Impossibly Compressed

The present is a rather fleeting event. Most of time exists in the past and in the future. We could argue this: my little jig, eating oysters, seemed to go on for quite a while. Fishing in a school of feeding bluefish, holding a dying person in your arms, knowing that help will be too late, a chance and exciting sexual encounter, some events seem to extend the present. I've lived through a half-dozen harrowing moments that seemed to last a long time. When I want to take a break from whatever, I like to slow down and look closely at something. I've collected a goodly pile of old things, stone points, a few fossils, and I never tire of looking at them. An atl-atl weight that seems to be notched for lunation, a perfect squirrel skull, a reconstructed turtle shell. When I found the little Indian pipe I almost had a swoon at the way time was compressed in the thing I was holding in my hand. My sister foisted on me a box of photos and documents from my Mom's side of the family, Grand Pa Tom, and Myrtle, the four kids, Mom the only other female, three brothers. She got away as soon as she could, building planes in Memphis, meeting Dad at a dance. My sister must have been conceived when Dad went from the Atlantic to the Pacific and had some shore-leave. Navy guys, it's all bullshit, but Dad had been with prostitutes in Morocco and Japan, I don't know if Mom ever played around, it doesn't matter, but I wonder.

Wild mustard and cress,
everything is sharp and clear,
but nothing is what it seems.

Rain moves in from the northwest, all the tracks are destroyed, but a couple of stumps indicate a bear looking for grubs. Another fucking bear, I have to smile, you make a lot of noise and they run away. I've been reading some Depression-Era recipes and they sound terrible. I'd talked with Mom and Dad about this, years ago, and they agreed that poor farmers ate well during that period. They raised all of their food so there weren't any shortages. A favorite uncle of mine, in Water Valley, Mississippi, told me that his extended family (they raised my father) needed $1,000 a year, for a family of eight. Cash money was the problem. He'd haul bushels of fresh produce to Memphis, and sell a few animals at auction every year, to make the family nut. He'd bought the old farm for $5 an acre, 80 acres, 60 acres in woodlot, fertilized with manure, rotated crops, and never bought anything he couldn't pay for in cash. I wanted to buy that place, when we moved to Mississippi, but it was over-priced, because of proximity to Oxford, so we bought an old hunting camp, an abandoned farm, in the hills, perfect with its springs and bottoms, and earned a good living there, until it became necessary to think about schooling. I'm not a good teacher. We moved to Colorado, where the public schools were pretty good, and Marilyn could indulge her fantasies. Maybe it was me, I'm not dependable, Joel called me to task, about saying that something had actually happened. I'm not sure anymore.