Every small town, no matter how prim and proper has a darkness coiled within. It is expressed in actions taken behind closed doors and in the discarded detritus that gathers on the fringes.
Abandonment and decay. Secret violence and buried frustrations. The colour leaches out like toxic waste into a once pristine stream. It crawls slowly along disused rails til there is nothing but sun-bleached bone and rust to speak its name in gravely whispers.
Let your boots crunch loudly on the stones. And do not look into the shadows beneath the trees.
They say you end up marrying your mother. I don’t think that’s strictly true but I did end up marrying a mother. Jersey girl and I celebrated our one year wedding anniversary on Friday and today it’s Mother’s Day here in America.
When I made my commitment to Jersey, I also knew I was committing to her three kids (all girls) and I knew she was a mother first and everything else second. I completely understood that, as it had always been my approach to parenting too.
I also knew that all of this could fall over – and I would be done – if, when I met her kids, they didn’t accept me. I guess I’m living a charmed life because they took to me far better than I ever had a right to expect.
And so, in the end, I didn’t just find a wife, I found a family waiting for me on the other side of the world. A family that admitted, not only me but my own son right along with me.
My boy has visited us three times since I arrived here permanently and has been welcomed with open arms not only by Jersey and the girls but the extended family as well. My wife has embraced her new adult son as if he were her own. This has been a tremendous boon to me as he lost his real mother a little over five years ago.
So, on this rainy Mothers Day in NJ, I just wanted to take a few moments to celebrate a really wonderful mom.
Happy Mother’s Day my love.
And while I’m at it, Happy Mother’s Day to you too, mum. You are so missed. Wish I could just say hi.
Well say goodbye it’s Independence Day
It’s Independence Day all boys must run away
So say goodbye it’s Independence Day
All men must make their way come Independence Day
Our town, like thousands of others around the nation, staged a July 4 Parade yesterday. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I got managed to move me deeply.
Here are just some of my visual impressions of the day.
The Baby Parade
These images represent only a fraction of what was on display. There were, for instance, some 30 individual fire engines at least in the parade from all the surrounding towns (even one from Arizona – the pink one). There was also an amazing sellection of classic cars and vintage John Deer tractors to feast the eye upon. Sadly, I’m dangerously close to running out of storage space on my WordPress account (not sure what I’m going to do about that) so I was forced to leave a lot out.
The day was remarkably poignant and uplifting in equal measure. I hope to see many more like it.
The relation that exists when things occur at the same time
I’ve always experienced a lot of synchronicity in my life. It comes and goes like the ocean tides. Often it manifests in small seemingly insignificant things like, for instance, a few weeks ago, I mentioned to Jersey girl that as much as I enjoyed the American beers I’d sampled, I had yet to find ‘the one’, a beer that I could think of as my old faithful as it were.
That conversation took place on the day I wrote this piece in which I reference Frost’s The road not taken with its famous lines;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
That very afternoon, while perusing some of my favourite blogs, Frost’s poem came up again (sadly, I neglected to bookmark the blog and can’t remember now whose it was).
Then, later that evening, we stopped off at the liquor store where I came across this little gem.
I, of course, had to give it a try and yes, it is now ‘the one’.
As I said, a small thing but still noteworthy. I treat synchronistic moments like these as signposts which tell me if I’m on the right path and headed in the right direction.
My most recent piece of synchronicity also revolved around a poem (and a lyric, though, sadly not a beer). I had just finished writing the text of my blog post on William Carlos Williams and was looking for a title and song to go with it (I generally take the blog title from the accompanying song clip rather than the piece itself – just a strange quirk of mine).
I’d included several quotes from poet and critic Randall Jarrell in the piece and, as the post was also about Springsteen, decided to use his song Jungleland to accompany the piece.
I wanted to use the lyric The poets down here don’t write nothin’ at all as the title for the piece but had a feeling I’d already used it in a previous post.
I went back to find it and, sure enough, I had used it on this piece essentially about my relationship to poetry. In the post, I reference the poem The Death of a Ball Turret Gunner – a piece that had had a strong impact on me in my youth – by none other than Randall Jarrell.
In a sense, the two posts were spiritual kin and yet, I’d had no idea until that moment that the Jarrell I’d been quoting in the one had penned the poem in the other.
There are lots of little synchronistic threads woven into this larger one. For instance, Jarrell wrote two children’s books which were illustrated by Maurice Sendak. And Sendak wrote the very first book I ever borrowed from a library, Where the wild thingsare. That book’s visual style was a massive influence on my future interest in illustration.
Even the fact that Williams and Robert Frost both died the same year I was born (just a month before, in Williams case) seems synchronistic to me. Actually, several of the people I would come to admire chose the year I was born to depart this existence; Kennedy, C S Lewis, Aldous Huxley – all three on the same day mind you, Patsy Cline, Jean Cocteau, and Édith Piaf. All died that year.
I don’t know what broader significance any of that might have, but I can say that the knowledge of it has shaped my world view in small ways and large.
Runaway American Dream 