s u m m e r
kick starter
Southern Live Oak are beautiful trees with their twisted branches and gnarled trunks seemingly begging to be climbed. I've never seen a young one. Always old. Always been there for what appears to be centuries. I picture the kids in their branches over the past hundred years. The prams parked underneath, the mockingbirds at twilight. I picture the lovers on the stone entrance way watching for someone to discover them as they sneak another forbidden kiss.
I can see the workers laying track for the trolley, pausing for a smoke in the only shade along St. Charles.
Later, I picture the vagrants and the teenagers drinking and leaving their cans lying around. The pressure washer to clean the paint off the granite and marble, and still the Live Oak stands, grows, flourishes until I too stand at the entranceway, bag over my shoulder. Until I too climb its branches and my eyes become level with the power cables running over St. Charles.
I think about a nap, it has been a long day, long couple of days, but I don't want to miss anything. I lay back on a wide branch and smell the ozone from the trolleys. I prop my head up on my bag and through the soft leather I can feel the kick starter from a motorbike I picked up off the street the night before.
Its hard steel pressing into the base of my neck. In the blanketed fuzz of a slight hangover I can recall shifting, slowly, until the kick starter works its way into the belly of my bag.
This is the second trip to the park. The second time through the huge stone gates.
So much happened between that first and second trip.
You asked me if I still had that kick starter? Yeah. Sitting right there in the same cherry and poplar lawyer's bookcase we pulled books from last May. Among the rocks from Sutro, Japan, Australia, the shells from countless strolls up the beach. The little plastic angel that glows, and the babies head found on the steps of a mansion on Battery Row. In-between a rusty nail and a small chip of metal pipe from a bathhouse on a hill, it sits. The rubber a little torn, most of the grease worn off. The scratched and scarred silver steel, rubbed flat on one side where it may have been dragged down Dauphine.
Yeah, I still have it. It and everything else.
I don't know that they help me remember, because some of the objects I've already forgotten their history. But I don't know that years from now I won't pick one up and feel exactly as it was that warm night in New Orleans and then recall all the rest that went with it.
Ever feel that you can touch a place in time, regardless of when and where? Ever look at a photo from a trip and think, that chair left marks on my thighs, or that glass was chipped just so, or the rust flaked from those railings off onto my feet. Ever wonder where that glass is? What it really felt like to run your tongue over the chip in the lip or curl your bare toes around the railing once again. Some things like that are possible, some are not, but the objects help. They are the real that become unreal in a photo. They are the proof it wasn't all a pleasant dream.
After a drowsy, fitful nap on a warm afternoon, the curtains blowing in the wake of an old black GE fan, they are the objects that can be held, studied, and perhaps bring a tear to your eye, perhaps a smile.
Once the damn kick starter cut me and I bled on the porch for a beer and a smoke. Holding a damp paper towel over a small, thin red line in my finger.
Indeed, a memory that truly made me bleed. Reached out from the past and cut me.
In a couple of weeks it will have been a year since that night. The bulbs are up, the bushes in bloom. The apple mint is thriving. The pollen has made its thin layer over everything around, and the robins still hop through the saturated yard pulling worms from the earth while the cardinals crack seed.
goodnight 4.24.00