A Tree Out Back

There was a massive tree in my back yard. The trunk was a good ten feet around, and the nobby knuckles of its roots filled almost the entire yard. The bark was smooth and white, hard like sinews of muscle and bleached bone, nicked here and there with deep black cuts and dark red notches. And most notable of all, the tree had made a strange twist as it had sprouted, as though tightening its grip on the soil, and the contours of this twist could be followed round and round the trunk and high up into the branches, determining the shape of its whole long tortured growth.

A rumor had spread that there was some sort of special enchantment about this tree, and people came from all around to see it and to reach out hesitating hands to touch its cool surface. In the early days, whole crowds had come to see the tree, coming day and night, and there had been a constant carnival of noise and excitement in the backyard. But over time, the rumors had subsided, and people just came every now and then, alone or in small groups. Touching the tree seemed to calm them, make them think, and they would leave quieted, stepping carefully over the roots in bare feet and treading off lightly across the lawn, taking the quiet away with them as they left.

One day I was having breakfast with my neighbor, and we were watching from the kitchen window as a family came to visit the tree. The shade was deep under the tree, and there was a glow of morning light in the grass beyond the shade. The mother had brought her three sons to the foot of the tree, pulling the smallest one up the driveway in a red wagon. We could see her explaining to them that it was okay to touch the tree and showing them by reaching her hand out and touching the tree herself, but we couldn't hear the words that she was saying.

I took a sip of my coffee and I leaned towards the window and looked up at where the higher branches of the tree got tangled in the sun. I turned to my neighbor and I told her that the real miracle in all of this was that while I knew that the tree was here for everyone's sake, disseminating its peace and its peculiar wisdom on Earth, I also somehow knew that it had grown here only for me, that it was the capstone of my life, the thing that would lull me quietly to sleep in the end. I couldn't reconcile these things, but I felt it, I knew it, every time I looked out the window at the tree, and it was almost more than my heart could take. I asked her if she understood. She shook her head no, but she smiled and reached out her hand.

Grace Note

I was working on a large memoir, trying to recount every little significant detail that I could remember, trying to put it all down on paper, and there was one moment in particular that I wanted to capture as vividly as I could. It was a morning many years ago when I was returning home for the funeral of an old friend. It was just before dawn, and I was taking a ferry across a large open lake. The passengers were all standing there in silence lined up in a row along the railing, looking down into the water. I could just make out the shapes of mountains on the far shore against the dark blue backdrop of the stars. As we headed towards a narrow channel between two rocky cliff faces that separated this section of the lake from another broader portion of it, I saw the glow of the sunrise behind the rocks, and I knew that the sun was waiting there on the other side of the lake.

And it was that moment of passing through the channel that I wanted to capture, that anticipation of the sun on the other side and how it suddenly hit me with the full devestating impact of the loss of my friend, leaving me to feel completely alone on the Earth, even the way home navigated through strange dark waters. So I added an improvised flute player to the scene. As we passed into the channel, another passenger standing towards the back of the ferry took out a flute from his brown duffel bag and began to play a single soft note, high and mournful. And I thought that I could grab this note out of the air and use it. If I could establish the key that the note was in and the precise intervals at which it reverberated between one rock face and the other, I could place the exact dimensions of this narrow channel directly into the reader's mind through the use of a single onamonapoetic phrase. I could put them right there in the scene with the light and the loss and that lingering sound of the note fading on the air as we emerged on the other side of lake to the low mist, the huge sky, the land in the unobtainable distance, and someone standing far off on a dock across the water waving a lantern to guide our way.

A Sharpened Blade

It all started with an explosion. I was making my way through the middle of town, and there was a single engine plane droning overhead in the placid blue sky, and suddenly everyone on the street was looking up at the spreading burst of black smoke where the plane had been shot down. There was a long interval of silence where everything seemed to hold quiet and still, and then the silence broke with everyone screaming and scattering and trying to run from the falling pieces of wreckage and debris. No one could afford the risk of stopping to look to see what had shot the plane down, but as we all scrambled for safety, there was an overwhelming sense that something was coming, like the unheard sound of a thousand boots approaching in perfect lockstep.

The attack went on into the next day with random percussions heard throughout the night on the outskirts of town. The invaders started rounding people up as they marched through the streets. I was taken prisoner and brought to a bombed out Spanish church where they were holding several people. The ceiling had been broken open, exposing it to the sky, and there were large chunks of stone and tile scattered around. I was sitting on the floor against a wall with the other prisoners, all of us with our heads hung and the sweat and dirt and soot covering our faces. There was a metal grate just beneath my feet, and I could hear the sounds of people screaming out in pain coming from somewhere below, along with pleas for mercy that were abruptly cut short by the sharp pop of a pistol.

And yet, there was a strange benevolence about our conquerors, as though all of this were being done for our benefit, trimming the weak from our population and honing us like a sharpened blade. A rosy blonde secretary smiled as she handed out blankets to the prisoners that were herded past her in a line, and the officer overseeing the distribution of the blankets patted each prisoner warmly on the back and leaned close to whisper smooth words of comfort to them as they took their blankets and nodded their feeble and terrified thanks before being ushered away to whatever awaited them off somewhere in the dark.

When the moment came for me to step up and take my blanket and this coarse lump of folded brown fabric was laid across my hands and I felt that tender thump against my shoulder, I was determined not to play the part of the pathetic supplicant that the situation seemed deliberately engineered to compel me to accept. I stopped and raised my head and held my glare on the officer, my teeth grit and my jaw quivering. The smile slowly faded from the officer's face as he stared past the sweat and the dirt and saw the anger in my eyes. And then his eyes shifted away from mine as he made a gesture to someone behind me, and I felt the sharp crack of the butt of a rifle against my back, shoving me forward with my blanket to join the other prisoners who'd gone on ahead.

Little Blue Suit

I was at a backyard picnic, and a toddler in a dark blue suit and striped tie came toddling over to me with a smile beaming on his chubby round face, exclaiming that I was his "best friend" and reaching his arms out wide for me to catch him. I knew that this was my son, a son that I had never had, as though he had toddled his way out of some other life that I had never lived. Everyone turned in surprise as he called out to me, and they chuckled over what he had said. I scooped him up as he came to me, and I hoisted him up by my shoulder so that he could see over everyone's heads to a spot in the shade of the house where the hosts of the party were releasing dozens of red and yellow balloons into the air. As the balloons sailed up into the clear blue sky, the boy tapped me on the back of the head with his little hand to get my attention, and he pointed towards the balloons with his stubby finger, and he nudged my chin trying to get me to look, and I turned and squinted as the balloons sailed past the glaring afternoon sun.

There was something in these gestures, this tapping on the back of the head, this nudging of my chin, that gave me a glimpse of the man he would become. I knew that over time, he'd get bigger and older and come to match me in height and stature, and there would be those grudges between us, as there tends to be with fathers and sons, something distant and awkward. But I also knew that this moment would stay with me, that open-hearted declaration of friendship, that gentle nudging of the chin, and despite anything else, it would always be between us. So we both beamed and grinned with the sunlight in our eyes, and we watched as the balloons sailed off over the tops of the trees and the roofs of the houses.

Over for Dinner

We went over to the pastor's house for dinner, and after the meal I sat in an armchair by the bay window in the front room and I watched as the snowfall tapered off and the traffic hissed by out on the wet road and the last light of the day broke through a frosty cluster of rose tinted clouds. One of the pastor's sons came up to me, his second oldest, the blonde one, a little leaner and gawkier than his brother, a little more troubled around the eyes. Around the table after dinner he had heard them mention that I liked to write, and he told me that he wanted to write as well. I turned from the window to listen. Maybe the kid had some real ideas. But he just made some sweeping gestures with his hands and spoke vaguely about the feelings engendered in him by dozens of books he'd read and movies he'd seen. He had the necessary passion, but like me, he was still struggling to find something to say.

I nodded along until it got too dark to keep sitting there in the front room. I got up and passed restlessly through the house. In the back there was a dim little mud room with a vinyl shade pulled down over the window in the door. All the shoes were lined up there in a row along the wall beneath the coat rack. I pulled on my coat and went out back down the snow covered steps. The back yard was encroached by a dense woods of stark grey trees, and there was a basketball hoop at the very back of the yard. There was a smooth depression in the ground in front of this basketball hoop, and I could tell that there was pavement under the snow. This small court was lit by the crossing glow of the back porch lights of the neighboring houses. The net and the post and backboard were all covered in snow. Only the white outlines of things remained, thicker shaped and softer around their edges.

A long shadow stretched across the snow as someone came out from the house next door, and a basketball came silently sailing through the air towards the hoop. It dropped through the net, barely brushing any of the snow off of the rim. The ball left little dark divots on the pavement as it bounced away from the hoop. The pastor's oldest son had slipped out the door behind me without a sound and he leapt at the ball, catching it mid-bounce. The snow began to fall again as he spun in the air, reaching the ball out towards the net. It dropped through with a whisper and the neighbor kid caught it from underneath before it had a chance to hit the pavement again.

I brushed off one of the deck chairs that had been left out on the patio, and I settled down to watch. It was really the snow that made it something, slowed it down, gave it a certain grace. The pastor's two youngest kids came out from around the corner of the house by the driveway, and they stopped to gawk and stare at the game for a second before they turned their attention to consulting over tiny discoveries in the palms of their mittens and rolling the first tentative lumps of a snowman along a strip of ground by the fence where the frozen soil of their mother's flower garden was buried.