Pine Cone Apocalypse

 I take Princess Amy for a walk on sunny mornings in hopes of lifting her mood and getting the day off on the right path. If you're one of the many who hang out here on the Circular Journey blog site and read everything that I write, then you're familiar with the princess. 

If you're new here, let it suffice to say that Princess Amy is my limbic system and she behaves like the Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass. If you're still lost, then I suggest that you stop reading now and return to your familiar social media habits.

On this morning's walk, I was contemplating the characters in my book--the novel, not the South Carolina travel book. I was thinking specifically of Lupe, the 14-year-old protagonist who causes all the rannygazoo in Crystal Cove.

As I walked underneath the arbor of a pine grove, I was startled when a pine cone fell from its moorings in the canopy at just the precise moment to strike its target on the very top of my head. 

Pine cones are harder than you might expect this one fell from high above and landed with a startling Whack!. I jumped. And if I shouted something like Holy Hell!, it was warranted. Tears came to my eyes.

Immediately after such an attack, the eyes are drawn upward to see where the attack originated and this morning I saw a bird, possibly a grackle, fly from somewhere high in the tree. A new spirit guide I wondered? 

The thought was prompted by my musing on the character Lupe. Her mother is Native American--Lupe prefers the word Indian--and she recognizes spirit guides from the animal kingdom and insists that I have one too, even though I haven't been properly introduced to one.

Hold that thought. I'm in danger of jumping the rails again. Let's get back to the subject by saying that when I brought my gaze back down to earth, I almost stepped on a card lying on the ground. At first, I walked on by but I quickly thought better of it.

You see, the pine cone barrage was a bit out of the usual, and considering the odds that a bird would dislodge the whatsit at just the right time to have it fall through the ether and smack me on the coconut must be staggering. And if you consider the spirit guide angle, it follows that maybe it all happened for a reason and the card, which turned out to be a lottery card, could be the reason.

You understand then why I picked up the card. Unfortunately, it wasn't a winner. Now I was left wondering, Why? Realizing that there was no answer better than the whole thing being nothing more than a random happenstance, I put the mystery aside and what do you think happened then?

You'll never guess so I'll tell you, My thoughts turned to germs. That's right. We're amid a global pandemic as I write this and germs often come to mind. And I was holding a card that had been in someone else's hands. 

There was no trash can in sight and I didn't want to carry this piece of garbage for the rest of my walk. But the ongoing environmental degradation has made me militantly anti-littering. What to do? That became the big question in my mind. What to do with the discarded paper.

I'm interested to know if you agree with my decision, which was this: The damage to the environment and all right-thinking sensibilities had already been done by the person who dropped the card in the first place. If I placed the card on the path exactly where I found it, then I was doing no further damage and I could pick up the card and dispose of it properly on my return. 

I walked back underneath the same tree and placed the card on the ground. Then I straightened and continued my stroll.

"You dropped something," said a voice somewhere off-stage.

That's right. Another hiker was approaching and she'd seen me deliberately place the piece of trash on the ground. Of course, I wanted to say, It's not mine. I'm only returning it to where I found it. 

I didn't want to pick up the trash again and go through the same deliberations I'd considered only a few seconds before. So what I actually said was: "Thank you." 

Then I picked up the card, and smiled at her as she walked past--it was no good, of course, I was wearing a mask. I placed the card in the back pocket of my jeans and forgot about it until I washed the jeans with the card still in the pocket. And there's the moral of the story! One damned thing after another.

Can't Stop Us Now

Dawn had swept the stars from the sky and poured a cupful of sunshine onto the lawns of Chatsford Hall by the time Ms. Wonder came breezing into my study. She looked like Marlene Dietrich in the role of Catherine the Great leading her troops to the Winter Palace to deliver the message to Peter that he found so very disappointing. I was happy to see her--Ms. Wonder, of course, not Catherine. If the United States Marines had landed on the lawn outside, I couldn't have been happier. I told her so.

"Good morning, Wonder," I said. "I'm happy to see you."

"Have you been up all night, working on that book?" she said.

"Not that book," I said. "It's called Out of the Blue, and no, I've been wrestling with a decision regarding the end of the world as we know it."

"Right," she said and if she seemed to be less than sympathetic it's because that's exactly what she was less than, and before you judge, let me assure you she has a right. It isn't easy living with The Genome.

I aspire to be a rational, level-headed--if that's the term--adult. I make reasonable plans that outline the proper steps. So far so good, but then when the curtain goes up I forget all my lines. No amount of cajoling can motivate me to leave the wings to strut across the stage playing my part. I don't trust myself to do the right thing and, this is the worst part, I don't trust the advice of anyone else. I don't suppose you've had the experience yourself?

"I want to hand the thing over to my agent," I said, "before I get around to it, I change my mind; I want to publish it myself, keeping all control, you know." I was silent for a moment musing on something I'd heard somewhere. Probably in a song. "It's like that mountain," I said at last.

"Mountain?" she said.

"You know," I said, "First there was a mountain, then there was no mountain, then there was. That mountain."

"Donovan," she said or at least that's what it sounded like to me. I believe it's one of the prehistoric eras but I'm not sure about it. You may be more familiar with the term.

"Between the acting of a dreadful thing and the first notion," she said, "all the interim is like a hideous dream and the state of man like to a little kingdom suffers an insurrection."

"I couldn't have put it better myself," I said "but why are you talking like that?"

"Shakespeare," she said, and then added, "Julius Caesar."

Well, it's always hard to know what to say when someone hands you lines like those. First Donovan and now Shakespeare and Julius Caesar! I began to wonder if she'd taken my meds instead of hers. It's the same problem I have trying to respond to the Muse and the Saint pre-coffee. But I responded in the best way I knew how on the spur of the moment.

"Your first guess is usually the correct one," I said, "so I'd guess Shakespeare. Sounds more like his stuff than something Caesar would say."

"In Hamlet, he described it as like the poor cat in the adage."

"Then I'm sure it was Shakespeare," I said, "we read Hamlet in Norbert Kier's class in high school and I'm pretty certain he wrote it. Shakespeare I mean, not Mr. Kier."

"I know who wrote it," she said. "It was in the play Julius Caesar."

I mused through a few moments of silence, wondering why she kept referring to me as Julius Caesar. I finally decided to go with this, "You know, Wonder, I think you're on to something. I seem to remember someone else saying something similar. Something about the spirit being willing but the feet were cold."

"Jesus Christ," she said.

"Ms. Wonder!" I said. "Language!. You may have ancestors who dumped palace waste into the Winter Canal and polluted the River Neva but my ears are not garbage cans."

"May I make a suggestion?" she said and I'm sure you can imagine the relief I felt that she was about to offer help.

"Do," I said.

"You might consider writing an email to yourself with a detailed explanation of your logical and reasonable thought processes. Then, in the future, when you feel unsure of your next step, you can refer to the email and know that you are getting sound advice."

"Send an email into the future addressed to me?" I said.

"Precisely," she said.

"Ms. Wonder!" I said with not a little enthusiasm. "You are one of a kind. You do know everything no matter how much you deny it."

"Not at all," she said. "I'm happy to help in any way I can."

"You know at least as much as Shakespeare," I said, "and he seemed to hear all the gossip. Thank you immensely."

"Not at all," she said.