Breaking the Wave

It wasn’t that long of a heat wave.
The afternoon air hit like blast from an opening furnace when you walked outside, but the ground didn’t crack, and the grass underfoot scarcely crunched. The cicada song was persistent but not yet maddening.
Still, when the thunderstorm hit on Thursday night, it was an event.
Jack and I sat on the screen porch, watching the wind pick up. The leaves rattled inside out, and then the branches high in the persimmon began thrashing back and forth. The first flares of lightning might have been no more than a streetlight coming on, or headlights sweeping a lawn, but then the flashes became insistent, and thunder followed. I went out to the driveway and turned around, looking at the sky, the storms flaring west and southeast.
“Are you doing a rain dance?”
“Sort of.”
The rain started as the hard pelt of single drops, and then the full storm arrived, rain blowing and pounding, filling the gutters, running in the street. Limp plants seemed to ease lower under the weight, drooping closer to the soil but with a resilience that promised a fresh morning.
The lightning got pretty intense. Jack delights in storms, the light-and-sound spectacle. I like the approach better, the waiting, the held-breath time. I still get a little nervous when the lightning is close. My mother’s house was struck by lightning and burned to the ground when she was a child. We never took lightning lightly. Maybe having my sister and I come down from our upstairs bedrooms and sit on the couch wearing our rubber boots as insulators was unnecessary – still, I felt safe.
The storms rolled past and the rush of cool air that followed reminded me that it is late July, soon to be August. The dog days are still ahead, but September is in sight.

Certifiable

Thanks to instructors Steve Raper (who took this photo) and Wayne Jones and the Lake Townsend Yacht Club ... and a great class of fellow novices ...
Jack and I have been certified for small boat sailing.
Along the way, we had some frustration and lots of fun, and are now reading sailing magazines and plotting our course to a boat of our own.

Learning to Fall Before You Fly

Falling over backwards was not a skill I ever hoped to master.
Not at those leadership seminars, trusting that I would be caught by a "team” member I barely knew. Certainly not on the spring-loaded trampolines of long-ago gym classes.
Here I was, standing on a tippy sliver of fiberglas, pulling the aluminum mast and a blanket of sail down after me as I headed for the green water of Lake Townsend.
I cleared the sail ok on the Pico, but struggled to lift myself over the stern of the plastic boat, shaped more like a sea kayak than a sailboat.
The AquaFin was another story. This flat little creature seemed like it should be stable, but other students had struggled to swim around the boat before it “turned turtle.” One student, the smallest of us, ended up standing on the hull of the overturned boat and forcing her slight weight against the daggerboard until slowly, finally, the mast lifted and the water poured out of the sail.
I pulled the AquaFin over hard but came up under the sail, pushing against the blue mass and knowing that I’d never get clear in time to catch the daggerboard – but I did. The boat grudged its way back to upright, and I clawed, squirmed and dragged myself back into the cockpit, one foot tangled in the lines and rudder.
“You find out what you can do when you have to,” observed Steve Raper, with the considerable calm of a longtime instructor and one who did not intend to end up in the water this evening.
Our class of eight was on the water Tuesday night for the second evening of an seven-day sailing class sponsored by city parks and conducted by volunteers from the Lake Townsend Yacht Club. More later at the News & Record, www.news-record.com, where I'm doing a Your Game column.

Shifting the Curve

If you scroll way, way down to the bottom of this blog, you'll see an icon about the MIT blogger survey. It doesn't take long, and you'll become part of the statistical bank showing who's who in blogging.
I was particularly interested in the part of the survey that dealt with social networks - the people you know, who's in your family, how you met them.
Most all my contacts were made offline - I've met so many folks over the course of a careeer in newspapers and now in teaching that the "rich man, poor man, beggarman, thief/doctor, lawyer, Indian chief" are part of the people-scape of my life.
Thanx and a hat tip (anyone remember that?) to Bora ... be sure to check in at the Tarheel Tavern now making merry at Scrutiny Hooligans.

Try This

I’ve been playing in the fields of the dictionary lately, a result of reworking a poetry collection yet again. Some of the poems are years old – back and back and back – past Carolina to West Virginia and memory before. I’ve spliced and splintered, put new wine in with the old, hoping this tempers the soft with the sharp, the discursive with the abrupt. Hoping the whole will blend and layer, revealing allusions the way sycamores (a childhood tree) and crape myrtles (my beloved Southern tree, even more than magnolia) each unfurl themselves from themselves.
“Wake” is the operative word, in all its derivations, a fine clipped single syllable that expands in all directions.
Poems leave wakes. Words, too. A word is no small thing, I think Edith Hamilton said, or so my memory has it, as variable as any word. The smaller the word, it seems, the more leeway. It can fly many flags.
And so to pirate, and this entry. The dictionary’s lovely forests part to reveal that the root for piracy is peiran, Greek for to attack or to attempt. And that makes me think immediately of essay, and assay, the same word, at root. To try something, to weigh its value, to seek out its true nature. Both from the Latin exagium, a weight.
Here we are in the age of blogs, a word with a much less elegant derivation, but like the essayists of old, bloggers test and try, pry and occasionally run up the Jolly Roger and borrow what’s needful – testing reality, striking off sparks.

July

In honor of July, an excerpt from "Mayapple," one of a pair of linked stories in Fidelities. The story was first published in the online journal "Ray's Road Review," edited by Chris Duncan whose blog can be accessed at left.

Gerard and Kay are climbing up the wooded hillside, away from the city and the heat and the thickened air shimmering among the buildings, as if the flood-prone river had come up out of its banks into the valley.
The mills are on July shutdown, quenched, joining the permanent rusty silence of so many along the river.
He tries to hide his laboring breaths. Kay climbs without difficulty. She speaks occasionally but firmly, like a tour guide, pointing out a blue damselfly, the shell of a cicada where it had climbed a stem to molt.
“A deer bedded here,” she says, and he nods. The grass is pressed down in an oval space that looks too small for a deer. It looks like a dog’s bed.
Then they are in the place where the may apples bloomed. The leaves droop.
Kay turns them over, finding the yellowish fruit. She picks two and hands one to him.
“Here, Adam, it can’t hurt you.”
He takes it between his thumb and forefinger, remembering tales that it was a tonic to heal all, that it was a poison by degrees.
“Is it safe?”
“Don’t trust a country girl?” She nibbles at her fruit. “I used to eat these all the time.”
One side of her mouth curls higher than the other as she smiles, a rueful look.
Gerard stands outside himself, an artist considering his self-portrait. A soft man, with thinning sandy hair and weak shoulders. A man without distinction. Softening from within around the lie in his flesh, like poison in the fruit.
He bites into the may apple, trembling with fatigue or his own recklessness. The taste is wild, astringent, spicy, with an overtone of carrion -- at once sweet and bitter, hidden, to be found out.