The Ides of Summer

13 July 09

“Human Greatness . . . the direct shooting mind . . . is incompatible with a man’s lying to himself.” Ezra Pound in Kulcher

Fog sifting in from the coast, up through the trough that leads to Pacifica, south of the dark-blurred cypress trees of the Twin Peaks ridge. A raven flops into the misty distance and is gone, past the bleak rooftops of the cloud-encased city.

Is there anything as chilly as hung laundry flapping in the fog?

Your weaknesses are yours alone, and can't be alleviated by friendship. Friends see your flaws and faults, and true friends forgive you those. But if you try to explain the weaknesses that run like fissures all the way down, not only does the attempt sound pathetic and self-indulgent, your friends will simply dismiss them. They’ll think, "well, those things may be half true, or hardly true at all, but old so-and-so is such a great guy anyway, what's he worried about?"

Good friends don't believe your fears. They believe in you, at all costs, and love you too much to split hairs. And so your weaknesses remain yours alone, subterranean to those closest to you. Fault lines, tremors you can't talk about. To do so would be self-indulgent in the least, and disillusioning at the worst. Your weaknesses are yours alone.

Maybe it’s the weather has me down. Hell, it’s July and I’m wearing wool socks and a blanket over my lap as I write this, gloomy from the view from the cabin window of my study, my cozy skiff riding the incoming waves of grey. I refuse to crank on the wall heater. It’s mid-summer and not only that, it’s a Saturday morning: something has to give. When the girls get up we’ll make a big breakfast and the sun will seep in, then splash through heroically, and for a few hours we’ll be reminded of what season it truly is.

By late morning the sun does come out and Anna, toting Ada in the wrap-around, hangs more laundry from the line above the patio. The potted olive and lemon trees do their best to look summery in the mist-strained light. The plants like our city-potted lives: root-bound, pending, eager to uncoil into the country earth. But what binds us isn’t so much the city as our fears of leaving the city, moving away from the intricate connections of career and friends, habit and true affinity.

But having Ada makes me want summer more than ever. Warmth and gardens and shade pooling under leafy trees; nakedness, simple primal nakedness both of body and of our lives. The girl is getting cuter and more enchanting by the day. She isn’t a baby. She’s a mysterious critter coming into being before our eyes. The looks and depths of soul in her eyes, that of an old soul arriving here from another place, gazing around with a mixture of astonishment, curiosity, scrutiny, and happiness at this new dwelling place. And I want it to be summer for her, and not a few months of rooftops floating in clouds.

And I want her to be happy, and for us to be happy, and for the fears which all of us have and accumulate in the dark hours to get a proper airing, like laundry in the sun, that they can be felt for what they are, and not heavier for the dampness of the season.