Dairy Farm on Route 15

04-19-98

 The patio is crowded with people and chairs, while around us, over the crown of the house, a miracle occurs: the bare brown limbs of the trees begin to show green.

I alone seem to take notice.

Everybody else shifts their chairs and stare at each other, displaying all the symptoms of boredom I never feel.

We all wait on a host we dread may actually come, though nobody can say when they might occur – since unlike the change of seasons, nobody can predict him.

This only irritates the guest all the more, a crowd of friends who would serve equally as enemies and at times may have, caught in that swing of pendulum between celebrating or lynching him.

This is a hip crowd, never showing exactly how they feel, scared such displays might get used against them, if not now then later, and if not by him, then by each other.

When they can, they slip off to some private nook where they can sniff white powder from silver spoons, boosting their egos if not their temperament. Some suck on joints in the open, sending up smoke signals into the budding leaves of the trees I can’t read – messages nobody else bothers to.

Each holds a private court in this strange place far from home, playing out some self-anointed role they must maintain even if it makes them miserable, needing to score some social point before they all flock back to their cars for the long drive home.

Those of us with far less clout float like shredded clouds from potent to potent, allowing them to grace us with a nod or wink, rarely a smile. We need to let them see us, so we can still exist – though in truth, we seeing them is what is really important, all of us asking each other where we’ve been and what we’ve been doing, and what we intend to do when we get through honoring our noble host.

We are too old to still be doing this after so many years and so many miles since those days in the rock clubs when we assumed such things were important. I guess, we never got over the loneliness we felt then, carrying it on our backs the whole time, locked into this trek through a wilderness we hoped we might lose it in, glancing over our shoulders and again and again to see if its shadow still clings to our heals when we fail to see it clinging to our backs, missing the scenery the whole way just as they miss it today, the miracle that comes to life above and around us, that embraces us, that invites us to take part, while we play parts nobody actually believes.