Notes On A Summer Day at The Lake

“As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.”

Rumi

June 11

The boy waits, just this side of the goose shit. If not for the semi-sprung folding chair and tripod, I’m thinking one of the Lake’s more common species – black frayed cap, black logo tee, second-owner Nike cross-trainers. Cross-training on the art of the sociopath on the stray mallard or woodchuck by daylight and the way of the predator in the shadows of a degrading dusk. Anywhere between 16 and 25, stalking the weak to feed the beast.

I slow. Zack trains a long lens into the thick of the lakeside flock, sleek fat Canadians and their furry gray brood, mingling in community and shifting and bristling en masse with any human approach or overture. Zack respects the dynamic, and the swarm tends obliviously to the young -- grooming, crowding, monitoring their progress toward self-sustainability in the shit-murky waters.

“Get some good stuff?” I ask, and am rewarded with an inventory of the day’s new discoveries – a white crane, a red-winged blackbird straying from the emerging corn on the city’s western fringe. I’ve seen it all, but I cue off the boy’s restrained enthusiasm. He treats me to a slideshow on the two-by-three screen on the back of the camera.

“If you know what I mean, that’s real Audubon-level stuff,” I murmur. He does, and while nothing much surprises any more, I’m pleased. And for that, Zach screens a second feature for me. Swirling galaxies and nebulas, the constellations of junior high textbooks now crisply defined beyond the greenhouse haze of Central Illinois, suns deceptively fresh and brilliant for their billions of years. The stars of the sky and the birds of the Lake. You can’t help get philosophical within a 30-acre universe.

The camera looks expensive and the boy a lightweight. But I simply wish him good hunting and push off. Not my circus, Dad used to say.

**

Like Russian dolls, the ones that sit inside each other, nesting dolls, yeah. Mom leading the way, trailed by the alpha teen and the youngest, nine, 10. Variations on a theme, all three in need of a few or a few dozen more laps around the Lake.

The tiny creature at the end of Mom’s tether is absurd by contrast. Domino is part dachshund and part something that may never be determined and that doesn’t matter for shit anyway. The monochrome dappling reminds me of the neighbor’s German short-haired pointer, my self-appointed nemesis at an age where I put too much weight on canine opinion.

Mom places too much weight on satisfying my WP speculation, and I kick myself for going all Westminster AKC on this lady, who I’m guessing resides at the Mulberry Homes a few blocks away and simply wanted a little green to break up the brick-browns and cracked grays of the day, of the foreseeable days ahead.

“Dachshund’s like bacon – always an improvement,” I suggest, ending Mom’s apologetic and wholly unnecessary speculation. Sounds lame, I know, but it seems right coming from what they see. Dog -- not music nor love nor as the old guys on the benches proclaim American English -- is the universal language, and Mom chuckles. Domino is not convinced. The girls, seeing what they can see, continue to eye me like an enemy combatant.

That, in all honesty, has for the last three centuries been a reasonable reaction in this habitable corner of the universe, especially when “The Mulberry” is your pocket universe. The physics of perception in my nesting universe (that’s it – nesting dolls!) continues to baffle. A titanium shell maybe isn’t a girl’s worst accessory. Sephora ought to stock them. If they’re still nested inside the Kohl’s, if the Beltway Mall still exists as anything more than a walking track hawking Halloween cosplay, cinnamon pretzels, and bioweapons-strength bayberry/pumpkin candles.

I don’t know. Just don’t get around much anymore. Picked that one up from one of the old bench dwellers in a red cap throwing popcorn at a visiting cormorant and periodically reaching down to scratch some childhood or second childhood companion now chasing squirrels an exit or 50 over that Rainbow Bridge. I reach down, and Domino retreats behind the equally baleful Girls. Maybe they do know something to which I never got the memo. But I get the feeling there’s a landfill awaiting me somewhere, if I ever find the exit. Or the entrance.

**

They’re apparitions. They emerge abruptly from and as swiftly retreat back across the manicured commons and pathways behind the condos and pricey “starters” that ass-end on the Lake’s west bank. Spirits in Nike and North Face and Lululemon, racing, hurtling, creating their own impenetrable atmosphere. They’ve opted out of engaging on the human plane. Their music is proprietary, air-wired to prevent Life from leaking in, and they don’t speak Dog – Dog is simply part of the inventory, with the Teslas and the $6,000 carbon-framed bikes and the Big Green Eggs that dot the western rise like a Ridley Scott hatchery. They ghost by choice. I respect their titanium autonomy, though at times I hope I manifest as something that might rattle their millennial senses, not so much to prick that supreme confidence as to poke a couple eyeholes in the titanium bubble. Not that they ever did me any great favors.

Not my circus. To be frank, I don’t know whether mine loaded up and shipped out of Dodge long ago or the tents and carnies or boojie Euro-acrobats (fucking PETA) are rolling off I-74 any day soon, or I’m just a stray clown with faulty GPS. Or whatever my actual schtick is – seems this universe doesn’t come with a manual or even a QR code.

**

Few years back, Millington Parks put up a shelter on the Martin Luther King Drive side of the Lake that ironically fronts a cluster of predominantly white folks who ride Walmart Schwinns, drive non-electrified SUVs, and, once-daily, trot public-domain rescues around the Lake to charge geese and whore for tummy love.

Summer’s waiting it out this season because CO2. The guy’s slumped over one of the already worn, heavily autographed picnic tables in a Clinton-vintage Carhartt and watch cap he may have slipped into sometime in January. 2012. Overstuffed 2-mil garbage bag and Dora backpack on the bench beside, our girl looking worse for the wear. His head buried so deep in his brown twill forearms, all I see is a ring of white bristles and 10 calloused gray-brown fingers.

Not my circus, but I peek through the flap anyway. I stupidly tiptoe across the concrete pad and wonder if maybe he’s suffocated in his own filthy insulated bulk, if the ghost he’d freed was already halfway to some better or inconceivably worse place, leaving the husk for pickup by Millington Sanitation or the Parks guys on a barrel run. Hauled his Hefty swag and Dora beyond the stares and glares of the Schwinn/Weber folks off MLK, the speed-dialing disciples of the Emerald Egg, the taunts and experimental cruelty of the Mulberry kids or the ‘boarders in their Amazoned Van’s and adolescent armor? Grabbed the next bus out with sycamores and reeds and aggro geese and red-winged blackbird and just maybe a Spandexed Gen-X backside or two burned into his bloodshot retina?

“Oh, shit.” It’s a simple statement, all breath and wary jaundiced eyes and gnarled sausage fingers seizing at splintered, graffitoed wood. The new village bosses have declared Hot Lava for the homefree, and he feels the magma lapping at his sprung Reeboks.

“Sorry,” I whisper. I hear and he sees me, thankfully.

“Just needed to rest a few, is all.” A glance over my shoulder nonetheless to ensure Karen hadn’t brought a few blues to the picnic.

“I get it,” I smile, I think, and yellow teeth emerge. “I got water. You want some?”

The yellow crescent disappears under a cloud and two espresso-on-yellow eyes fix on me. Cruelty has no bounds, at least ones we aren’t willing to test, and don’t I know it.

“It’s sealed,” I promise. He nods, the teeth peeking through cracked blue lips. I return to the bike. The Dasani is there, like every day, for no reason seemingly until now. Hilton Housekeeping has nothing on The Lake.

He accepts it eagerly, with murmured blessings for me and all of mine, but his scaled fingers worry the cap, and the smile now fixes somewhere between eyes and bridgework. I never was terrifically fast on my feet. Metaphorically, anyway.

“Sooo, sorry to interrupt,” I said. “You rest up, all you want.” The Benevolent Goddess of the Lake, at least until one of the Bench People or the afternoon Shitzu Squad gets 5-0 into the ring.

But I don’t break down the tents or scoop the elephant poop, which is not a thing anyway any more. I climb back onto the saddle and swing back onto the asphalt. He waggles the bottle cheerfully before clamping back on like its Enfamil…

**

Dear Diary, I’m tempted to write just because there’s no one else to snark at. It’s a weekday, I guess, there are no ribeyes incubating in the Eggs above, and the only thing burning at the Mulberry are Dollar Heaven bulbs behind amber shades. The folks off Martin Luther King are living the dream to the tune of NCIS and Papa John’s. The shelter’s empty, because even Carhartt knows nothing good ever happens here after 8. Preach.

Birdboy blew out hours ago for the interstellar shift, and Domino and The Women likely are huddled in for a night of basic cable and, if the gods and the budget provides, some Walgreen’s popcorn. The Teslas and Priuses are plugged in all snug in their bays, their people into Netflix or Hulu or Max or, if it’s the Prius crowd, IFC or PBS or maybe a harrowing podcast. True crime, maybe – young men gone wrong, young women gone missing. In the heat of domestic anger, adolescent drama, leaving behind scorched feelings and arrows pointing every which direction but across the backyard into the night, into the wrong hands, into the prairie grass and the murky depths, into whatever this shit eventually ever turns out to be.

At the Lake, nothing much good happens after the sun goes down. It ain’t follow your dream or put it all in crypto, but that’s a piece of sound valedictory wisdom for the Class of ‘23 as it prepares to venture boldly out into the carnivorous world. Well, I guess now the Class of ’24 or maybe ’25. The iPhone, I’d found stripped to its silicon innards down by the Park Sensory Garden some sensitive soul had redesignated the FUCK YOUR FEELLINGS!! Garden, and after a while, the revolution of the Earth or what or who the old crew was doing seemed insignificant. Shanna Widmann had probably killed it in the valedictorian’s sudden absence, anyway.

Nice Shanna got her shot. The Widmanns – somewhere on separate lots up there among the Green Eggs and robot cars – had fucked her up just great, and there’d been a hypothetical uncle who’d only popped up in a sophomore lit project that got her some unwelcome counseling, a threatened lawsuit against Millington District Schools from The Folks, and an “A+” and a parentally rejected nomination for a young authors prize sponsored by Miss Grendell. God love and for fuck’s sake keep Miss Grendell.

Miss Grendell felt there wasn’t much short of COVID and the Middle East and the truth about Tupac you couldn’t fix with journaling. Miss G had been lucky enough to get her very own bubble in the Year of the Plague, and in the continued absence of sex (class consensus) she’d spent way too much time on the OG Web with the lonely, the horny, the quarantined martyrs, and the shrinks and motivational jags.

“It was so cathartic, so transformative,” she gushed as she distributed the things to a herd of seniors still struggling with “cathartic.” My Mom’s big on the pop psych shit – God save us all -- so instead, I focused on the discolored rectangle (math honors!) in the lower right corner of the cruelty-free “leather” cover. Where Miss Grendell probably spent the previous fuck-free evening pulling Barnes and Noble last-chance clearance stickers from My Journals. Apparently, catharsis and transformation weren’t that high on the post-COVID, post-Trump agenda. But clearly, she’d went into her own pocket, I managed to squeeze out a convincing thanks, and I opened the little brown book. Some dude named Rumi had a quote at the top of each blank page.

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.” Well, fuck you too, Rumi, I thought, flipping the page.

“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” I looked over at Shanna, who was still staring at the cover numbly like Ice-T had just pushed a legal pad and a pen across the interview table. Well, you fucking asked for it, Rumi.

In the end, Rumi and Miss Grendell nailed it, because come Graduation, Shanna transformed into a keynote speaker and I got the living shit transformed out of me. “Be melting snow. Wash yourself of yourself,” Rumi recommends on page 3. Props, Bro -- close enough in a fortune cookie kinda way. Technically, Millington Lake and its bottom-feeders had done a pretty neat cleanup job, and I was now what Mom always accused Dad of trying to be. All things to all people.

Well, more like anyone to anyone. Flexing, catfishing, code switching, persona posting, clout-chasing, Stan culture, gaslighting, flat-out hypocrisy and posing – they’re all a conscious front for the self we don’t want others to see, the self we don’t want to see ourselves. Now that my self – “my self” -- is off the table, I wonder why I still seem to be fronting, on a grander scale.

Bear with.

About the 1,137th time around the Lake, I spotted the marker – basically, just one of those big concrete bricks from Kelsey’s Garden and Gifts you get carved usually to remember Fluffy who passed of feline leukemia or to forget Grandma was a raging fucking racist who’d enjoyed spying on the Indians next door from the sanctity of her tomato plants.

This one’s like those shrines along the highway ditches, minus the Hobby Lobby flowers or Our Lady of the Dollar Palace candles. It’s just “Tina”’s brick, tucked under some kind of bush with green berries. Dad told me the name the only time he tried to bring me here fishing, about two to five years past my threshold for West Nile Virus or watching slimy things gasp for dear life before getting hurled back into the Lake with some speech about respect for God’s creatures.

I didn’t get tossed back on the bank as I was gulping for oxygen, nor did I get a speech. There’s no real learning moment in death, unless you’re the lesson. Nothing good ever happens after 8 in the reeds and prairie grass and green-berried bushes. Men are animals; women are snacks. Just say no to the meth. Watch the ice, Dude. Don’t kayak alone. Keep your friends close and their girlfriends strangers. Take the epi pen along anyway. Watch Grandma, cause she’s slippery and its 10 below out there.

When I was maybe 11, Dad’s sister, Aunt Renee, died of ovarian cancer that spread into the bones. We drove what cremained of Renee to Starved Rock State Park near Utica, trekked into the woods way back to St. Louis Canyon, and emptied a plastic bag of my dead aunt along the high walls and in a long deep shelf in the rock along with maybe a dozen other piles of the recently dead and pulverized. I was big into R.L. Stine about that time, and while we stood in a circle trying to cough up soft and cuddly things to say about uncuddly Aunt Renee, I thought about that shit-ton of powdered people blowing and mingling around the woods and trails and canyons, and what I came up with put me permanently off Mr. Stine.

The Lake teaches us many things, if we only listen along the way around the one-mile asphalt circle of life, if we commune with our newly collective, transformative selves. Someday, after Earl-Bob or Javier snags their line on an eye socket or a femur or Parks finally dredges for the debris of a thousand ass-wipes, I may wind up core curriculum. Or an object lesson, more like – a scary story for angry, unscareable adolescent girls, and good luck with that.

But until then...

P.S.

I’m tucking My Journal back into the tall grass near the fishing dock when I feel him up on the embankment, hear him crunching and sloshing his way through the weeds and the mud and the goose shit. We don’t slosh.

It’s a clear night, but even with the full moon, all I can make out is a male shadow, young, agile and hungry, a gleam of aluminum and a flash of the Cubbies logo. This is no catch-and-release expedition, and I’m getting the old déjà vu all over again.

He slips on the slime, the Slugger splashes into the muck, and the black cap tumbles past me into the waters. Take only photos, the National Parks folks scold. But life ain’t all just red-winged blackbirds and red dwarfs, I guess. I catch my moonlit reflection in The Lake as the cap drifts off, and he falls ass-backwards into the goose shit as he sees me, really sees me. That’s some feminine empowerment, right there. Truly, virtually, literally transformative. For both of us, and maybe Tina, too.

“You are not a drop in the ocean,” Rumi tells us at the top of page 153. “You are the entire ocean, in a drop.”

Must be something in the water. All the deets tomorrow, promise.