Saint Eerie

It’s summer time, and the living is easy…. It’s also rushing by – yes, summer time too. Wooosh, like those August winds I felt, hot and dry, making their way up from Africa, while I slept under a full moon on the Island of Majorca de Palma in the sleepy village of Sollier. I was in my late twenties and the world lay out before me like a feast. It still does, but I don’t rush it so madly. It seems like the more I slow down to soak it in, the faster it moves. In this regard, I hate what technology has done to us.

We had a minor earthquake the other night. After returning from a slow rolling hike up at Bon Tempe, I was changing my shoes and readying to meet LB for dinner and the house began to twitch. Secret Agent Dog ran from something chasing her about, or so she thought. When things like this happen there is a instant, though only momentary, confusion. What’s this unfamiliar thing? Reflexively I search my memory banks for a touchstone of experience. It’s funny that the first thing my mind landed on was a commuter train.

Many years ago, not long after I first moved to California, I lived in a house away from a commuter train track in San Mateo. It was also an intersection so not only did the house thunder and shake as the train went by, but the bells and flashing lights of the crossing gates were harbingers of the roar. While our earthquake didn’t have bells and lights, for a moment I found myself looking out the window, wondering where the commuter train was. It just disappeared into the early evening summer air.

And yes, at about the time I was looking out the window for the train and Secret was looking behind her, equally at nothing, it settled in my head that indeed that wasn’t a train, that was just little quake – that was just the earth giggling a little. The phone rang, it was LB, did you feel that!? Yes, I felt that.

I was a teenager playing house with the first boy I thought I loved, whose name was Ed. This isn’t my Ed, but a different Ed. At the time, my Ed was only eleven or twelve years old and to my surprise was living just around the corner. Further strangeness is that he was my paperboy. We likely passed one another on the street a hundred times. I find that all very weird and eerie.