Hey friends, been awhile, how ya'll been doing? Things are good here, in an odd way that I'll ramble on about in a separate correspondence, but that's not what's prompted me to get off my lazy ass and actually write something new on the bigdogblog. I'm writing now because I've experienced a poetic coincidence or two involving some highly unlikely events that I want to share with you, my good friends and close confidants.
It has been a busy couple of weeks, both at work and on the home front. We're additionally short staffed at work since one of my project managers quit recently, and in between interviewing people to fill that slot and all the other babysitting that I do during the day I'd been investigating loose ends that this PM had left behind and trying to get them tied up. This, of course, resulted in some long days and short nights, and my awareness of and interaction with the outside world had been reduced to the narrowly defined world of the jobsite and the white lines on the stretch of highway that connects Key Largo to Homestead. On Tuesday night, heading home around ten o'clock, I had done a drive-by at Taco Bell to get some dinner, and had sort of half-heartedly munched on a burrito while I drove and stared through the windshield at the oncoming traffic. Getting out of the car at the house I was juggling the half-eaten burrito, a coke, my travel coffee cup, and a couple of other things as I swung the screen door open and fiddled with getting the key into the lock. That's when I heard footsteps behind me. Running my direction out of the back yard.
For those of you who haven't been here, I rent the lower floor of a two-story house, and you'll need to understand that the back yard, and the front and side yards, too, for that matter, are all gravel, which is the Key Largo equivalent to sod, spread around thick clumps of bushes and trees. The other thing you'll need to know to fully understand the scene is that it is dark here if there's no moon, and there was no moon that night. There are no street lights, and any lights that may have come from houses across the way or down the street are blocked by the trees and shrubs that line all of the front yards. My neighbor John wasn't home or was already in bed, so there was no light coming through his windows. There's also a hundred yards of mangrove between the back of the house and Largo Sound, and no lights there except the occasional lightning bug. Whoever coined the term inky blackness probably lived here, in other words. The only light came from a solitary bulb on a motion detector that came on at the front of the house when I drove up, and its beam was directed out toward the street and of little help to me in my current location and circumstances.
Now, had there been sod I probably wouldn't have heard the approaching footsteps. Heck, if there'd been some light I may have been able to see what I was doing and gotten the door open and been inside before hearing whatever it was that was coming my way. We'll never know now, because there I was, frozen in the darkness with my hands full and something bearing down on me fast out of the back yard gloom. As I turned my head, I saw a blur, low to the ground and moving fast right at me along the sidewalk that runs front to back at the edge of the house. When it cleared the backyard gravel and hit the concrete sidewalk the sound of the footsteps became more distinct, clearly something big and heavy galloping directly at me and all of a sudden I see its face illuminated in the weak light from the front yard bulb, scaly and brown with glowing green eyes racing right at me, something dangling in its jaws, and then it hits the bottom of the screen door, sending it slamming into me and pressing me against the house as it careens off my leg, and I realize it isn't coming for me - it's being chased! Holy shit I hadn't had time to react when the first thing came blazing out of the dark but in the millisecond between the first creature's departure and the arrival of the second I jumped in the air and spidermanned up the wall, in my terror recalling an incident involving a rattlesnake, a barbed wire fence, and a certain younger brother of mine who need not be named here and wondering if my current supernatural ability to walk on a vertical surface was somehow a repressed family trait that only comes to the surface under extreme psychological stress. The arrival of the second creature broke that reverie, however, and a mottled brown furry blur sprinted past, close on the heels of its prey, and off into the night.
It got awfully quiet. A light came on upstairs in John's house, and in that soft yellow glow I looked around and took stock. My right foot was on the door knob, my left arm firmly gripping the porch light mounted on the ceiling there. Thankfully for me, both were still attached in their normal fashion to the rest of my body, and I hadn't lost a leg or been injured in any obvious way. There was no blood, but I had put the death squeeze on that Taco Bell cup and geysered my coke all over hell and creation before dropping it when I grabbed for the porch light. And, according to John, there must have been a young girl around somewhere at the time of this incident who mysteriously disappeared based on his descriptions of the scream he heard that woke him up and prompted him to turn on a light and come investigate.
I told him what had happened, and he started laughing his ass off, explaining to me between snorts, giggles, and knee-slaps that there's been a feud of sorts going on recently between our neighborhood iguana and a family of raccoons that inhabit the mangroves behind the house over ownership of our neighbor's trash cans. Apparently they have some first class leftovers that have a strong appeal to both the totally herbivorous iguanas and the the more dietarily flexible raccoons. I had been caught in the crossfire of a minor skirmish in that larger conflict.
It took a while for the adrenaline rush to pass, and I eventually got to bed. After a fitful night's sleep I got up in the dark stillness of the morning and stumbled through my morning coffee and internet news routine before getting in the car and heading for the jobsite. I was still puzzling over the previous night's events as I drove over the Lake Surprise causeway and noticed that the traffic was stopped as the Jewfish Creek drawbridge was opening. It was windy that morning, and salt foam was blowing off the surface of the water and across the road. Normally this stuff blows up in white puffs made up of billions of little bubbles, but as I sat there peering distractedly through the windshield a single perfect bubble the size of a golf ball came floating into my field of vision as it wafted along in the breeze. I had already felt an urge to write something down about the iguana / raccoon footrace anyway, to try to capture what had happened and how I had reacted to it, and this little magic bubble, unconnected in any direct way to that backyard feud, got me to thinking about how much there is going on around me, around all of us, that we just aren't normally aware of. I started drafting lines for a song or a poem in my head as I sat there waiting for the bridge to come down and traffic to start moving again, and when it did my thoughts gradually drifted towards work and the particulars of what I'd need to do when I got here. Needless to say, the moment for composition had passed, and I didn't think about those unusual events again until this morning.
I had managed to get through my day on Wednesday, and Thursday worked on more loose ends in the morning before getting in the car and driving up to the Orlando area for a company meeting. All the project managers and company executives were gathered for the annual project manager's retreat, and the theme for the two-day event was "Raising Quality Outcomes". We had lively and engaging presentations on risk management, speakers talking about quality in all of its glorious manifestations, and inspiring addresses by the wise and benevolent members of the executive council. Great stuff, really, but the highlight of the whole two day shindig was a talk by the cartoonist and author, Jake Vest. He's a funny guy, and he told the story of how he arrived at this fancy golf resort that morning and asked for directions on how to get to the project manager's meeting where he was to speak. He said the golf resort security person eyed him with suspicion, and Jake said he realized that he was sitting in a beat up old Dodge pickup truck with a pair of grimy barbecue grilles in the bed, parked between a brand new Lexus and an even brand-newer Mercedes, telling a security guard he was here to lecture a bunch of managers and executives for one the world's largest and most successful construction companies on how to raise their quality outcomes. Lucky the guard didn't call the sheriff or the local mental health center.
But Jake did get in, and he did deliver his message. I'm not sure what anyone else there got out of what he said, but what stuck in my mind was that this guy hadn't had a real job in over twenty years. Talk about a quality outcome.
I was lucky enough to play golf with Jake and two of our executives that afternoon, and happy to discover he's a Prine fan and knew the lyrics to damn near every song Mr. Prine's written. We sang snippets of songs and, of course, knocked our old balls around the old golf course. He talked some about his cartoons and his books, and I listened to hear what had given him the inspiration for what he had drawn and written. Turns out he had just looked around him, noticed what was going on, and written down something about what he had observed.
It was late when I got home last night, and I went straight to bed. I enjoyed sleeping late this morning, and went for a walk with my cup of coffee and pondered over whether or not I should go sailing today or go to the josbite and get some work done. I had decided to go sailing - sitting inside pecking away on the computer on such a beautiful day just semed a waste. At the time.
I don't always check the weather before going out to the boat, and although this morning was absolutely crystal clear and calm I felt like it was important that I do that. While the machine was up I checked e-mails, and what did I discover on the daily Writer's Almanac e-mail than this:
Poem: "This Kind of Thing Doesn't Happen Often and When it Does You Should Pay Attention" by John Stone from Music From Apartment 8: New and Selected Poems. © Louisiana State University Press. This Kind of Thing Doesn't Happen Often and When it Does You Should Pay Attention
i thank heaven somebody's crazy
enough to send me a daisy
E.E. Cummings
On Piedmont Road, going north,
before my car there floated forth
a soapy bubble in the traffic,
glistening and holographic.
It drifted down into my path,
this ghostly sphere from someone's bath.
I watched it bob and almost tickle
A Harley-Davidson motorcycle
then rise (as it got quite exhausted)
That's where I left it, fair and frosted.
For this unexpected act
I thank heaven (I think), in fact,
that someone went to all the trouble
to blow me a bubble.
Goddam. Ever been slapped upside the head?
You know the rest, of course. I wrote this down. Now I'm gonna ice down a couple beers and head for the boat.
Don't let life pass you by, friends and neighbors. Feuding iguanas and raccoons and magic floating bubbles are out there, along with an infinity of other oddness. I, for one, am gonna go check it out. I'll let you know what I see.
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