So Much Sand

 

Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.

* * *

Here we go again, a new year, a new beginning.  Whoopee. Give this baby a good spank, get it breathing, screaming, wild for life. Then hug it, kiss it, embrace it. It’s ours now. What will we do with it?

Say it’s not true, but the first thing we do is to introduce it to our tired routines, those stale, leftover crumbs of yesterday. Routine’s death grip will strangle the life of anything new before it can even crawl.    

Do the first few days of the ‘new year’ feel like more of the same old same old? Status quo is the way of Routine. We slide like pigs back into the habit-filled wallow of what was. Muck migrates.

I know these things. Routine is a ball and chain, a way of life. It’s easier to skin an alligator’s hide with your bare teeth than to attempt to strip-search Routine for hidden motives. Our new baby needs fresh air. Let’s begin here.

Now I agree with Routine that some pursuits are beneficial. One of mine is walking our hound Bogey on the beach every morning. He is a rescue baby, supposedly a Beagle. But the baby grew and ended up being a big hound. You never know what you get with babies.

January 1^st finds us walking the beach in the fresh air of a new year. He has his own temperament, I have mine. I give him his nose. He’s a sniffer, keen on all dog and deer tracks recently implanted in the sands. Born tracker, that boy, always on the hunt. No instructions necessary.

I, on the other hand, am a talker and a thinker. We walk, he sniffs. I talk or think. Or both. Takes talent to walk, talk and think at the same time. But not much.

Bogey finds something exciting in the tangled sea oats while I’m thinking of how to put some new wine into my old wineskin. Last year’s juice was of poor vintage. The skin split. I need a new one.

Such efforts are mostly mental foreplay, generally producing nothing more orgasmic than Bogey’s discovery of some blanched bones that resemble a rabbit. The ideas simply spin around endlessly in an ethereal vortex and ultimately fly off harmlessly into the ether from whence they came.

Suddenly Bogey emerges with a treasure gripped between his teeth. It resembles a dead crab. He wants to bring it home for a souvenir. Dogs and humans share some proclivities. Certain treasures are better left where found. I persuade him to leave it.

It was a good morning for Routine. We both left something on the beach, Bogey a dead crab and me some cycled-out relationships. We’re both the better for it.       

Back home unleased, Bogey checks on the backyard squirrel. I kick off my shoes, shake out the sand thinking, surely there’s a metaphor in here somewhere.

 Happy New Year. Let the baby have its nose.

 

Bud Hearn

January 7, 2022