Monday, May 18, 2009
Unspeakable Wonder
Now that I’m back off of family leave, I want to do my best to remember what it was like to be away. Family leave is not vacation, by any stretch of the imagination - especially not when it involves Jesse, the child of powers that know neither surcease or limitation. He’s a wonderful, sweet boy, and a double handful of tough. He does what he does, and it’s up to us to keep up as best we can. Four weeks of that, and no fooling - I’m ready to get back to the office.
One of the most precious memories I will strive to cherish from the time with Jesse was when we got out to the Academy of Science for members’ hours a couple of times. We had the place pretty much to ourselves - the African Hall, the swamps, the aquarium.... it’s a gorgeous building, especially when it’s almost empty. But there was one morning in particular that stands out for me: the rainy morning. It had been threatening since before dawn and I could feel the rain in my fillings, pendent and waiting. We spent some good time in the museum, saw the sights, ran around like we owned the place, and then settled down under a huge glass dome for a bit of a snack. And that’s when the deluge started. We looked up - there was no way not to - and watched water come down on that dome in sheets, in blankets, in enormous transparent comforters stuffed with uncountable raindrops, fat and mad with gravity. The water careened down the huge glass hemisphere overhead with the roar of oceans. We sat beneath it as if it was an aquarium aloft and waited for the storm to pass.
It took only five minutes or so before someone upstairs shut off the faucet. Dilatory raindrops pattered their way down, playing catchup with their cousins running down the drainpipes. It was time for us to toddle, so I wiped the yogurt off Jesse’s face and hands as best I could, piled him into the stroller, fixed the rainfly, and headed toward the exit door. As we departed, they asked us if we needed a handstamp to return. We didn’t. We’d seen all the nature we needed to see - or so we thought. But as it turns out, there was one more exhibit for us to enjoy: the post-diluvial walk home. After a downpour like that, things all smell differently; the world had been transformed into a feast for the senses. A park I knew intimately, a route that was second nature to me, revealed itself anew.
You may ask, what I mean. It is this:
A rush of coolness, outside air, soaked with rain and rich with ions
Hydroblasted concrete steps
The inky breath of wet macadam
Once-parched lawns, their grass reviving
Art museum’s stale sigh
Crackers&milk from a Tea Garden toddler
A tricklesniff beneath the shadetrees down beside Strawberry Hill
Rhodos perfumed like a gradeschool friend’s kind mother’s closets
Bamboo - tea-sweet and herbaceous
Rotting compost, stinking of the grave and nursery
Ornamental plumtree blossoms, redolent of imagined islands
Acrid tang of runner’s sweat
Roses burgeoning with nascent bloom
Dark beds thick with soil enhancers puckering the soggy air
Redwood grove erupting from its murky dingle: private breezes; gnarled bark on towering trunks that glisten in the faltering light; boughs heavy with needles, chartreuse-tipped and sharply pungent
Sour fists of car exhaust where traffic stops for a fender-bender
Multifarious flowers on tangled shrubs, medicinal and biologic
Fruit trees wafting candied scents
A drunken whiff of juniper
Turpentine pines and sawmill acacias
The hedge that smells of syruped pancakes
Construction trucks and asphalt stockpiles, unctuous, dirty, businesslike
A tremor in the very air as sunlight angles through the clouds
The smell of my child lifted high, clean and frank, the world respiring through his smallness, filling us both with unspeakable wonder
Yeah, that’s how I remember it. I hope I always do.
