Catalina’s mother was able to travel and be with us for a number of weeks, shortly after the birth of her grandson, our son. On one of the Saturdays of her visit, the two decided to, finally, “Do the Tourist Thing”, and ride one of the big red double-decker buses around the hills and beaches of Barcelona. I was invited, but declined; they had a great mother-daughter-grandson outing, and I took my bicycle and headed north.

– It’s pulling hard!

– Yes, it’s a big one. Don’t jerk the line, just keep…. wow, yes, just keep hold and bring it in slowly…

The line in the boy’s hands bucking and tugging, this way, that way, desperate to escape the fingers. His expression more determined than seven years of puzzles, seven winters, seven pairs of shoes, seven circles around the sun. A case for karma, the man thought, watching.

– There! Did you see it? – I don’t… think… over by the water? – No no no, down there (look where I’m pointing). OH! It moved again! – I can barely see your hand.

By now the children had returned from the shore and, having been hushed to quiet, came on exaggerated tip-toes to stand behind their parents. What is it? What is it?

– I think it’s a fox or a mink. – A fox! (stage whisper) – What’s a mink? (the fewer the years, the louder the “whisper”) – Quiet, quiet. There’s a little light between those two trees… it must be coming off the water? And every once in a – there!

Between the hills and the channel, the crows flew into cornfields as they had two hundred years before; the crows were chased from the nests of sparrows and starlings as they had been a thousand years before; the crows made their raucous calls as they had as long as earth could remember.

"Crows" by chrissymllr @ DeviantArt.com

On the shore, the channel waves pushed and pulled grains of sand as they had under the same sun, time forgotten. The salty water, warmed by the same rays, made little lives from its brine, time undefined. The breeze rose from one direction and flew to another, mixing sun and sea, making fog and rain, until no one and nothing remembered when it began, until the habit of creation was no longer noticed.

“What was that!”

They were on the river trail, a few minutes’ walk from the town center: far enough out that traffic noise was hushed and self-absorbed, yet near enough in that the bank of the waterway was tended like a garden, perennials were in bloom, annuals in bud, the grass clipped neat and paths swept clean. Comfortable benches had been placed every so often, that couples might rest in public privacy, leaning together, their words becoming soft and intimate, their breath merging as their thoughts merged.

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Look at that moon! And over there, Venus is a diamond. While this campfire warms my feet, the breeze nods itself to sleep, and the river (whose unceasing flow is an unremarked inspiration) hushes along on its gentle, downhill slide…

There is much to be said of city life — but the less said, the better.

We can make smaller circles in the trees, just out of sight of those agitated centers. Here where embraces are slower and quieter, where we do more to nourish ourselves and our neighbors, and less to stoke a Machine whose engines carry others to others’ destinations.

Some art is as trivial and ephemeral as our youth: its willful innocence soon outgrown, and without resentment, but with a kind and condescending turn of heart, to be dismissed as a passing, as a light distraction.

Other pieces are soon discovered: those that remain with us are an artist’s masterwork, which once open our youthful eyes, a door to something larger than we know, larger than we are; and as we age into their beauty and their wisdom they make their way into our hearts along the lines of fracture and remorse we earn through our hard living.

Several years ago I was “improving” my photo collection, which had become a wobbling tower of Kodachrome, balanced precariously and in no particular order in a hidden corner of my closet. Every time I saw it, I felt a vague intolerance; and each time I saw it, I felt that intolerance grow, until finally the intolerance was itself intolerable, and I furiously shoveled the concealing junk out of the way, and hooked those boxes and stacks out into the middle of my bedroom floor.

I

At the sliding glass door she stood, looking at the night. Through her own reflection she could see, in order of diminishing certainty, the branches of a pine, the outline of flowers along the walk (in shades of gray), lawn that faded into the darkness of what she knew to be a road. When she breathed in there was a faint whistling through her nostrils; when she breathed out, her breath fogged the glass in an oval that grew outward, then shrunk on itself, as though its shape were being drawn back into her lungs. The hall tiles were cold. She looked down at her feet.

Lonny was the product of big energy and tiny town, where the limitations imposed by three square blocks of homes – an Alcatraz adrift on an ocean of unswimmable wheat – fueled the kind of incendiary pressure that could only come out wrong. Even back then, when I was eight and Lonny was nine, his combustion resulted in trouble; so years later, when I heard that he was in the pen for grand theft auto and some litany of other offenses, it was disappointingly no surprise: the wide world never succeeded in changing Lonny’s first impressions, nor would he be able to see it as anything but an endless, confining small town. A twitch in his heart was too large for his skin, a cruel itch, an irritation for which he found no balm. Maybe he didn’t look hard enough. Maybe he took off in the wrong direction, followed the wrong leader, and never got righted.