The Third Thing: Early Winter Notes

When I walk into the room the device known as Alexa flashes its green light twice in acknowledgment of my presence, the way an old dog might thump its tail a couple times in recognition, perhaps opening a sleepy eye, to confirm. Each time this happens I feel like I’m living in an old Twilight Zone episode.  It occurs to me I have outlived my era.

My St. Bernard medal seems to be irritating my skin, so I take it off, though I am leery of going up into the mountains without it.  Bernard, patron saint of alpinists and skiers. That day, I slip on a thin invisible layer of black ice in our steep driveway and go down hard.

We just saw a Ram Dass movie, noting that the audience was almost universally people of our age who had probably once been enthralled with Be Here Now, as we, I anyway, once were.  I was more skeptical, or equally skeptical, considering him now. But some of his observations are clear and unquestionable: “We are all just walking each other home.”

“Drinking too much is not a thing,” advises my friend, Nick Dighiera.  He’s wrong, of course, but he says so out of kindness.

My bathtub drains so slowly that dirt (where did it come from?) coats its surface and I procrastinate and procrastinate about calling the plumber.  It’s like this for three weeks.  My wife looks at it for five minutes and says the drainplug is stuck. Now it drains perfectly.  I envision my future self a doddering old man with his house falling down around him because he doesn’t have the common sense of 12 year old.

I love these dark winter hikes when we set out, as we’ve done dozens and dozens of times, into the darkness with no need of headlamps because the way is so familiar to us.  Now the snow is fresh and soft and underfoot the rocks and gravel are unconsolidated, the footing more work than usual.  Pre-dawn cold. It never once occurs to me to wonder why I am doing this, only to be glad that I can. The summit is fiercely windblown and the sun still not risen and we walk right over it without pause, downward facing dogs in one fluid motion.

What to make of strange dreams?  The dream of falling off Carl’s roof, while Carl and Charlie discuss a renovation project.  Which segues to crawling across a grass and hard dirt field during which I discover a hidey-hole filled with drugs and cash and am convinced that because of this discovered knowledge drug dealers are chasing me and I crawl and crawl and make no progress though I can see my bicycle leaning against a brick wall in the distance.  When I awake, the word “perfidy” is prominent in consciousness with not a known connection to anything, not the preceding dream(s) not any conscious thought.  Too much television news and facebook.

The poet Donald Hall once wrote of his marriage to Jane Kenyon: “Most of the time our eyes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing.”

“Other people’s dreams are boring.” So declared a Robert Stone character in a famous short story.  As evidenced above.

When I was about 15 I had an intense friendship with Drago. We would talk for hours.  We lived almost a mile from each other, but I remember walking with him to his house, but we weren’t finished with our conversation, so we walked back to my house, and then back to his house, kind of a form of Zeno’s paradox, arrows never arriving at their destination.  I think of Drago often now as he confounds the doctor’s death sentence by remaining alive months after they predicted otherwise. I am hoping he is holding on until I can see him again.

Hall added: “Sometimes you lose a third thing.”

This morning I was out shoveling the driveway at 5:30 a.m.  Quiet. The snow, which continues to fall, muffling all sound.  I was thinking about my father and what a comfort he was to me when our son died.  Then I remembered, whoops, he wasn't there, he had already been dead for three years when our son died. And then, I thought, but yeah, he was a comfort to me then.