What Are You Looking At?

Ten a.m. Agent 97 wakes up, drags himself to the living room to read the latest volume in whatever fantasy adventure series it is this month. I take a ninja stance, arms up, wrists cocked, wagging my fingers menacingly with a “Come on, what have you got?” look.

“Shut uppa you mouth,” he says. “Go to the store right now and get cookies.”

“Ha! I mock you” I say.

“Go get cookies!”

Cool gray Saturday morning, the second chilly day of the season. I love this weather, it makes me imagine I’m in New York or the Bay Area. It lets me wear my new favorite sweater. I’m sitting near the open window, sipping my second half-decaf au lait from a ceramic mug that Agent 83 doesn’t remember giving me when he was a child. I may take a walk to the library, or I may just imagine it. I watch a squirrel with twin nuts in its mouth run the length of a telephone wire, its back undulating. It speeds up when a little bird flies near it, though the bird can’t do it any harm.

I can see what the wire looks like through the squirrel’s eyes. The wire moving under him, and the tops of the green and tan bamboo under that, and the gray cloud-light in his peripheral vision. Pure sensation of movement, no words, pure sight and motion. Life, absolute life.

I can see what the world looks like for this Richard, too. A wide dark space with thoughts zinging across it like meteor showers that make him go, “Ah.” A space infinite but bounded; within its borders everything fits: cities, hosts of people, entire literatures, out to the galaxies. And him little in the center of it, taking in all the messages and sending ones back. Absolute life.

“Get some cookies! There’s nothing to eat around here, what’s a person to eat? What are you looking at?”

leaf impressions, quack not clack, Great Pyrenees

1. At the newly landscaped pond at the multi-use development, the designers imprinted leaves and grasses into the wet cement so that the impressions dried in. Not until after I drive off do I wonder whether they took real plants from the surrounding fields, or used ready-made stamps. Oh no, how will I know whether I’m allowed to like it or not?

2. A nearby clacking: at first I think it’s my phone mischievously taking snapshots inside my pocket, but it’s a pair of quacking waterbirds at the edge of the pond, small and black with off-white bills, quick-paddling this way and that through the grass and algae and dipping for munchables, and followed by three fuzzy chicks with red bills who wonder, “What’s next?”

3. The dogs are out, their masters putting on or taking off their leashes. From the other side of the pond I’m planning what I’m going to say to the leash-removers if I command myself not to chicken out. But by the time we’re all on the same side of the pond it’s occurred to me that these people may know how to handle their animals –- canine-human pairs stop on the path to greet one another and separate with no horrible consequences -- and that the only unpeaceful things in the scene are my own judgments. In a wild departure, I smile at one of the dog owners and ask him what breed his big beautiful dog is: it’s a Great Pyrenees.