar or important, like an itch he couldn't reach to scratch. He sat and stared, mesmerized by the rising and falling as the boy breathed. Gradually the young owl began to doze, puffed up against the wind and rain.

Bob slept deeply, gone a long ways back in time, walking down his hometown street. It was probably about 1966, before they had moved out to the country, the old trees, and the owls. 

Walking home from school, he gazed at the Elm trees that lined the street, fingertip-twigs just touching as the branches arched completely across. He looked down the street and he knew right then that all this was going away. The sunlit leaf patterns on the street, the smell of tiger-lilies in a yard, the humming bird that kept stopping to stare in his face - the way it all was, would be gone in just a while.

He walked on down his street to the house he had lived in all through grade school, in the little town he had lived in all of his life. As he walked he said to himself, to the humming bird, and to the trees: "I promise, I will remember you".

Something startled the owl awake there in the quiet woods, nearly dawn, by the little house where the young man lived. The owl looked in at the bed. The boy wasn’t there. Little Head-Bob looked around him. He knew, and watched himself knowing; that the boy was gone and not coming back. All his people might not be coming back. This place would remain a while and then, it wouldn’t, at least not as he saw it now. 

And Little Head-Bob the owl began to see time.

As the morning sun warmed the woods Little Head-Bob dreamt he was a young man long ago, one of The People, standing in a place not far from where a young owl dozed. 

He looked down the hill. He saw a herd of deer grazing. Once or twice one of the bucks would stop and lift its head to look his way before turning again to the new grass. Farther over, down close to the river he saw the woods, recognized each tree there, and knew them by names only the breeze could say.

And then he knew that something was coming, something big like the wind. All this that had been for as long as The People had known, would soon be gone.

The young owl barely heard the man whisper: “I promise, I will remember you”.