On Turning 76

Which happens today, and so I’m remembering Sputnik, October 4 ,1957. I’m in the third grade, Mrs. Smith is reading the class a letter to the editor from the NY Times or, more likely, the Long Island Newsday. Our pb&j sandwiches sit warming in brown paper bags, intoxicating in the sunlight through the windows, and it seems the letter writer worried that the Russians were punching holes in outer space. Mrs. Smith’s reading is smug and dismissive, and we know that because, even at 7-years-old, you already understand smugness and dismissiveness. Those young, exquisitely tuned radar mature long begore we have words for the feelings. But we kids knew, despite her tone, that this was something big. Along with the authors of my picture books I wondered, even with extraordinary artist’s conceptions of gleaming metal streaking through the ionosphere, whether space travel might ever someday be possible. My favorite was the spaceship some artist rendered with giant sails to catch the solar wind.

JFK said we were going to go to the moon, even though we hadn’t a clue how to get there. And time itself rushes back at me as I am borne ceaselessly into the eternal now, like an eddy in the continuum in which my two shepherds, a boy and a girl, thank you, have taught me to dwell. Even as the past recedes into uncertainty or further into dimming consciousness—like an entire world carried in the arms of dissociative amnesia—not sleeping so much as disappearing.

That dream I had on climbing back into bed this morning with Cassie up since 5:30 and there she is out in the rain-soaked yard throwing balls for the dogs & drinking coffee from the spanking new, space-age coffee maker, and I think through the early morning grogginess how infinitely sweet to climb back into bed for another 15 minutes, but waken instead an hour later, awaken out of the most profound, most important dream of my life, where the key to everything is made clear, including the answer to Existentialism and Fermi’s Paradox and why chickens behave that way, and what was there before the Big Bang, and getting the simultaneity of that vast something and nothing that the Big Bang expanded into. And for a moment I have it, the answer to everything, and my heart-light, if I had one, glowing red. And in the next moment, the dream along with its Rosetta stone is gone, poof, vanished the moment I lift my head from the pillow.

The day will proceed with or without me, so an hour later I pull on my windbreaker against the rain and we climb one of those long, steep, hills in the Vermont National Forest just beyond my front door where I hike with the dogs two or three times a day. But my heart is racing much too fast at the top of the hill, and I’m gasping for breath, what is this? I hear Henry James saying, “Here it is at last, that distinguished thing.”

I thought, when it comes, it will be like a bailing out, unforgivable, leaving so much undone, leaving the world in such an unholy mess. Yes, of course, but also the relief of . . . just . . . leaving, like the pleasure I found sneaking out on an ethereal yet interminable Handel opera that summer at Glimmerglass after sitting for 2 1/2 hours, and it’s only the beginning of act three and the counter-tenor is waxing melismatic, and look, I run into Paul Newman, really, my singular brush with stardom, in the entryway, both of us bailing at the same moment, each too polite to speak. But look again. Out here there are real stars in the night sky and the air is cool and fragrant. It’s as if some sweet chariot really does swing by overhead and you get to choose whether or not to grab hold, to be swept up into the heavens, or to go on with things here on Earth. This time you choose living. How would the dogs get back home? Who would go to the Coop for #4 coffee filters and tart cherry juice? Who would strum the guitar under Cassie’s fiddle tunes?

We are all animals bewildered to be surrounded by humans. The bewildering strangeness of humans, their mirrors and angles and posturing.

According to the atomic timeline sketched out by Samantha Harvey in her utterly brilliant novel (poetry, really) Orbital, Buddha appears about 3 seconds before midnight at the last fraction of time in the first atomic calendar year, and Christ at about 1 second later. Then, if I may invent my own list, in the last half second of Atomic New Year’s Eve, Mozart and industrialization and Rachel Carson and Martin Buber, cave dwellers drawing bison on the cave walls and Babe Ruth & Napoleon & Kierkegaard, Attila the Hun and Jonas Salk, Kobayashi Issa ‘s World of Dew and Potemkin Villages,  Billy Joel and Odessa and Caravaggio and Tesla, Tolstoy and the Met Gala and the Crypto Dinner, democracy and dictatorships, the Tang Dynasty and Wu-Tang clan, Guttenberg and the Terminator, Toscanini and the Eroica and David Bowie in The Man Who Fell to Earth.

As the atomic calendar page turns over to year two, we have only just about 4 or 5 months to go before the sun burns itself out and takes us with it. It will be May on that calendar, as it is right now on ours. My birthday month.

In the meantime, there’s the pull of stars that don’t even exist yet. Plenty of time to get the world right.  If only it would stop raining. But oh, the irises coming, salmon on the grill and instead of rockets, the twin rockers on the porch.