How Thirsty?

This morning, the wind carried a light snow...a friend said that maybe it was the moon's punishment to us. Another said perhaps it was the confetti from the "bomb."

My head's off kilter (has been since last night at my short but sweet birthday celebration), and my nephew jokes that maybe the tides in my head have been affected.

Maybe all of our tides have been.

I haven't read enough on the matter to make an intellectual claim or take a particular "side" if you will, but here's one viewpoint. I don't care which word you use: we battering rammed our moon, and it doesn't leave a good feeling in my stomach.

*****

Yesterday, my sons started my birthday off right. They woke early, biked to the store, bought me a few thoughtful gifts (along with an appropriate card), lit a candle in a Starbucks double-stuffed cinnamon roll and sang me happy birthday. 10am: a great start to a birthday morning.

By 3pm, I'd had a few good hours alone, running racks at the poolhall. I wasn't shooting spot on, but to focus on aim, angles, the follow-through of the moment without worry for what I should be doing or haven't done...it was exactly what I needed. In pool, you can't think past right now. It's my meditative sport. So, even though I went outside to a dead battery, I still felt pretty good. I got a jump and headed off to find the boys---who were skating around tiny MQT---so we could go pick up our Chinese take-out: the birthday dinner.

Not on 3rd street, not by the Commons, not at Lower Harbor. Huh. Maybe the parking garage? Nope, but across the street---at the Baptist church---there's a cop running around the corner of the building. Interesting. I'll pull in there.

I park. I wait. I call a friend. Nothing ever happens. I leave.

I drive to Picnic Rocks. I park. I watch the waves. I call another friend to thank him for his birthday wishes. We're catching up when my call waiting beeps and officer bearer-of-birthday-ruining-news tells me he has my sons at the police station; they've just thrown an egg at a car.

At the police station, I won't talk to the boys. Won't look at them. I stand stage left, waiting for the couple to come back from washing their car. Of course, I have to reimburse them. Finally, they walk out of the sunlight and down into the basement of the police station.

I shake their hands, apologize, say how I regret to meet them this way. I look in my wallet. The 10 I thought was there? Spent at the poolhall. I apologize again, and from here this is the dialogue:

Me: I'm sorry, I don't have any cash. Can I get your address so I can mail the money?

Car owner (looks at me, looks over my shoulder and through the glass double-doors where my boys sit hunched over in a row of hard, plastic chairs nailed to a wall): Well...actually...I'm a pastor at a church. Instead, why don't you and your sons come to our church.

Me: Oh, thanks, but no. I'd rather just pay for the carwash.

Pastor: Well, I think that you should...

Me: No, really, it's not that I don't have faith, I just don't adhere to any organized religion. There's nothing for me at your church.

Pastor: Well, I really think that there is...

Me: No. Really. There's not. If I could just get your address...

Later, when another mother (the boys' friend who bought the eggs) asked him to forgive her son for his part in things, he said, "Oh, of course! It's my business to forgive," and maybe it was wrong of me to laugh/grumble. But really?

Needless to say, we didn't get Chinese food. But it's also not everyday you get bribed by a baptist pastor. It's not everyday you're pulling out from a parking garage, see what seems to be a chase in progress, and later realize you were a witness to the crime for which you're now intimately involved, and certainly being judged.

Oh, crazy useless moon. Crazy useless tides.

****

Finally---and on a happier note: Tim O'Brien's visit to my Creative Writing class went pretty well. Clearly, he's more of a public speaker than a reader...in fact, at his reading, he read only two very short pieces and spent the better part of an hour and a half talking about the war, the process of writing, his son pissing in a mesh waste basket. All anecdotal, all funny or sad--in some way engaging, but not the prose I was expecting.

Either way, he reminds me of my dad. Not just his war stories and his feelings about Vietnam, but his mannerisms. That he needed to go smoke between classes before he could speak to my students. That he knows how to tell a story without bordering on didacticism. That the older he gets, the more easily tears come.

Tim O'Brien wrote a letter to his six year old son (from something new he's writing) and in it told him he'd give back all of his success in writing just to have five more years with him. To little Timmy from big Tim.

Yesterday, they rammed one bus-sized spacecraft into the moon and they followed it with a compact-car sized craft. They're looking for water. Today, they still haven't found any.

Yesterday, my sons started strong and fell down halfway through. I suppose we all do and I know that, but if I wrote a letter, it would be angry. It would be selfish. It wouldn't be tempered with years and experience. We're all looking for something, aren't we. Today, the damn tides in my head are off. At the shore, during what should be a low tide, I'm trying to get my balance. I'm tilting. I'm tipping.

****