(from late last week)

The end of September approaches, and with it (finally) a respite from hot, muggy weather that's supposed to go away with August, but stuck around the upper Ohio Valley, or Central Appalachians, or whatever you call it, a little longer than that. What was left of Hurricane Rita swept up and through last Monday, dousing us in steamy rain but little else, and then left behind the most crystal-clear, warm, blue and beautiful edge-of-autumn days you could imagine. But the nights are growing cooler, and with summer gone, summer habits go out the window too.

I have not been writing here because I have not been spending much time at the computer for the past few months. Ok, that's a lie - not as much time as I had been before. Who wants to spend summer inside? Whenever I wasn't in a dark, windowless little radio studio playing Triple A and/or NPR (which was often enough) I took off for my second residence, a place I humbly think of as my Summer Palace.

It is neither very distant nor very grand at all, this spot of mine, this...brick patio with two tables and a bunch of wrought iron chairs, about 10 yards and a wall away from where I sit typing this now. Why such a name for the place ever came to me (besides a Stewie Griffinesque-level of imagined pomposity I naturally harbor) I don't know. Maybe because in reality, I was unable to get away anywhere for very long. It's just a few steps around the corner and outside, this seating area for the deli next door, (thankfully) left vacant more often than not. A very good place to sit reading or writing, especially when evening comes in the summertime. Something slightly expansive about it, sitting clear on a rise, elevated above the identikit student apartments in the overfertilized green flat that once was a railyard; look out, over the rooftops at the sunset on a tree-lined horizon a mile or so off, the view hemmed in by the old brick factory that made God knows what once upon a time but houses a fried chicken place and a hardware store nowadays, golden-hour light streaming off it at an oblique angle.

There, this summer I read Goethe, Shelley, Csikszentmihalyi, Frisch, histories of architecture, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Buenos Aires, and the panorama painting. There I was known to cook out with others who - like negative images of winter residents of old seaside resorts, prowled the vacant town in the summer with me; also, known to don a Dad hat as protection against skull melanoma. There I contended, as best as I could from far away, with Kiki's BMT and the aftermath. She has been doing well since July, with the occasional bumps in the road. As much as she tells me, that is. She protects me. A lot.

The biggest sign of autumn to me - my birthday - is coming up in a matter of days and, just like last year, at the party on Saturday night, we'll all realize it's getting cold to be out there. The days of the Summer Palace are coming to an end. But not quite yet. Tonight I was out there as the sun went down, so big and orange, casting the apartments in blackness my eyes couldn't adjust to. Above, as they do at this time, some sort of triangle-winged flying creatures - I can never tell if they are bats or birds - wheeled and squeaked by the dozens high above me, in big, interlaced counterclockwise circles. Feeding time.

I was writing in a journal, or trying to write. Emphasis on try. I try a lot lately. For reasons I'll get into later, I wanted to set that aside, set thought aside, and just daydream a little bit, let my mind go a little. So I threw my head back, let my eyes fall into the molecular-model pattern of the little black fliers above me (how they never collide!), the unreal shades of blue and apricot sky smoldering at the horizon. A tiny contrail speeding quickly through the blue, a white pinpoint with a vanishing tail; quite unusual for this place, and that's quite unusual for me.

I've lived most of my life under transatlantic flight paths, from the Connecticut coast to a dingy, smoke-scented, cheerful basement apartment right under the Heathrow landing pattern. White streaks across the sky, cooling grass below bare feet mark my eternal summer evening. A couple days before I had to read a paper written by one of my profs; he talks about "configurated time", what Ricoeur terms an understanding created by "grasping together...significant wholes out of scattered events"....the attempt to transcend the constraints of time. It is maybe what Proust tried to do. It is what I believe Nabokov was surely trying to do in one of my very favorite books, Speak, Memory. Nabokov confessed he did not believe in time. I often don't believe in it either, as anyone who's expected punctuality out of me has found out. Like Nabokov, I spend an inordinate amount of my time gathering up reflections, images, visions...as if by obsessively gathering them, I'll never move far from the moment. Defy time. But there's more stages; now and then I'll spend hours transcribing them, then more time at work, not trying like dear old Vlad to recapture a perfect,lost past but to read in the whole river passing by some form, some essential meaning. To interpret this existence, if it can be done.

That pinpoint with the small tail was disappearing into the peach regions of the sky, but the black things flying thousands of feet below still wheeled noisily a few yards above me. And that sight rang another old chord, and not for the first time, either, of a couple nights I spent in Rabat years ago, in a hotel near the old quarter. From a top floor balcony I remember watching more flying things - dozens of flying things, filthy gray flying things, big city birds circling over the rooftops of the twilit city.
My mind blanked in dreamy reverie, the two chords rang in harmony for a moment. Happiness complete, if not meaning made.
Then one of the bastards shitted on my shoulder.