Tree at the center of the world

 

About two inches of room temperature Coca Cola left in the bottle I forgot was in my bag. Enough to wash down the boiled egg I’m masticating. I’ve been 70 for five months now. I ride the subway to a job. I stop at a place where I can sit at a table and write for thirty minutes, if I left home early enough. I use the timer on my phone to measure out this time.

The high wall of the marketplace is covered with decorative green plastic representations of flora and fauna, a plastic wilderness to contemplate while you eat quickly. 

A young man with green hair passes by. Human activity, we call it.

Yesterday I was looking out a window at the security tent as we waited for the ferry and I noticed a bit of real foliage sprouting from the top of one of the pilings on the dock. I took a photo of it and named it “Tree.”

The piling is still a tree, despite having lost its limbs when it was put to use at the dock, and I wonder if it is still growing roots underneath, and can it take root under the water and grow branches.

In time, if humans and human activity leave New Amsterdam will all the pilings become a new forest? Even if there is no one here to see them? If one hand is clapping in the inhuman forest, do the trees acknowledge the applause?

I perform my human activity. I sit at a table or stand behind a cash register and take root and something green sprouts from the crown of my head and, if left alone, I slowly become a tree. 

God willing, I become Yggdrasil.

Middle of August already beginning to seem like September, late summer light and cool morning and vague back to school nostalgia. Labor Day weekend will mark twenty six years as a resident of Brooklyn. I’ve lived here longer than I’ve lived any where else, over a third of my life (so far). Twenty three years after 9/11, eighteen years after getting married to Lori, and nine years after she left__________________________

Seventeen years after Mom left, sixteen after Dad left. Now we wait for my sister to leave, and how many years before I leave?

Life doesn’t begin at seventy, but it doesn’t end until it ends, if it really ends, if there really is an end. We are in the embrace of the unconditioned all the time, and isn’t recalling that, recognizing that, what it’s all about?

Orion seems menacing now when I see him out my kitchen window. Orion is not really a “he” or “him” or any pronoun at all but a few stars that appear regularly in the sky in the same configuration from my POV. This connect the dots figure travels in a regular path, or appears to, and I think about our ancestors observing the stars and their paths and feel the mix of awe and fear toward these uncanny things far above us and much older than us and even now way beyond reach of our rockets, and even though I know there is no Orion, there it is, familiar, and always a sign of September mornings and the approach of another 9/11 anniversary. 

I tell a co-worker that what freaks me out this year is that it has been twenty three years and I can’t even process that. Everything that happened in the past twenty three years are like the images and scenes that flash in the window of a train racing to the terminal. A third of a lifetime. 

I mean, I’ve been seventy for six months now.