Coming About
The year is coming about like the boat in New York harbor after Dad emptied his father's ashes into the water. The wreath followed and Booker rang the ship's bell eight times. "Watch's over. All's well," he said according to custom of the merchant marines he and Denison separately served in during WWII. This was last week. A turning, but a much more solemn one. This direction change is decisive but different, opposite, a celebration. No mourning of summer. No desire to stretch August out, pull the legs of the gullible days till they believed the season wouldn't change, till time was taller between me and a Horace Mann September start. The month didn't hurry either, though it's happy to turn towards school.
The year is coming to be about college. Post-Paris and my second summer at Einstein, high school, capped by a coda, finally feels sealed and put away in a box on a shelf in my closet. Fond of photos and tickets stubs, saved scraps of past, touchstones of memories (mine), I like that the box exists. I like knowing it's there like nineteen years are there, objects hung on my body, not ornaments on a tree, but clothes. They're not embalmed, the years or the memories. They'll slowly decay, diminish or become decadent with dust. But dry, tied up on a top shelf, I doubt they'll fester. And while I like seeing it sitting there, owning it, I don't want to go back. There's no future in that. The boat has come about. My saucy bark is Yale-bound. Bound to college, fact and place I'm supposed to be at. Along the turn, buoys been helpful markers of change. Turmoil's taken multiple forms. By metempsychosis, the soul of summer's end has blown through moving boxes, a Yankee game - the best thank you present for summer lab work, and learning to ride a bike.
It's just like riding a bike. Never a cliché I liked. To me the antecedent always corresponded to scrapes, bruises, and a beating by a menacing simple machine. But because of a logistical incarnation of the problem of split interests, I wheeled a bike out of the shed of the country house and ended up in a ditch. The bike ended upside down against a white wooden fence. The cause I considered from the ditch was the approach of classes. It looked like Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies and Principles of Biochemistry were separated by a ten minute interlude to take in the distance between Linsly Chittendon on Old Campus and Sterling Chemistry at the top of science hill, a fifteen minute walk. I needed to take both classes. I declared I would learn to ride a bike in one week in August. And like driving, I was fine in the parking lot. (I might be the only person to simultaneously learn to drive and ride a bike.) But a terror of traffic flipped me off and acquainted me with the incline of a particular Route 42 ditch. The back road was better. Cars carefully skirted around a biker with a determined face. Gradually grip on handlebars eased and coasting down through the valley, I almost appreciated why people might get on a bike of their own volition. But thankfully biochem decided to take a lower seat on science hill and I can feasibly make it without two-wheeled aid. Meaning I'm giving up biking, again, with one more knee scrape and a spectacular black bruise on the top inside of my thigh. Like Odysseus's scar, a physical marker of identity embedded in flesh, indentation and contusion branding story of this struggle into body. But they're better than being drawn and quartered by divergent desires for explanations of being human. "Science of English, which do you really love?" they asked me repeatedly at the neuroscience lab. The question does not have to be solved now, on the eve of classes. I came home from a candlelit poetry séance and I'm waking to a first neurobiology course tomorrow. Hopefully, I won't ever have to answer the question.
The year is coming to be about college. Post-Paris and my second summer at Einstein, high school, capped by a coda, finally feels sealed and put away in a box on a shelf in my closet. Fond of photos and tickets stubs, saved scraps of past, touchstones of memories (mine), I like that the box exists. I like knowing it's there like nineteen years are there, objects hung on my body, not ornaments on a tree, but clothes. They're not embalmed, the years or the memories. They'll slowly decay, diminish or become decadent with dust. But dry, tied up on a top shelf, I doubt they'll fester. And while I like seeing it sitting there, owning it, I don't want to go back. There's no future in that. The boat has come about. My saucy bark is Yale-bound. Bound to college, fact and place I'm supposed to be at. Along the turn, buoys been helpful markers of change. Turmoil's taken multiple forms. By metempsychosis, the soul of summer's end has blown through moving boxes, a Yankee game - the best thank you present for summer lab work, and learning to ride a bike.
It's just like riding a bike. Never a cliché I liked. To me the antecedent always corresponded to scrapes, bruises, and a beating by a menacing simple machine. But because of a logistical incarnation of the problem of split interests, I wheeled a bike out of the shed of the country house and ended up in a ditch. The bike ended upside down against a white wooden fence. The cause I considered from the ditch was the approach of classes. It looked like Shakespeare: Histories and Tragedies and Principles of Biochemistry were separated by a ten minute interlude to take in the distance between Linsly Chittendon on Old Campus and Sterling Chemistry at the top of science hill, a fifteen minute walk. I needed to take both classes. I declared I would learn to ride a bike in one week in August. And like driving, I was fine in the parking lot. (I might be the only person to simultaneously learn to drive and ride a bike.) But a terror of traffic flipped me off and acquainted me with the incline of a particular Route 42 ditch. The back road was better. Cars carefully skirted around a biker with a determined face. Gradually grip on handlebars eased and coasting down through the valley, I almost appreciated why people might get on a bike of their own volition. But thankfully biochem decided to take a lower seat on science hill and I can feasibly make it without two-wheeled aid. Meaning I'm giving up biking, again, with one more knee scrape and a spectacular black bruise on the top inside of my thigh. Like Odysseus's scar, a physical marker of identity embedded in flesh, indentation and contusion branding story of this struggle into body. But they're better than being drawn and quartered by divergent desires for explanations of being human. "Science of English, which do you really love?" they asked me repeatedly at the neuroscience lab. The question does not have to be solved now, on the eve of classes. I came home from a candlelit poetry séance and I'm waking to a first neurobiology course tomorrow. Hopefully, I won't ever have to answer the question.
