Waiting for Brenda

Considering where natural ends and un-natural begins, I'm taking a north breeze in the face, or would be if I sat outside. I'm thinking of tractors, three tractors in particular, three of fourteen or so in a book.

Judging by the size of the birds in this breeze, pigeons and gulls most prominent, they're doing just fine. Who needs more than a whiff of green beyond that parking-lotted, brick-apartment playground of theirs?

When friends arrive in the city, they carry threads of where they've been. Some of them have been outside for quite a while.

Air Canada Jazz lands about a mile west.

The wind makes us natural, there's plenty of wind around here.

9:00, McNally's

If I were recording songs tonight live at a club for a new cd called Cityscrape, I'd be there right now rehearsing, placing the energy up in the beams to be called upon later. It would be an indoors sort of a summer's day.

A shame, I know. Clouds so fresh they stay above our eyes. The Riders won in Hamilton so the force that drives the green fuse (as we say around here, ripping off Thomas and cruising calmly the streets at the same time) shoves the rain east and hums like a new piano.

Until the last few hours, we had the same weather as the Tour de France. "Gloomy and dreary," said the commentator (not Paul Sherwin, the other guy).

So the first tune I'll play is a little thing called I'm In Love (With You Tonight). After that, we'll see.

It's cold and gloomy

I spent the morning by the window, feet on the heater, the New and Collected Poems of Czeslaw Milosz on my lap. I paused after "The Journey" and watched the mountain ash waving in the breeze. I saw nothing "pure-colored" as Milosz would have it. Nothing impure either. Not a bird clung to its branches. Just leaves.

The tree needs trimming. Badly. We say so every time we back into the yard. It's at the end of the driveway and has grown so much it now brushes the car as we come and go. I should take my shears to it, but a mountain ash has a certain symmetry that I fear I'll destroy. Today's not the day for it.

I turned back to the book and realized then, after all this time, that I did not know how to pronounce his name. It felt wrong to read any further. I searched online until I found an audio clip called "Requiem for a Poet: Czeslaw Milosz." And as the tree waved I heard his name. I heard him speak. Still not a bird.

Drainage

Streets are cambered, arched for drainage to concave curbs, all the way to Hudson's Bay. This morning, on a run, I noticed a neighbour draining her swimming pool through a green hose that ran into the back lane. In another yard, a Bobcat tested the space between the back of the house and a wood fence, backed out and shut down.

That's the very house where five years ago my kids and I observed the old guy watering his driveway every day to clear it of leaves, dead bugs or other debris. Every day he watered his driveway. He must be dead now, hence the Bobcat.

Many boughs hang lower, all leafed out, causing me to bend and run at the same time. More than once my cap has been swept off, the top of my scalp gouged. This morning too I ran past the bingo manager's house, a miserable junkyard of a place, no offence to junkyards.

In the neighbourhood I lived in with my parents and sisters when we were in high school, about a half-mile east of right here, the yards and trees have been nudged and coddled until the street looks ancient and overgrown.

It was bright new in '62.

Pushing daisies

My new reel mower squeaks and squeals as if it's the one being cut. Maybe it's speaking on behalf of the grass, clover and daisies that I've been beheading. Daisies are tougher to behead than the rest. They just pop back up and wave bye-bye. How annoying. So yesterday I hauled out my grass whip. It's double-edged and serrated. The handle is loose. Nothing was safe. Heads flew. Petals everywhere. A gouge in my shoe. My hands were shaking.

Winding

Every day up at Emma, the wind was new. Down here, it's the same patch of flags over the TraveLodge, same pages blown off my printer, same old dust off the parking lot.

I ran the sole off my ten-dollar cleats the other night. Threw the sole away, kept playing. Next pitch: pop-up between pitcher and second. Playing shortsop, I had the easy play but with no cleat on my right foot couldn't get my body going soon enough. Safe.

So I spent an hour yesterday watching Rear Window and duct-taping my shoe back together, transferring much of the dust from the shoe to my furniture. The cleats have to last at least two more games--our last Glove Story, next Wednesday, and my birthday ballgame sometime in late August.

If the wind's blowing out that night, look out. I plan to send my friends and other loved ones deep.