Marvels And Wonders

9:37 p.m. Wednesday. December. Dark. Rained the entire day. I took a day off from running. R and I went for a short walk instead. I’ve always enjoyed walking with an umbrella. Like a portable home. Roof over one’s head, clickety clackety of drops on the fabric, in this case black, with silver ribs. We went to check on the crows, Louise in particular, who remained perched on a phone wire, the only crow there. She’s usually accompanied by two other crows, her family. We tossed some peanuts on the ground and walked a few feet away and I turned back expecting to see her come down but she remained, still as a statue, high on the wire. Why? I wondered. Why was she sitting like that getting soaked in cold December rain? She’s an enigma wrapped in a riddle, as they say. Later, after dinner and a movie (Fourteen Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, not nearly as good or transcendent as the other one we saw yesterday, The Alpinist, whose central character is a young Canadian mountaineer with a real love for the rock walls and ice he negotiates with sublime concentration, the beatific focus of a Zen priest), I read about Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt in the Old Testament story of the Exodus and – curious about where God split the Red Sea so they could all get across safely with the angry Pharoah in pursuit, Yul Brynner resplendent in embossed gold & knitted brow, a scene I vividly remember seeing as a kid in the movie theater in 1956, Charlton Heston with his stern countenance as Moses holding out his staff, the salty wind catching in his beard, the sea splitting into two huge turbulent walls of water, which is supposed to have occurred “in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea, in front of Baal-zephon” – I look it up via Google and discover that there is no archaeological evidence of where, or whether, such an event took place, but a possible location may have been somewhere along the banks of the Gulf of Suez. That seems feasible because it’s much narrower. I don’t care if it’s real or not. I doubt it happened. But it’s a great story. Perfect for the movies. Imagine some other 50s actor in that role, John Wayne or Clark Gable, had to be Charlton Heston, he’s the only one with the completely unironic imperious one-dimensionality to pull it off, though nothing remotely Jewish about him, could’ve been Paul Newman, who was 31 at the time. Five years later he’d be holding a cue stick and splitting balls on a pool table. I get up from the bed and plop some cubed bits of salmon in Athena’s dish and pop a cherry cordial into my mouth, sweet chocolate diffusing in my mouth with a filling of cherry juice and sugary corn syrup. Feel like a real hedonist. Takes the edge off things. We need a new sink. Can’t get sealant in the back without removing the thing. Garbage disposal went dead. We never used it. Gears must’ve somehow frozen. Hate the sound it makes. Easier just to toss food scraps into the compost pail. Let the molds & yeasts do their thing. Release nutrients. Convert it to rich black dirt. Grow more food. Such is the cyclical nature of things. Everything in balance. And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, and then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; and thereby hangs a tale.