Rye

--An eight hour stint, babysitting, like a very extended play date, the son of a friend, that boy my son’s friend.

The same age, these little boys.

They wear each other out almost as much as they do me.

--I sit on the picnic table at the park, watching them, playing with sticks and toy swords, sliding the slides, swinging the swings, merry go rounding.

Like brothers, the way we’re all brothers, not Biblically, or Quaranically, not in the eyes of any god, and not brothers in arms. Brothers in company, in care, the way everything is reduced for a child.

The way that which is immediate, you accept, especially if you’re young.

And on this Georgia winter day that is like a fall day in the places I’m from, I sit on the picnic table in the weakened sun and I watch them, on the playground equipment, in the leaves on the floor of the forest beyond, and they might as well be brothers.

And I watch other kids fill up the park, and I see how they mingle and how they share. My son handing his sword to a kid who doesn’t speak English, or at least won't speak it now. A bigger kid, but not by much.

At first, I think that the kid will reject it, but then he carries it around for awhile

Later, that kid embraces my son as we are leaving. That simple and sincere communication.

And what I wish for, it is that the world was full of only kids and Catchers.

--Earlier, the three of us go to the store, we buy food for the limping black cat that is hiding in the bushes close to the apartment.

We place the food and disappear, hope that the cat comes out to eat.

Inside, we say a prayer for it, the two little boys and me, that one day it will walk well and that it will not know hunger.

And we look into a marble, a crystal ball, and we think we see something there, the good future of that good cat.

And secretly, I check the food. That cat hasn’t eaten. Who knows where it has gone. Not tame enough to catch and cage and take to some kind minded vet. A cat like many I’ve know for who there is no easy answer. Thin and with that messed up foot, fearl and furitive and desperate. A cat close to that inevitable that we all reach but want to avoid, those final days nobody, not even those with courage, wants to witness.

Something you don’t see in a crystal ball, not if you’re in control of the vision.

--And A, formally of LA, this friend I’ve had almost as long as anybody, this girl with whom I’ve never slept, who has seen me through two marriages and three loves, who knew me before I knew my first ex wife, she calls in the late last night.

Her voice on the machine in the morning: I need to get away. I’m going to come and stay with you.

This mirage of escape I sometimes hear from her. And it’s never been true, but for all I know, she is en route. The way patterns break finally because they must. Because life can't sustain them.

Her marriage, this new one, shaky, those old problems, the same problem over and over. The way we always have the same problems, in some guise or another, with people we try to stay intimate with.

(And so if they ask you: should you really stay married for the children? you should answer yes, because your next marriage, if you believe in marriage, it will reach this point too; this hump, you’ll either get over it with someone or never get over it; [the same thing is always waiting in the middle of the road; you put it there, you ought to know] you’ll either always stop in the midst of the journey and start over again or you’ll finally make it past that stopping point—so why not now, this time, with this person, for the sake of the children; both of you, you’ve got it, that fucked up thing that you bring to dismantle whatever you’ve mantled; you hit that point and say, jesusgod, I better find another person to be with... but you’ll carry that thing with you to that person too, and that person, damn it, that person too will have a thing to put down in the path that you thought was meant for you both; so yeah, for the sake of the kids, really try to get over it this time and not with the next person—either that, or go it alone, give up on that kind of combining [Happy Near Valentine’s Day]).

She calls as she has done from time to time, saying she will come to hide from the world with me.

As if I hide from the world.
Though it may be said I’m quite distant from hers. Maybe that’s good enough.

One of the smartest girls I know, this girl, which makes her one of the smartest people I’ve known, for all the great minds I can think of having known personally are, but a very few, those of women.
Terribly smart.
As terrible as it can be to be smart like that.
All that legitimate pain.

--This girl, she scares me because she is always right about me, the kind of things people tell your about yourself and your situations that you don’t want to believe. But ought to.

None of the doctors healing themselves.

And the old fantasy that we had that I would get rich and save her, this girl I’ve known more than a decade and never slept with, whose mouth has been against my mouth but a few times.

So that we are beyond the question of seduction, that old cycle no longer valid.

This character from an F Scott Fitzgerald novel, this person that lives closer to literature than anybody I know, as awful as that is in reality.

--And the innocence with which I used to believe in what I could imagine:
My back so broad that all the waters of the sea rose and fell against it but no wetness came through to the other side, whoever huddled there dry and safe.

That kind of impossible shelter.

--What I imagine, in the park, but before then too, what I’m always imaging, it’s some kind of a place into which everyone I care for can run.

And, you know, live happily ever after.

The way I’ve come to see it, it’s all steel siding and spike, the only kind of Eden I can imagine.

This trail of women and children. The cows and that limping cat.

--All the kids movies we're watching, all the ones worth a damn, they're built around something sad. The only ones that stuck with me, sad ones. The only ones that made me grow, if growing is good, somehow sad. Tears as nutrient.

--And I know how we’d get bored in there, that spiked Eden.
The children becoming their lord of the flies games.
The women missing the grand swap of seduction.
The cat missing the death of the butterfly.

And me, when I pray for myself, what I pray is not for peace, but that I may find ease in peace. That when it comes to rest on me, as it does from time to time, that I do not have the urge to run, to rock, to dredge up some old tension or create some new one.

Peace for us all and ease in peace.