Out of the Windswept Chaos

This weekend, the forces of nature dumped a big, wet, sloppy grey Nor'easter on the East Coast of the United States. It was the wrong weather at the wrong time of the year. I like that in a weather phenomenon.

George Augustus Williams: "A Snow Storm"

On Saturday morning, we awoke to a rainy grey that kept us snoozing with the covers up over our shoulders longer than usual. As the day continued, ice began falling, too, ticking on the windows when the wind gusted, and it started to whiten the colder surfaces: the hoods of cars and the tops of mailboxes. Little deposits of what looked like rock candy began to collect in the cups of dead leaves scattered across lawns.

It was a chilly, bone-deep gloom that kept people under quilts and in house coats for much of the day -- or in bed, altogether, well into the afternoon.

Hot Dog Man

The other day, I was rushing around for an end-of -the-day meeting at my school. The students were loudly and gleefully slamming lockers and scrambling toward the exits in buffalo-like heards and I stepped out of the side door with them. On the landing, a bunch of students had gathered into a crowd and were laughing and grabbing at pieces of paper handed to them from below. I looked to see what was up.

There stood a fellow dressed as a hot dog. He had a bun wrapped around him and a squiggly ribbon of mustard running up his belly. His face fitted into a little round hole and he wore thick black glasses. He was passing out brochures for a restaurant. The dialogue ran as follows:

The Weight of Darkness

If time is a line, let's lift off of it and sail up above it, back past years and decades, over fields scarred with muddy trenches and flashing insanely with artillery fire; over revolutionary battlefields, where men fire in formal lines, and above great, concrete-grey cities that rose out of small brown towns nestled next to rivers -- rivers that have watched and watched and watched, bringing life and then taking away the refuse of the hundreds and then the thousands and then the millions as years worked slowly around them all.

Then, let's alight, somewhere far away from the city, at the edge of a great forest, on a night in high summer, in a time when there were no machines but those bound with rope and cobbled together out of wood and propelled only by tired beasts -- a time when a few carried steel and many laboured at the plow to pay tithes to those few . . .

by Arthur Rackham

Paint me, then, a man sitting in his small hovel, children sleeping, wife sleeping since sunset. See that man peering through a crack in the boards, fearful, as he watches golden lights among the trees, flitting around, blinking brightly and then fading and then blinking again. He knows who they are: the stealers of dreams -- fairies who fly into the mouths of sleeping innocents, to take out their souls and to fly them around the gaping night in order to gather dreams.

Delusional Peace

The wind is cool and alive with (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) the rustle of the leaves and I look skyward from a cushioned (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) reclining chair on my deck. It couldn't be a (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) more beautiful day and I (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) think of my sons -- how lucky they are to live in a pretty town with honey-golden (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) sun in the fall. Like Coleridge, I revel in their chance to grow up in a (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) place with woods and a stream by which (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) they can run, far away fro the constant sounds of (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) traffic and far away from the (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) screech of the railway line I'd (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) watch from my window as a boy.

My dog lies at my feet and my honeyed green tea steams up (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) into the cool air. A good book waits, so I pick it up and crawl into its (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) pages to escape, enjoying the quiet and the tea and the (RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR) warmth of fur under my fingers.

Isivivable Are Among Women

When I was a boy, I saw Al Pacino in  . . . And Justice for All. Inspired by the film, I decided to be a lawyer when I grew up.

I was good with words, so everyone encouraged that. My mom, who always seemed to be convinced that one had to be handsome to be a lawyer (and seeing through the complimentary glasses that are standard-mom-issue), was sure that I was a double-threat.

What I saw in that film was a guy who was willing to sacrifice a career for what was right -- a guy who saw the flaws in the legal system and decided to stand up against them ("You're out of order! You're out of order! The whole trial is out of order!"), whatever the cost. The drama of this appealed to me, too -- as did the dramatic element of arguing a case in front of an audience.