For the last two weekends I have dragged out the water hose and the big blue bucket full of cleaner soaps high density drying clothes shining rags, to clean the car. It is spring. A pine tree in the rear of the house gathered all the pollen in the area and slowly deposited it all on the roof of the Trail Blazer rendering its charming light reddish brown a yellow and sticky hue. Earlier in the morning so much of the fecund stuff was blowing off the pine needles that at first I thought I was witnessing a smoldering forest fire.

So I wet and I rub and I dry and I sparkle. Each of the two weeks it has taken less than an hour to deposit, out of a clear blue and sunny sky, a rain storm laden with tubs of water on the vehicle that I have just made pristine.  Life can be a cartoon. I watch from the rear picture window drenching rain blowing almost horizontally. Smile at the Saturday Funny.

Baseball usually catches me for a month or two early in the season and I dream of the home run king that I was sure I was going to be when I was a kid playing in a stubbled field just a short bike ride down Maple Street and up into the housing plan. We had as many on the team as there were kids that showed up. Sometimes the outfield positions would be doubled. On occasion there would be another roving shortstop and redundant second baseman, but I alone always played first base. Not because I was a lefty, but because I was the only one with a first baseman’s mitt. I wasn’t bad and I could hit the ball a ton.

When it finally came time to join a little league team I was sorely disappointed. All the fun was gone and the game became serious. When we played in our rough field, everyone played, regardless of age or ability. When we competed it was against the group at the far end of the field who had an identical ethos. The organization was more than democratic and it worked just fine. Score, Who cared about score for more than a minute. It was exhilarating. It was real life. Adult supervision and "organized" little league brought the fantasy of limitation, the fantasy of real life. It is happily a lesson that I have never forgotten.

I never made a little league team. I quit after one try out.

Spring is that season for rebirth and I take it with some seriousness and I crack out of my egg. It is more important as I grow older. More miraculous.

I am sitting presently on the side porch and writing in the chill of the morning as church going cars whine up the hill. I have on a corduroy jacket and I can feel the wind cool my hands above the keyboard, the sun is making the laptop screen dim. Life ain’t so bad.

I think of my life, reflections stuffed between the million of minute mundane minutes, in episodes. Not very deep, I fear, but there you have it. I don’t think of it as some four dimensional time line growing like a fat worm through the years. Past Present Future. Nor do I think of it as eternal now. Om mani padme hum. Barely I think it at all as I am busy with the tedium of my life.

In Pittsburgh we have a passion play each year in the Easter Season, called Veronica’s Veil. The church, St. Michaels, and the Passionist Fathers are gone, but the auditorium and the passion remain on the climb up the hill from the South Side. It is a drama writ in tableaus of Veronica as she wiped the sweat and blood from Christ face as he struggled with the cross on the way to Golgotha. The veil captured his sacred visage.

The thing that most folks remember, often because they were moved to spiritual lethargy watching the posed scenes, was the giant surprising clap of thunder and flash of lightning that occurs when Christ dies on the Cross. It definitely is an eye opener. But that isn’t what I remember about the passion play.

What I remember is the dense wet feel of my winter coat on the way into the auditorium. Squeals and whispers of the children that had been delivered from my automobile to the drama. My shoes streaked with muddy snow and my socks soggy, heavy on my feet. The smell of cooked cabbage and sweet foods being sold in the gymnasium. The even more overpowering odor and feel of the ages of that spiritual and local community that seeped its way into the walls. You could peel some of it off when you brushed past as you slowly walked up a set of stairs: The thrill, some young woman being chosen to play Mary, Mother of God. Soldiers, who had been in the crowd scenes only last year, uniformed returned from or off to any of the wars, embracing the people they loved and who loved them in a silent moment of hope that would soon lead to despair. The son who was Christ. The father who died short weeks before the performance. Fingers fashioning the shrouded veil that Veronica’s kindness created. The chatter of the ladies as the robes, shawls and costumes were sewn and assembled. Laughter. Tragedy. The Spirit. All greeting you. Smothering you in a palpable wave of warmth. The mothers cooking bowls of golumpki and buttons of pastry in their kitchen for transport to the Passion. Day after day season after season session after session building memory and life into hard surface of the plaster walls.

The way that I view my life is in tableau, like those presented in the drama, but peeled haphazardly off the accretion of brushed against walls and formed like those silent static scenes with an occasional thunderclap to awaken me. There is little seeming to do with progression but everything to do with causality.

So I glimpse, a dead summer night of the close to midnight sun on a funeral mound, wind blowing against me and the Limfjord down the slowly falling fields not a inch of sleep in my mind. Late at night. And the dirty dank dungeon smell of listener sponsored radio, floor uneven like a German expressionist film, walls covered with inexpensive ineffective paint and tons of reel to reel tapes sitting on a table while I argue with someone about their shift on the radio, it’s too long, it’s too short, it’s too shout, a day on the San Francisco Bay when we caught a crab and yes by god a boot with our fishing gear, the crab was boiled and swallowed the shoe thrown back, a summer day on a lake at a farm of our neighbors when I got both sun blitz and sea sick, a precursor to a day on the North Atlantic when I became as sick as any I have ever been, so much so that even dry land couldn’t heal me for a couple days.

So I glimpse, all manner of friends family and strangers around me. When I think of them I believe that they all know one another. I believe I know the lives and names of the strangers. When I send a letter or email to acquaintances they all must be confused by mentions of people that have no particular meaning to them.

Eventually, it comes to me. I am the great integrator. We are all the great integrators of our lives. Of course everyone knows one another. How could it be otherwise? They know me. I know you. I mix work relations with school relations with virtual relations with home relations with childhood relations with family relations. I discover that here lies my great wellspring. Here is the central tap of my creative power that carries the energy and flow of my living.

I’m not much taken to mysticism. I only visited Veronica’s Veil once and that was only as a favor to deliver a portion of a CCD class from a church that I attended out of duty. I did find, at my church, a spirit of community that I thought was powerful. Which will suffice as spirit. I consulted the I Ching once. The coin oracle because I could never conquer the dexterous mathematical concepts of, much less find, yarrow stocks. I don’t exactly remember the question but I suppose I was asking after the nature of my essential being. I threw the coins, yes they had holes in the center, and the answer calculated was six unbroken lines, primal power, light giving, active, strong and of the spirit, Ch’ien, The Creative. I took it as a wonderful affirmation. I still do.