spring back fall ahead

2023-03-27 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

Witnessing the long tail of his memory makes me wonder if living so long and far from my first years has locked away some nascent mysteries, some overgrown paths never explored further. And what will the coming years layer on those firsts? As spring buds break so do the inchoate depths frozen in place as life overgrew elsewhere.

And here I return without words or thread of where I started, but these songs tug at what wants surface and light:

I’ve lived long enough now that the depth of years obscures with strange refractions. There’s more to process but less time to process it. I’m not sure what to do with that.

Projecting from now, I see the negative space beyond all my comprehension.

updowntime

2023-03-12 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

Now I’m silent here with words by the window untaken by the tiredness of another night’s imperfect sleep while Marcelo naps easily. The urge to unearth the felt but unseen current is turbid with minding’s movement. From here the sky’s an even sheet over the rainless day. There is something that wants to be seen in its seeing. Where is there space I can make to align the inmost and the ineffable immediate?

two of us

2023-02-20 :: Al Min

#Marcelo #red-tailed hawk

Morning tripped the breakers long before the circuit of sleep wired me to wake. The brain’s earthworks of half-turned fallows sowing already for this winter’s prematurely warm day. Marcelo stirs, turbid, distracted, the churning of a new mind, still forming unevenly. We stopped downstairs at Monkey Cup for my usual coffee and a croissant for our little growth spurt. We followed inertia steering toward Morningside Park, but our young compass righted the ship, and we found ourselves by the fire tower in Marcus Garvey Park, two red-tailed hawks unsettling the squirrels. Though they’re a common presence in this landscape, sighting one always reassures me (partly because of this), and being among this hunting pair gives me hope for our little family.

tolerable twos

2022-12-24 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

Here in Hollis, late to nap, with the in-laws scattered waiting for Nochebuena. I began that last bit four days back and now am here on the loveseat where once mom fed child as just now I hear touch has a memory touch has a memory, and I remember too much to contain/retain any of it. Memories pass through me with their undercurrent of shared/layered feelings.

But how much of these traces make me? All that’s undone before it starts, what becomes of those runnels? Childhood is immense. I know it even as I look from the outside with inchoate hints of remembrance/imagination. Somehow this Found Light still taps something I can’t name, some vein of deep feeling.

ways to be free

2022-08-14 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

Tonight’s a null thread. The nursery’s infrared camera shows an opaque face that vaguely resembles my own the way the mirror opens up an uncanny valley if I look too directly for too long. There’s an impermeable vein of feeling that reveals itself at the self’s low tide. It feeds the ocean of being that makes me possible and carries me in such a way that I drift back into the illusion that I’m carrying myself.

lanterns

2022-07-15 :: Al Min

#Laura Veirs #Marcelo

Lately and now I’m listening to Laura Veirs Found Light for the way it taps a vein of feeling that just now recalls to me Dark Dark Dark’s Wild Go. The slipstream of a headache is chasing me to sleep, and I wonder if death will truly be the relief that I’m entertaining these days of what that final end entails. I saw my dad’s face today in just-woken half-sleep over a belated birthday video call and was struck in my mind’s back-channel by our years showing there. Still there’s some otherness that calls with the inkling joy of the days ahead I can’t see but feel.

remember

2022-06-23 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

I’m sitting listening to Penguin Cafe thinking of memory and trying to remember what memory meant before algorithms drowned us in content. I’m trying to think ahead to what I’ll remember of these days when Marcelo will thread his own recollections into the story of his life. How well will I recall his first attempts at pronouncing grapes (buysh) without an audio recording? I started a single note on my phone the other day that never progressed beyond “I want to remember,” and I do, but my mind stops short there as if the bottom has dropped out.

father litany

2022-06-09 :: Al Min

#Marcelo

His words grow. He begins to know letters. He’s excited to see buses and bikes and emergency vehicles. His favorite pond in Morningside Park has a resident egret and occasionally some ducks and two geese with their suddenly adolescent goslings and red-winged blackbirds and stray cats and turtles, always turtles all the way down and through. And he identifies them all. He kicks a ball. He points at everything and demands attention and identification. Let me write the memories before they’re absorbed by the body’s opaque, vestigial palimpsest. I chatter and chatter to lull him into patience, to tide him to the next impossible wave of childhood.

wending wall

2022-05-06 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

Among the innumerable delights of being a father is that of your wee one toddling up unbidden with a hug at the back of your knees. That I have so little time to absorb these little joys means they’ll leave their traces without stirring any waves of future memory. How will this attachment fair through the years of our relationship? Already this palimpsest seems unfathomable in the light as his independence grows.

low blur

2022-05-03 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

Was a time I kept multiple blogs and hand-written journals and notebooks and scraps of scribbles and sketches on discarded newsprint. Now it takes me five months to write one blog post. Begun reading again from something other than a screen. Marcelo is able to identify birds—egret, goose, robin, sparrow, starling, pigeon. Trying to do less. Bless this less.

weird bones

2021-12-23 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo

Marcelo is asleep, and we’re watching a documentary about Joan Didion because she died today. I’ve never read any of her work. My left shoulder hurts from two vaccine jabs received at a Rite Aid where the security guards were holding back one of their own from being drawn into a fight at the door with a man whose nude rear end was open to the bike rack where I needed to return my Citi Bike. I’m deeply tired because Marcelo’s daycare is closed due to its director and other staff testing positive for Covid. All three of us tested negative, but Marcelo has a cold. He develops in amazing ways despite all, in innumerable daily changes.

o sage

2021-10-23 :: Al Min

#pandemic #Marcelo #Fall

Yesterday’s hawk, talons empty. We walk through Marcus Garvey’s chess players, strung out junkies, African drum circles and dancers, open air gym rats by the bball court, dog park walkers. The osage oranges are plentiful.

Marcelo now stands unaided briefly. He’s waving to Sesame Street monsters on TV. He claps and points. He hands me toys. He laughs randomly as if he’s remembered a joke. He seems ready to walk and speak any day now. Daily I’m pummeled by the darkness of our living dystopia, but this love that is our family of three is my refuge.

no know say

2021-10-05 :: Al Min

#Marcelo #pandemic

It’s Tuesday. Marcelo has come through his first cold for which I took a sick day Monday, and today was the first incident report at daycare (bumped his head, exploring under tables). I’m listening to Rilo Kiley’s Take Offs and Landings because I missed it in 2001, and now I’m searching through e-mail and various digital files to see just what I was up to in that year and am coming up bupkis so it must pre-date much of my digitized life. Still feels strange to think of the gaps of unrecorded life Marcelo will never know. Will these almost daily photos/videos and digital ephemera be part of his tracing the history that arrives at the formation of his first memories? The accumulation of 42 years makes me wonder if I can make anything of it beyond a personal tower of Babel.