A Southward Tide

Poems, essays and excerpts. A favorite quote or two. An observation. A compendium of imagery. A dream analysis.

Tag: United States

November 26, 2013

Buzzards

After high school, I vowed never to return to Palm Beach, a thin sliver of island that reminded me of all things lost in the cranky cogs of adolescence: wide-eyed jubilance, minnows and unconditional parental love (Later I learned their boundless love was not as mythic as teenagedom suggested. But that took decades…)

The tropical sun was reserved for holidays when I could loosen the vice grip of New York City and laziness became art: poolside reading, Dad’s cooking, twelve-hour sleeps. Over cocktails, I hated it here – how fake, weird, racist, stupid, greedy the inhabitants, how soporific the lifestyle. Couldn’t you just roll over and die in the blaze?

Then on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, a conspiracy of fates shipwrecked me. Moored by family illness and eventually love, I stayed, bought a house over the bridge and had some kids of my own.

Time rounded those reactive edges that tugged me to and fro, that trapped in the dooming treason of choice, the youthful delusion that life is anything other than the reinforcement of habits.

And slowly, the world unfolded before my eyes.

The buzzards float along the currents of the winds, hundreds of feet in the sky. In late afternoon, they swarm on buildings that edge the Intercoastal, covering the mirrored windows with hunched bodies. Actually, they are no more buzzards than butterflies, but rather two species of vultures: the turkey vulture and the black vulture. The former is the larger of the two with a red face and beak, while the latter has a smaller wingspan, a gray face and beak.

Egrets peck through the palmetto grasses and troops of white ibis with hooked bills hang out on the curb of my neighborhood. Often bobbing alone on buoys, pelicans sometimes fly in formation along the crashing surf.

By the glittering blue of the Intercoastal, a hawk beats its wings above the water where old timers on fold-out beach chairs cast their lines, reeling in whatever they can hook, snook if they are lucky. Every evening the sky blooms purple and neon pink; the moon rises over the ocean. And in my garden, hibiscus flower, three types of gardenia and some sweet almond vines.

The two Vanda orchids hanging from my front porch remind me of my father. His grave is shaded by banyans in the old cemetery. Above him, the buzzards circle.

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October 31, 2013

A Spectral Rooster

My second year at the University of Chicago, I moved into an apartment owned by my roommate’s father, a professor emeritus of Arabic Literature. Years before they had purchased the flat on the cheap as the previous tenant had been murdered there by her husband. She had been a sculptor; traces of clay were still visible between the floorboards.

It was summer in Chicago. A few days before the other roommates arrived, my boyfriend helped me move into the grimy walk-up that had been uninhabited for a decade. I had just purchased a single size futon, presumably to torture him. He squeezed next to me on the dusty floor of a bedroom with no air conditioning. That first night, we somehow convinced ourselves  that a human size rooster would soon be seen walking by, its sharpened spurs clicking on the floor, pausing at our bedroom door long enough to turn a feathered head and merciless gaze towards us. Terrified, we ran off to sleep at his mother’s house. So visual was this fear that even today I hold a crystalline image of that rooster in the mind’s eye.

A few years after college, I traveled to New Zealand with the same poor man. We were camping outside of Queenstown and walked to town one evening to watch The Ring. Later back at camp, I bawled in fear. The images on the screen, the images in my head, were no different than reality.  I would not have been surprised to see that evil child’s ratty wig of long black hair and bent arm snaking though the zipper of our tent

From childhood I have carried through the concept that if a negative thought alights on my mind but for a second, that thing, awful, tragic, or terrifying, will be willed into being. It began with the ‘Bloody Mary’s’ chanted in front of third grade bathroom mirrors and continued with ghost stories, roosters and later the sense of impending doom that surrounded almost all of my romantic relationships.

Unfortunately, I have not maintained the logically opposite belief: that wonderful and enchanted things will happen to me if I dare to think about them. And neither have I done much to dispel the negatives. The notion of creating phantoms, tragedies and car accidents with the mind is an intoxicating delusion. But today is Halloween, so you’ll forgive me if I choose to resurrect nostalgic ghosts – spectral roosters walking bandy-legged through the past.

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October 29, 2013

On Jadedness and Magic

I began feeling jaded during teenage hood. As the magic of childhood faded and life started to appear in all its glory, a wretched unjust affair, I experienced the common symptoms: eye-rolling, sarcasm, over-sensitivity, unfounded hatred of existing power structures, a thirst for independence occurring alongside a pathological desire to feel part of a group (my peers – unfortunately also teenagers). Then freedom! Graduation! And all sorts of new things started pouring in again. College. Undesirable behaviors. After experiencing everything there was to experience in a short span, and then moving to New York, activity and boredom capital of the world, now I was jaded again. My twenties were a decade of ugly shiftless feelings, disappointments and ebbing wonderment.

Much has already been said about my generation’s inability to grow up. We have squeezed the last drops of collegiate experience well into our thirties to thirsty, spiritually bereft results. We wait till almost middle age to have children. And to what end? Now a mother of two, I understand that psychic reconciliation with one’s own mother and father can only occur after a few years of interrupted sleep, bathroom floods and crayoned walls. How can we forgive the twisting directions of our own lives if we cannot understand our own incapacity as parents to shield a child from the arrows of existence? Since we cannot forgive, we cannot move on. We remain stunted teens with crow’s feet and graying hair.  

But more importantly, we remain jaded. I’m not suggesting that everyone needs children to perceive magic again. For others, a dog (or three) will suffice. Maybe a pet armadillo. A backyard teepee. Or a scuba tank and a fish-eye lens. But let’s just say: the magic has always been here. We just closed our eyes. And jadedness is this willing escape from the whole picture of life into the comfortable womb of resentment. It is a momentary death as we turn from brilliance to count circles on the ceiling.

Maybe the only way out is not through but on top of – flip it, turn it backwards, throw your life on its head. A call to all fellow werewolves, midnight flutists, bird whisperers and underwater stargazers (you know who you are) –  to paraquote Ghandi – be the magic you want to see in the world.

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