In Anticipation of an Anniversary

I have been off here and there and everywhere it would seem enjoying (mostly!) this summer of summers, and though Love's Freeway has been ever present with me, I have not, truth be told, been moved to write. Invariably when this happens, the turn of a page or the shift of a thought or the cast of a glance will, when I least expect it, excite and propel me to rush to the keyboard, in Love, eager to make a few more tracks on this Freeway. This time is no exception.

Part of the "everywhere" I've been this week is called back to dip into a particularly precious journal or two, a half-written second novel, and a two-thirds complete manuscript of writings in various forms. Each, I see now, is an earlier incarnation of this very vehicle. And so, just days away from the one-year anniversary of Love's Freeway, I am inclined to make those tracks over already broken ground, over cleared but unfinished dirt roads previously abandoned that I wish to intersect here. I will bring a handful forward over these next few days. Some are love letters or stories, some are poems. This one is an invitation:

January 13, 2004 ~ Now and now: how do I speak about it? How do I convey the way the singing to the radio on my way here was different today? I was being--singing--like there’s no tomorrow: yes, that's what it was. Try it. For a minute, an hour, a day—I challenge you, just try it. Suddenly even brushing teeth is an event. All is new. All is…alive? Is that a good word for it? And swimming this morning: same thing. I don’t swim like it’s my last time. I swim always knowing there’ll be another swim—tomorrow, the next day. But I don’t know this for sure, do I? That there will be another tomorrow, another swim, another chance to send that note to Barbara or Richard: appreciations I’ve been delaying because I know there is tomorrow to convey them. And hell, well I’ve got this and this and this and this already to do today.

Do you see how it matters, being in the mode of “Now” and “Now”?

Not later, but now. Pick up that phone, send that note. Love up that dog. You'll see, then, why my singing—the same song I’ve sung to countless times before—was so impassioned tonight.

I’ve been lap swimming year round for going on nine years. That’s the other part of this. We get used to things: people, routines, landscapes. When was the last time you really looked at your wife, your mother, your old cat? Go now, go home tonight and look like there’s no tomorrow. Like this is it, the last time, and tell me what fills you.

Do it. Go now. Go home tonight, or set out this morning and look as if there's no tomorrow. As if this is it, the last time...and tell me what fills you.

Drink deeply.

p.s. - just-past-full moon tonight: don't miss it!