Nashville was quite the sight today, all decked out in her many revealing colors. Pink and white flowering dogwoods nestled up against the sides of homes, clusters of showy-white bridal wreath, cherry trees and redbuds barely draped in their pink formal wear, the maroon leaves of Japanese maples softening otherwise harsh lawns, and the green - oh the bright neon green - infant leaves that unmistakably mark most trees around town this time of year. It made me recall springtime in Baton Rouge, the place I grew up. You see, spring, as one of the four seasons, in south Louisiana is nearly already over. It’s almost summertime there. It was a time of year that was over far too soon and seemed to end before it ever began. The four seasons in Louisiana really only exist as two: summer and a-break-from-summer. Though I miss eating boiled crawfish this time of year, I am thankful that I get to experience all four seasons here in Tennessee.

Danielle and I sipped on coffee outdoors first thing this morning enjoying the sounds that only A.M. hours can bring: occasional passing motorists, birds singing morning chants, leaves stuttering in the breeze, occasional bumblebees. It usually bums me out when morning somehow slips into lunch-hour and then into early afternoon. Life is too quick.

I ate a slice of toast on my way out the door as I drove over to my friend Ben Shive’s house where I was to sing some vocal parts on his upcoming album. I arrived, his wife Beth was just then leaving to take their two kids, Jude and Lucy, to the downtown library, and we set to work. I did my best to sing a la Beach Boys for the better part of a couple of hours before Beth and the kids arrived. The kids (and Beth) took to napping while Ben and I ate lunch while watching a few episodes of The Simpsons (Season 7) on DVD. Once I made it back home I plopped myself, for the second time today, on the backyard patio furniture where I recommenced reading A Confederacy of Dunces (Toole) but was mostly distracted during that time by a pair of white-throated sparrows which were quietly and efficiently stomaching bugs beneath the row of Bradford pears. I went back inside and brewed up a batch of Olga’s salsa (see post below). Times are good.

My paternal grandmother, Geneva (she went by “Nanny” to most of her family) died in August 2004. Dividing her Baton Rouge estate, her children, grandchildren, cousins and a few close friends were allowed and encouraged to roam her abode on South River Oaks to collect whatever furniture, trinkets or paintings of hers we might want to bring into our own homes thus keeping our memories of this matriarch alive. I chose the six-inch high smoking man which stood in her wood-paneled kitchen for as long as I can remember. He wears knickerbockers, healthy sideburns and a cone hat. It was probably an item she purchased on one of her many travels abroad. To this day I can still recall Nanny making him “smoke”, with the way he held his pipe sternly above his bearded chin in an effort to balance the honeycomb he held dangling from his other lowered hand. It makes me remember not only Nanny, but childhood itself. Danielle was given an old, and mighty comfortable, rocking chair, a watercolor painting, a couple of boxes of fabric - some retro-good, some not-so-good - and a box or two of various sundry items. It was in unpacking one of these boxes where we discovered an old tin of Band-Aids fully stocked. Yes, I said “tin” for those of you too young to remember such archaic corporate packaging practices. For some reason, we wound up with this modern antiquity, and for some reason we put it away not really thinking much of it. Until tonight.

Tonight, Danielle, was applying one of these band-aids to her dry and cracked fingertip when she made me look at, and smell, this tan, hole punched sticky rectangle before applying it. I was intaking childhood all over again. For, you see, band-aids aren’t made to smell like old doctor’s offices anymore, they smell like strictly-regulated government factories. These things smelled overtly plastic (the “new” synthetic at the time?) and as sterile as the sun, an odor that hasn’t chased across my nostrils in many moons.

I usually get sad at the thought of growing old, the aspect of life I fear the most. That smell made me think of age and our passing across this earth from birth to burial, a chain of events so utterly miraculous in its daily occurrence that it confounds me as to how anyone could ever deny God’s existence in the first and especially last place. And, on this matter, please don’t confuse God’s existence with God’s intentions, for the two are easily confused. I doubt God’s intentions every day. But I rarely doubt his existence. That is to say, I believe God exists (somewhere in the heart of man?) because I must; it makes me what I am. If there is no God, then I, and many others, are up a creek without a paddle, for everything that has ever been promised by him is as empty as space itself and the many lives that have been staked upon these claims some generations ago would be merely folk tales. Change is inevitable. People move on, we die, are buried and our possessions are scattered to the remnant. As much as I wish life would never change, things would always stay, our parents and children would remain full of breath and our skin would never wrinkle nor hair turn grey, this much is impossible. But it is this same impossibility which makes for possibilities, for “nothing”, it would seem, “is impossible with God”. It is that piece of advice that I take to bed with me tonight where I will fall asleep next to my already sleeping wife in her beautiful comfort and her band-aided finger. May the memories, odor-induced or otherwise, of your life bring you to the great convergence of change and promise. May they bless you….
EP