Illumination through alliteration:
Subtitle: The Garden
Alternate titles: A letter from the grasshopper to the ant or heavy-handed diatribe concluding with platitudes (in which I address, several years after the fact, Shaylin’s caustic critique)

In this house there is always a fine line between waking up and coming to. I am moving slow this morning. My joints are creaking from the inevitable dehydration brought on by margaritas, gin & juice. I sing a song of synovial sadness, stiff and sedentary I segway into solipsism. I could write about how I got this way, I could blog about work. It’s been an odd week with all the storms that have barreled through our fair city, turning me into administrative building manager in charge of leaks. Steve, who is a great new character in my life, suctioned fifteen gallons of water out of the student clinic carpet yesterday. He’s a flood damage specialist who tells speed freak style stories of Hazmat horrors, chain sawing the couches of corpses. He reminds me of a young archetypal Burroughs hunting centipedes while on Benzedrine.

I can give you my new favorite phrase; which encapsulates how I feel about the current tides in my life:

The universe is popping out luck like seventeen-year cicadas.

Sometimes life moves faster than I have time to capture it, like riding the inflowing wave and twisting in the fun of the lift and roll. I spent last Sunday, my actual birthday, at the Missouri Botanical Gardens with Mary, who hadn’t been before. If you haven’t been it’s really a must see facility. I tend to go frequently in the summer and they have a free music series on Wednesday nights, which starts this week. The music series is very civilized – got your baby, got your blanket, got your bucket of beer – it’s the kind of thing where they encourage you to bring your wine and cheese to hear Jazz, folk, whatever – amid the garden’s beauty (& it’s free). There’s another free music series over at the history museum, which I think has started already. St. Louis really is a fine place to live, if you are interested in living. People out in the donut bemoan the sameness of the city, but in just three licks they could be in the chewy center of this tootsie roll tootsie pop (just ask the wise old owl).

The colors we saw at the garden, from the Betty Boop roses to the porcelain inspiring coy, were an ocular feast (I love the pop culture names for the newer hybrid roses). As always Mary’s encyclopedic mind heightened the pleasure of the visit. Mary used to work grounds at the L.A. Zoo. When the feds would snag incoming illegal plant species that did not need to be destroyed, they would often gift the Zoo with them, so Mary was filled with Orchid Thief like tales of planters intrigue as she rattled through the Latinate lingo of the haut horticulturalist (sorry for the heightened rhetoric, I’m feeling verbose today – on a bit of a linguistic tear).

We were feeding the fish from one of the side docks in the Japanese garden and were treated to an impromptu history lesson on the Persian origins of coy breeding from a passing lecturer. Chess, coy, flush toilets and justice; those wacky Persians had their shit together. That must be why we’re bombing the crap out of them now, to pretend we’re the cradle of civilization rather than, as Oppenheimer observed, Shiva to the globe. Hanging Gardens has a different meaning when you change the pause & the emphasis.

I dreamt last night that I was smashing black scorpions with a plate, chopping them in half and putting them in a huge wriggling pile. They were emerging from a fountain. I felt it was a war dream, but I’m not sure how. That’s my second scorpion dream; I wonder what that’s about. Blah - They asked a soldier on NPR the other day if he thought the pictures he’d taken of a corpse in Iraq, which he and the men in his unit had named Mr. Crispy because of his charred torso, were obscene. His response was succinct, “What in war isn’t obscene?”
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Diane was at the Garden earlier this week when one of the big storms hit. Everyone was enjoying the excitement and energy of the torrent, huddled together under the awning of the main entrance building. The wind was blowing the water in the fountain into chaotic patterns and the mist was still reaching them despite the large overhang. It had been a special event to view the blooming roses and people were laughing & drinking bottles of wine, immersed in the pleasure of the evening.

When the tornado sirens first sounded people weren’t sure what to do, even in the midst of a storm you have to wonder if they are just testing the equipment or sounding the hour. We haven’t been conditioned to react quickly to these warning systems, we’re always wondering if this is a drill. People were gradually ushered into the basement, where a small band began to play and bottles of wine were passed around. As Diane told the story you could tell that the unexpected civility of the rose show turned tornado drill had given her great pleasure.

This is strong metaphor for a very real problem, as the mist from our wars reaches us under the awning of America in the form of body counts and gas prices, and we head to the basements of our Memorial Day weekends, we need to consider how we should feel about the band & the bottles of wine. Do we drinkers and thinkers, the grasshoppers and pleasure takers of the world, lack, as bright Shaylin (who wept from the challenge to her faith when she first stood before the skeleton of a dinosaur) once observed of me, the courage of our convictions?

“And the band played on,” is the title of the HBO film about the willful ignorance of the medical establishment during the early days of HIV Aids, referencing the band on the titanic. Is it foolish, courageous, or obscene for the band to play while the storm rages outside and the ship is sinking? It depends. It’s only obscene if the band pretends it doesn’t know that there’s a storm.

When the worst of it is over, good people will go and clean up the messes wrought by the pride, greed and arrogance of fools. St. Louis accepted 14,000 plus refugees after the last storm. I saw a Bosnian couple with their daughter at the gardens on Sunday, walking among the orderly rows of plants, and I wondered what all the order, color, and beauty looked like against the background of what they must have seen to get there.

It’s important for the band to play, and for us to enjoy them as we may, because there’s always a storm and when it briefly abates, there will always be work to do.