Field Note: Tucking the Day to Bed on the Sound Side

The day ended with a red orb descending on the sound waters.

The sunset stretched itself across the water in long trembling ripples while terns swooped and purple martins darted visible through the last light. A pelican sailed past with the solemn competence of something that has been doing this much longer than we have. Crab-pot buoys buoyed.

And the mullets did what mullets do.

Plip. Plip. Plip. Plop.

Aspiring, apparently, toward flight and joyous to fail.

Sometimes not getting what we want is a gift and a joy. Maybe the trying is the joy and the gift. Always trying. Almost grasping. Maybe that is how we win.

The boy and I sat on the pier with the dog and wandered backward through time. Germany. Russia. Britain. Wars. Empires. Older empires. Mongols. Medieval clans and castles. Falconers and horses and jousting. Weapons, clothes, music, hairstyles, jewelry. Gods and witches. Old beliefs meeting new ones and people trying, as people always have, to figure out what was true and who belonged to whom. The great human sorting. Always.

I would not want to live there.

But I like to look through the windows made by my mind.

I would like to see the Aztecs before their world was broken open. The peoples of North America before so much was displaced, renamed, paved over, forgotten. Old Tibet in its isolation. Ordinary people inhabiting worlds that now exist mostly in fragments, artifacts, stories and our imperfect imagining. Parts of the middle east that were.

Always the great sorting.

I’m not idealistic about any of the worlds. Every system was made to benefit one and was always hard for others.

But somewhere off from the center, in the ignored areas, there was culture and community and families and traditions I would have liked to have seen. Maybe experience.

Maybe that is part of what makes history so compelling. Whole civilizations once believed their present was permanent.

Permanence never was.

Behind us, a full moon was rising. In front of us, the sun was dropping to below us. One always above and something always below. Sometimes the moon cheats this. Tricky moon. Tonight, two stood between them: a woman, a boy and a dog talking about the rise and fall of things.

Then another mullet jumped.

Plip.

The air had gone cool. Finally. In August.

The dog was calm.

Nobody needed anything from me for a few more minutes.

There was nowhere else I needed to be.

We were talked out. Finally.

An ordinary Wednesday night at the end of August, tucked quietly into bed.

And somehow, this mattered.