Young October

And now September has flown away with the hummingbirds, leaving the young and quiet October as sentry to my observed life. We haven’t yet had our first frost, but the mornings are damp and chilly, and I’ve resumed wearing a hat on my morning rambles with the spotted menace. The spider webs are visible on many plants and structures, dew-decked and glistening like ice wheels. The wildflowers are dying back slowly; this morning Jinx and I passed between rows of late chicory, the vivid blue a contrast to the murky air around us. The leaves on the trees are slowly turning. I’m growing a tiny oak tree in a flowerpot from an acorn given to me by a massive tree last year. It’s little leaves are going all red-tinged, which tickled my heart when Mrs. Orr pointed it out to me this morning.

I mentioned wearing a hat. In cooler weather, I wear one of two wool hats. One is a nice Harris tweed bunnet (flat cap), and the other a stingy-brim fedora. The latter has an interesting and enjoyable quality. I pray while we walk, and when wearing this hat, the brim captures my whispered voice and amplifies it, giving my prayers an immediacy and an intimacy that is very appealing to my ear. It feels as if Christ and His mother and the saints and I are talking across a table to each other, and that each word is as deliberate and significant as the movements in a Japanese tea ceremony.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death…

At the hour of our death. I came very close to death two mornings ago. I had arrived at work, parked beneath my friend the tree, scattered crackers for the crows, and was walking across the road to the parking lot adjacent my office. I was on the short crosswalk taking me to the staff entrance, daydreaming and watching the ground when a quick burst of sound and motion made me look up.

A girl, perhaps 18 or 19 years old, had roared through the parking lot from the other side, apparently laughing with another teenage girl in the passenger seat, and hadn’t seen me until she almost hit me. She had to have been doing at least 40 mph in the parking lot because I never heard nor saw the car, a gray Camaro, until the screech of brakes and flash of color to my left. The bumper of the car was one foot from my left leg, so close that if I had done a slight knee-bend, my kneecap would have touched it.

I stared into the face of the girl, whose eyes had gone wide, along with those of her passenger. She was holding a cellphone in one hand, and I could see her mouthing “Oh, my God” while the powerful engine purred between us. In that instant, I had a very clear vision of the car not stopping in time, of me feeling a hard shock along my left leg, of me spinning into the air like a baton and falling back onto the asphalt headfirst, falling on that little case that contains all my memories and my abilities, all sight and sound and sense blacked out in an instant, and of people running to my assistance and me unable to tell them to please call my wife, please call my wife…

But that didn’t happen. The girl and I stared at each other, and then she said something to her companion and yanked the hidden shift lever into reverse. The car squealed backwards and I finally broke my trance and managed to lift my hands in a “What the hell?” gesture. The girl got the car turned around and floored it, disappearing around the corner of the building before I could drop my hands. I never thought to look at her license plate or to do anything else except stand there with that vision of my own death still unspooling behind my eyes.  I walked the few steps to the door, managed to fit my key into the lock, and went inside. I found my way to my desk and sat there for several minutes, aware of the heavy plod of my heart, aware of the fragility of all that I am. I heard a coworker’s key in the door, and I shook off the shock and set about the day.

But I was rattled for the remainder of the day, and have thought several times about how awful it would have been to draw my last breath down on the parking lot of a building where the owners will certainly be soon taking steps to call me in and have the Take The Jab Or Take The Exit talk. I’m grateful I didn’t die there, accompanied by no one who loves me, and observed only by a tree and a small group of crows who know my face and my voice.

I’ve had several close calls with sudden, violent death in my life, mostly because of the jobs I’ve worked and the paths I’ve walked in this life. Each time, I have reflected on the fragility and brevity of my time here, and each time I’ve felt perky and lively in the days following the incidents. This time, though, the somber feeling remains. Perhaps I am more aware of certain things, certain curves of concrete curb and how the veins on the backs of my hands look when they are spread on a book and how my wife’s slow, steady breathing in the bed beside me is a metronome of love and fidelity and how the green expanse outside my window will soon be covered with hoarfrost and then snow, with no flowers and no bees remaining to capture my gaze when I lift my fingers from these black, unmusical keys.

***

In five minutes the other day, I gathered a whole wheelbarrow full of pine cones from the tree that stands outside our bedroom window. I piled them next to the old goat shed and left them there for reasons unknown to me. They give me pleasure when I look at them. Sometimes these intuitive acts are a blessing for the day, and I never understand them. But I look for them and know them when they arrive. They seem to be punctuation marks on the page of grace on which I am, for now, still making my mark.

***

This morning, Jinx and I walked up in the cemetery, up there in the garden of granite, up there among the remains of a hundred departed souls beneath the living grass, and he looked up at me and said, in his way, I’m glad you’re with me here, and isn’t this life the most wondrous thing you know? and I scratched the diamond between his ears and whispered, “Yessir. It surely is.” And then we turned and went back to the house, where my beautiful little wife was fixing breakfast burritos.

Most wondrous.

~ S.K. Orr