The Earth and the Mammals Do Move

Just when you think that the universe might finally be cooperating you necessarily must realize that you are dead wrong. Inevitable. Being reminded of the larger picture of oh, you know, history and seismology and life cycles, comes with a jar. Not like a delicious container of fruit preserves, no, like a JAR! (imagine that in a big crazy broken-y font) that shakes and wakes and reminds that you are but a teensy player on an enormous stage. A walk on, if you will, in this play that is called "Here on Earth: A Living, Breathing Planet with Many Species of Fauna and the Humans Who (Hilariously) Think They Control Everything". (A great name for a play, I do think.)

Today sitting on my well-worn sofa, doing my thing where I internet and write and respond and generally commute my head's thoughts via my computer's keyboard, an earthquake rocked the house. I heard it before I felt it - like a really loud truck passing by + a really loud toilet flushing. Then a WTF? moment of my heart jumping into my ears, then a serious shaking. I am terrified of earthquakes having lived through the 1989 San Francisco quake, they strike ultimate fear into my heart and render me sissified like nothing else in this world. It shook, I jumped and ran for a doorway, I stopped halfway there took note of the wine glass rack clinking and glass tchotchkes clanking, ran back to the sofa and slipped on flip flops (broken glass and bloody feet imagined here), then ran back to the doorway farthest away from anything breakable. The quake stopped, yet for a full minute I stood clutching my shaking hands in front of me, waiting for another jolt. What happened was the parrot jumped off his cage (he can't fly, sadly) and this moved me to action - some being was possibly more freaked than I.

I breathed deeply and moved from this solid doorway to pick up the bird. He jumped off my finger. I picked him up again, but he wouldn't dismount my finger back onto his cage, however, with some sotto voce coaxing (it's all okay... possibly) he stepped off and life, earth, the house were still again. To the UAF Seismic Website Place! But, overloaded with instant interneter looky-lous and unable to load! Hours later I would learn it was a 4.9, epicenter 13 miles SW of here. That's just too close for comfort.

And yet, speaking of comfort levels of closeness, just minutes before I write this I'm standing in the kitchen with the window open and I hear something (someone) clearly crashing through the bushes out back. (Interesting that I'm braver in these possible intruder situations than in houserocking moments which present no threat of a possible baddie coming in through the back door.) I turn on the back porchlight and let my eyes adjust waiting to confront.

Moments. Then - there are, not more than 20 feet away from where I stand, a momma moose and two baby moose. A single-mother family just cruising through my backyard, munching on the yellowing fireweed, all familiarly touching at their flanks as they graze and then suddenly aware of me - the crouching tiger on the porch outstretching her very weak and inept iPhone camera that refuses to capture this little dinner outing because it's too dark - so they stopped and looked back. It was a staredown. I felt like a bit of a paparazzi there in the glare of their very large mammalian eyeballs staring back, so I blinked first. "Sorry," I actually said to the mooses three, turning off the porchlight, letting them go on about enjoying their late-night snack.

I think I needn't point out the moral of these nature stories - the quaking, the four-legged beasts - except to say that I do recognize that these things happened very really, and then they also happened to others, not just me. I assume this based on a lifetime of empathic humanity. A 4.9 earthquake causes things to rattle in other people's houses, and moose families gallop on to eat the fireweed in others' backyards, and don't these crazy occurrences of nature just make some of us glad to be a human who reads much into their happening? Indubitably.

Sweet the Sound

It's been awhile since. I just watched a documentary about Joan Baez "So Sweet the Sound." We listened to Joan Baez records when I was growing up and her voice to hear it now reminds me of an old two-story in Spokane, Washington on Atlantic Street in 1982 or thereabouts. The vinyl collection then stored in the same piece of antique furniture in which my mom now keeps the tablecloths (I think it's the same one). Joan Baez and Bob Dylan were everything music to me, the height of cool - she was long dark hair and a guitar singing about frustrated love, about peace, impersonating Dylan with whom she was once in love - that guy on the album cover next to her's in the antique bureau - of the mad hair, dark glasses and the dangling cigarette. I was six years old.

I didn't know then that they were before my time. I would hear them later in life, as a teenager, a 20-something, now, and say I listened to them growing up, as though I were a child of the 60's. I was too young for Selma and MLK, the Vietnam war, the space race and the British Invasion. That was my parents' time, it belonged to them, 20-somethings playing the records that were their lifetime.

There is a distinct memory of sitting on the wooden floor with my little sister, under the dining room table, and we perhaps 4 and 5 are looking at album covers, splaying them out all around us on the floor. I clearly recall Jim Croce's moustache, a quartet of bearded men holding instruments, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Joan Baez in soft 70's yellow light and a v-neck sweater, Dylan in a flower covered fedora, a "mixed LP" (as it were) containing one of my favorite songs to listen to up through high school - White Room by Cream (I loved the syncopation and it made me think of Alice in Wonderland for some reason - white rabbit?), Aretha Franklin and Al Green, and this album which we thought was hilarious - Steve Martin in LIPSTICK!:

p.s. you can now get here by simply going to musemaria.com