Lightning
(I'd gone to take photos of the rosy magnolia pods forming on the tree up on the corner. I'd had my eye on them for a while, waiting for the right conditions. Too damn bright/hot to do on a typical Texas summer day, but the sky lowered and grumbled in swirling shades of payne's grey, and the cool breeze shaking the first autumn leaves out of the crape myrtles beckoned me out from under the laptop in the studio...)
I walk briskly down the long drive and up the road to where it forks at the grassy triangle, wondering if I should have brought a plastic bag for my camera in case the deluge I sense coming arrives sooner than later. I tiptoe gingerly into the high grass where snakes, burrs and fire ants hide like land mines in an otherwise innocent and inviting vernal landscape, carefully picking my way into the oasis of shadow provided by a cluster of dark magnolia, hoary crape myrtle, wild cedar and mimosa trees.
I catch a rain drop here and another there, savor the distant rumbling of racing thunderheads. Snared by the siren song of magnolia pods, velvety soft with funny curling black hairs where the seeds are forming, it is too delicious to retreat .. just a few shots lest I not make it out here again before time turns the tender blushing pods to unremarkable brown...
Someone turns up the volume on the approaching storm. I look nervously to the east as the thunderclaps get louder. The little voice in my head asks, “At what price art?.”
But the stream of consciousness bubbling up from the triangle fixed between the pupils of my eyes and the focal point of the camera natters on, “Oh look at that ivory colored bud against the broad waxy dark leaves, nice contrast... no, turn it this way....okay, open it up just a little more... How beatuiful...”
Boom! It’s dark enough now that I can see some of the flashes that precede the thunder and it’s harder to get my shots with my subjects bouncing around on the cool downdrafts...
“They say you should never hang out under a tree during an electrical storm...” says that very reasonable inner voice that feels responsible for my well being, but doesn’t want to push the panic button--yet.
“... yeah, yeah, yeah... but look at that spider! Exquisitely beautiful yet menacing at the same time... I wish I could get this macro lens to cooperate...”
Then the simultaneous flash and earsplitting crack of a thunder bolt accompanied by a shower of sparks from the utility pole about 30 yards away!
“Holy Shit!!!”
Who knew I could still move so fast?
My in-flight calculations compare the relative safety of lying in a ditch away from the trees and waiting it out like they told us to do in elementary school safety drills--are you kidding, this is fire ant and burr country?!--to running alone on the exposed road. And yes, the telephone poles are taller than I am, but also, I imagine, susceptible to explosive splintering.
Then I try to recall if I've ever heard anything about whether lightning is more likely to strike a stationary or moving object. No available data on that one so my mind leaps to wondering if being struck by lightning is such a bad thing? some people do survive. Maybe I could end up with cool psychic powers like that guy in that Anne Rice book, but do I really want cool psychic powers if they are bestowed thru a process that fries vital organs along the way...?
Another sky splitting CRACK! and no looking back. Too bad I'm not in better condition. I’m an avid walker, but not a runner... Running for one’s life is a good argument, however, for taking ambulation up another notch... I cringe with the next flash anticipaintg the sharp retort of thunder--
Damn it would be inconvenient if I died with so much work unfinished, all those paintings that never got painted, assemblages that never got assembled, photos that never made it into the photo albums, so many journaled pages begging to be edited-- or burnt...
...burnt would probably be better, zapped by lightning...
Jogging along in the rain, I take a mental peek into file cabinets and folders at home where there are letters I’ve never sent, ragged prose, stillborn “creative” writing endeavors...
All the stuff I’m too “enlightened” to say out loud ends up on those pages.. My journals are my paper priest, my confessor, witness to the flaws that confront me when I bare my soul before my omniscient self, the one who knows my secret heart of heats... and then there’s the fragile electronic vault of my unprinted longings and fantasies--aahh, but I did put a password on THAT file didn’t I?...
Still, hundreds--get real, nearly 30 years of writing? okay, a few THOUSAND pages of trivial bullshit that seems somehow relevant in the moment... memories of the little things, the details that give my life its distinctive flavor, things that might be entertaining to me alone in my dotage when I’ve developed a penchant for nostalgia, but otherwise--KABOOM!--how embarrassing would it be for my family to have to sift thru all that evidence of my self indulgent literary attempts, the messy years of bad writing and youthful melodrama that fertilize the ground of verbal facility and emotional maturity... Given the sheer volume of paper I’ve already consumed and what would be required to print the documents that have acrued in my laptop in recent years there could be no disguising how truly self-absorbed I am...
I make it inside the tree line of the thickly forested drive where the lightning will have to be much more discerning to get me, and slow to a walk, heart pounding, gasping for breath, relieved to know there is still time for me to edit my life before post mortem review...
I walk briskly down the long drive and up the road to where it forks at the grassy triangle, wondering if I should have brought a plastic bag for my camera in case the deluge I sense coming arrives sooner than later. I tiptoe gingerly into the high grass where snakes, burrs and fire ants hide like land mines in an otherwise innocent and inviting vernal landscape, carefully picking my way into the oasis of shadow provided by a cluster of dark magnolia, hoary crape myrtle, wild cedar and mimosa trees.
I catch a rain drop here and another there, savor the distant rumbling of racing thunderheads. Snared by the siren song of magnolia pods, velvety soft with funny curling black hairs where the seeds are forming, it is too delicious to retreat .. just a few shots lest I not make it out here again before time turns the tender blushing pods to unremarkable brown...
Someone turns up the volume on the approaching storm. I look nervously to the east as the thunderclaps get louder. The little voice in my head asks, “At what price art?.”
But the stream of consciousness bubbling up from the triangle fixed between the pupils of my eyes and the focal point of the camera natters on, “Oh look at that ivory colored bud against the broad waxy dark leaves, nice contrast... no, turn it this way....okay, open it up just a little more... How beatuiful...”
Boom! It’s dark enough now that I can see some of the flashes that precede the thunder and it’s harder to get my shots with my subjects bouncing around on the cool downdrafts...
“They say you should never hang out under a tree during an electrical storm...” says that very reasonable inner voice that feels responsible for my well being, but doesn’t want to push the panic button--yet.
“... yeah, yeah, yeah... but look at that spider! Exquisitely beautiful yet menacing at the same time... I wish I could get this macro lens to cooperate...”
Then the simultaneous flash and earsplitting crack of a thunder bolt accompanied by a shower of sparks from the utility pole about 30 yards away!
“Holy Shit!!!”
Who knew I could still move so fast?
My in-flight calculations compare the relative safety of lying in a ditch away from the trees and waiting it out like they told us to do in elementary school safety drills--are you kidding, this is fire ant and burr country?!--to running alone on the exposed road. And yes, the telephone poles are taller than I am, but also, I imagine, susceptible to explosive splintering.
Then I try to recall if I've ever heard anything about whether lightning is more likely to strike a stationary or moving object. No available data on that one so my mind leaps to wondering if being struck by lightning is such a bad thing? some people do survive. Maybe I could end up with cool psychic powers like that guy in that Anne Rice book, but do I really want cool psychic powers if they are bestowed thru a process that fries vital organs along the way...?
Another sky splitting CRACK! and no looking back. Too bad I'm not in better condition. I’m an avid walker, but not a runner... Running for one’s life is a good argument, however, for taking ambulation up another notch... I cringe with the next flash anticipaintg the sharp retort of thunder--
Damn it would be inconvenient if I died with so much work unfinished, all those paintings that never got painted, assemblages that never got assembled, photos that never made it into the photo albums, so many journaled pages begging to be edited-- or burnt...
...burnt would probably be better, zapped by lightning...
Jogging along in the rain, I take a mental peek into file cabinets and folders at home where there are letters I’ve never sent, ragged prose, stillborn “creative” writing endeavors...
All the stuff I’m too “enlightened” to say out loud ends up on those pages.. My journals are my paper priest, my confessor, witness to the flaws that confront me when I bare my soul before my omniscient self, the one who knows my secret heart of heats... and then there’s the fragile electronic vault of my unprinted longings and fantasies--aahh, but I did put a password on THAT file didn’t I?...
Still, hundreds--get real, nearly 30 years of writing? okay, a few THOUSAND pages of trivial bullshit that seems somehow relevant in the moment... memories of the little things, the details that give my life its distinctive flavor, things that might be entertaining to me alone in my dotage when I’ve developed a penchant for nostalgia, but otherwise--KABOOM!--how embarrassing would it be for my family to have to sift thru all that evidence of my self indulgent literary attempts, the messy years of bad writing and youthful melodrama that fertilize the ground of verbal facility and emotional maturity... Given the sheer volume of paper I’ve already consumed and what would be required to print the documents that have acrued in my laptop in recent years there could be no disguising how truly self-absorbed I am...
I make it inside the tree line of the thickly forested drive where the lightning will have to be much more discerning to get me, and slow to a walk, heart pounding, gasping for breath, relieved to know there is still time for me to edit my life before post mortem review...