Suburban Soliloquies #5
~Spring Comes to Suburbia~
Life is short. If it gets any shorter, I'm likely to die.
Before that
happens, I want to figure it out as much as possible. We
expect to find
wisdom at the conclusion of a difficult mountain climb to
a bearded guru in
his aerie, or after a long stay in the desert with a
hermit. I'm not
prepared to pay those prices, to forsake my comfortable
life and that
phenomenally rare feature, a happy marriage. Is it just
the lonely and
unhappy who seek enlightenment? Is nirvana to be forever
out of my reach
because I'm not willing to give up the incredible joys of
this life? Rather
than receiving my lessons while kneeling on the stone
floor of a kellion, I
would prefer gathering knowledge over a sumptuous meal
with glasses of fine
wine.
Walking is my favourite form of meditation. It is one of
the best features
of my companionship with a dog, that I find myself
obligated to set aside a
certain amount of time every day for my peripatetic
meditation. The other
night, before it rained, Boris [Kuma-san Chaliapin, my
190 pound
Newfoundland dog, not to be mistaken for a descendant of
Feodor Ivanovich
Chaliapin, the great, Russian operatic basso of a
previous generation] and I
took our constitutional around Samuel Everitt Elementary
School. The school
is a single-level brick structure. Each classroom has an
inside door
emptying into a long hallway, and a row of windows with
an outside door
opening onto the school yard. This is a large piece of
property that
incorporates two softball fields, a basketball court,
and two playgrounds,
plus a long expanse of grass. When my parents first
moved to Levittown,
Pennsylvania, thirty-seven years ago, I entered the
fifth grade of this very
school, named for the farmer who donated the property.
And in the middle of
the night I was returning to this school for my
continuing education.
As I walked the perimeter of the property in search of
philosophical insight
or spiritual enhancement, the unleashed Boris navigated
a circle closer to
the school in hope of finding a student’s abandoned
lunch or dropped candy
bars. A line of towering trees formed a dark and ragged
wall that marked the
edge of the school’s property on this overcast night. At
the foot of this
wall was a smaller tree vaguely glowing. My mother tells
me that we are
descended directly from Aaron, the brother of stuttering
Moses, so who
knows; I walked over to this small tree to see if it
would talk to me, as
did the burning bush to Moses of old. This eerie vision
turned out to be a
blossoming dogwood with nothing to say to me, but
nonetheless beautiful.
As I continued my journey along the edge of the woods, I
came across a tree
that had fallen. At some time in the recent past this
tree, rotten in its
center, surrendered to gravity's unrelenting pull.
Across my path the trunk
extended for at least fifty feet. Huge limbs had broken
off on impact. I
felt almost certain that there was a message here for
me, but I couldn't
decipher it. A tree shouldn’t die in Spring. Did this
tree die from its own
efforts to lift water and put forth leaves? In any case,
the tree's falling
did not intersect in time with my walking by, there was
that little blessing
to count. Then there was the nagging question that arose
uninvited to my
thoughts and commenced annoying me - if a tree falls in
the forest . . . .
The following day in the city, after it had rained,
tulips were displayed in
the occasional strips of geometric flower beds that are
crammed into the
available spaces. At storefronts flower pots appeared on
the sidewalks and
newly potted pansies decorated the window boxes. In the
country, distances
formerly visible through the tracery of naked limbs were
now curtained by
branches densely packed with leaves. Spring patched up
the unsightly views
of abandoned cars and littered roadways. In Levittown
the new growth
concealed the power lines and telephone wires carried by
poles through
everybody's backyard. Suburbia was absorbed by nature's
rejuvenation.
Levittown is looking beautiful, and maybe that's all the
truth I need to
know. In suburbia, where the branches of the trees
extend out over the black
asphalt streets, just now darkened because of the
earlier rain, they have
cast green and yellow shadows made up of petals. With
every burst of wind it
snows fruit tree blossoms.