Foxy Breaks It Down For You

      When Miss Foxy Brown (pictured above) and I take our daily walk, we never fail to stumble upon some great mystery, however small.  On today's stroll around the block, I was thinking of the lines of poet Mary Oliver when she wrote about her dog, Percy:


I Ask Percy How I Should Live My Life

Love, love, love, says Percy.
And hurry as fast as you can
along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust.
Then go to sleep.
Give up your body heat, your beating heart.
Then, trust. 


     Oliver always gets it right, and apparently so does her dog, Percy. I asked Foxy about this, and she seemed to be down with the whole love and trust thing.  Oh, and dog treats.  Foxy loves her some food. (She's a full-figured gal, and our daily walks are not only in service to daily reflection). 
     Percy says to love, and no one knows how to love this world more than dogs. So today I thought it might be nice to see the world through Foxy's eyes; as such, I give you a photo essay of sorts.  These are some of the things we saw in our brief one mile walk around the block.  We did not "hurry as fast as [we could] / along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust."  Instead, we tried to follow Oliver's charge to:


look down with...
golden eyes how everything
trembles
then settles
from mere incidence into
the lush of meaning.


...and this is what we saw:

A daylily "giving up its body heat, its beating heart."  

Foxy says it is good to "Be a little twisted," but then to pick up bottle caps in the road because it's not nice to litter.  And so we did after a good laugh.

Speaking of twisted, in the middle of this broken bottle near a water drain was a really lovely piece of coiled metal looking at home amid the twigs, brown glass, concrete and leaves.

aaaand sometimes you're walking along and you just find Jesus on the road...

Foxy knows that even the discarded can stand out with beautiful hues.

Where a driveway meets the street, some extra buttons.

Love, love, love.

Oh, Father Time...

     Tra-la-la...It is 3:00.  I'm home from the office early because my semester is over and I can now relax and maybe I'll sip some lemonade and just check Facebook and oh, look! How cute, my oldest child has posted something on his page: "I. Am. Now. In. High School."


     Crash-Bang!  That is me falling on the floor. No amount of pre-registration forms, no parenting manual prepares you for this day.  Where did the time go?  Oh let's just speed the plow, shall we?  Why don't we just sign up for his AARP card now?  If Father Time is going to be so cruel as to hurl our babies into the future at warp speed, then why not start those Senior Citizen discounts now?


     I know for him, time has moved way too slowly.  He can't wait to drive, to have more independence, and I remember that feeling acutely.  I remember when the word "year" was always preceded by the words "a whole." A year felt like...(insert eye roll here) forever.  Now I tend to think in 5-year and 10-year increments.  Probably not a good sign.


     But I promise you it was just yesterday, or it felt like just yesterday when he was getting ready to go to Kindergarten.  After I picked myself up off the floor, I promptly found two things:   
     1) His school photo album with year by year school pictures including this one from Kindergarten.  He wrote in the album that he enjoyed "reading and costumes."  Ha!  You don't say, future thespian.
     2)  A poem I wrote 9 years ago after attending the preview day for Kindergarten.  It was such a foreign planet.  I was bewildered by all of those children, moms and popsicles.  My baby was getting shuffled into some system, some machine that I knew would take good care of him, but something I knew nothing about.  Heck, I was still reeling from childbirth and now I had to adjust to school?  So I wrote this poem--really, it was yesterday-- but somehow the little boy in this poem seems to be going to high school now.  For the life of me, I'm still bewildered.

Kindergarten Enrollment Party

Slanting sunlight on playground and popsicles.

Kindergarten holds the mysteries

of exotic postcards or strange zoo animals.

Mothers hover.  Fathers flick

coats over their shoulders

like catalog models.  Everywhere

a cacophony of kids.

A pile of gravel calls them to conquer.

Girls who haven’t learned to yield

take the hill in skirts.  Boys hurl

pebbles at Miss Carr.

Finn finds his way from the fire truck
and scales the mountain

when no one else is there

and catches my eye in his triumph.

I see him, in a glimpse, grown,
doing the things men learn to do
like surveying a scene,
like setting his jaw,
like owning a piece of this earth for awhile.
Who can resist the fading 

afternoon light 

and those little fists?

I imagine him with boys

of his own. He looks like his father

used to when he was forty and starting to gray.
I feel my body start to slacken in age, heavier and tired
as he stands in his bright and certain future,
but then he bends to palm some pebbles
and places them on his head.
I don't realize he's making a crown.
All is see is his jagged crew cut
rough with dust, a firm chin
smeared in cherry stain. 

All I see is a boy with rocks on his head.
No mortar board, no snap brim fedora.
Just some silly rocks, a Garanimals shirt,
and the sly smile of Miss Carr
watching merely one of dozens of boys
do what they do with
no thought of tomorrow
at all.