music brain

In Recoleta in Buenos Aires they do a flea market on Sunday. A guy brings RCA Victrolas that you can wind with a crank to play records. On an old 78 at the bottom of a dusty box that's survived innumerable crises quasi-intact is a record without any words on the label. There's a picture though, a doodle of a worried looking cartoon fat man with bug eyes. The A-side is ungrooved and would sound like nails scratching on the flaming chalkboards of full hell in the open-air market.

If you wind the crank and put on the B-side, though, you'll hear preserved the contents of my music brain, which I've transcoded there for safe-keeping as I build competency in realms far more bureaucratic and parental.

Under the music is a gringo trying to sing in Spanish because he thinks the language will make his lyrics more poetic. The engineer on duty the day of the recording had the good sense to fade the lyrics in the mix to the point of mumble, so all you hear is the occasional mispronounced accent or stray letter n with a tilde, or o. Porque no tengo la sensibilidad a cantar con palabras que yo entiendo, porque la luna es libre y cabelleros son su estudiantes idiotas.

dream as metaphor for the full parenting process

In the dream we were in front of the house and he was running from near where you were, along the sidewalk toward me. I tried to catch him and called to him but he didn't listen and he was moving faster than I could catch him, much faster than I expected. That part of the dream ended as he ran into traffic and across the road. The same dreamspeed logic through which he evaded my grasp allowed him to dodge cars as he crossed the street to safety, or out of our care and into the world.

salt air

So we walked out to the edge of the land, far out from the full coast, held by the temperate late Atlantic. Boats in the bay, every house losing its slow fight with salt air. The same with people's faces, or how you tell the difference between a townie and the folks in for the weekend, the week, or at most the summer. A glamorous way to demarcate your allocated time, out on the edge of the world, where the end seems both close at hand and never further away, what comes after east.

water underground

The antique roses in the front yard bloomed last week. They're in full flower now, some dragging the stems to the sidewalk with their weight. There are so many this spring, how still the depth of this winter makes its presence known. And in my work, one way or another every day I catch myself still digging out from those huge storms.

Home and barely functional or honestly half dead, when I see your faces leaning together, hear your voices speaking together I feel you both a part of me the same, a breaking through to light from water underground.