An Oak. Fallen.

I've been mired in a Sargasso sea of a cold. Like a barnacled ship of old, wrapped in thick seaweed with no wind to propel myself through it. Each time I lay down to rest, whether in the space between meetings or for the evening, I hope I'll wake up with my usual energy. But no. 

In fact, for one of the first times in my life, I woke today with aches all over. It feels like, I think, what a mobster must feel like after he's been beaten pulpy by some professional thugs. My body hurts in places I didn't even know I had body.

Back when I played ball for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League, when the earth was somewhat cooler and democracy had maybe a slightly firmer grip on amerika, I was laid low with a similar cold. Hector saw me laying across a pine bench on our locker room and muttered un 'roble caído, un roble caído, un roble caído.' A fallen oak.

Like today--so many years later, oaks, even fallen ones didn't then and don't now get days off. I suited up of those phlegmy games, head woozy, legs like I had just stepped off lurching ship after a long voyage. But we know what we have to do, and sick or not, we find a way to corral a sharp grounder, or smack an opposite field line-drive and dirty our flannels.

Two dogs. One ball.

With all that going on above my shoulders, the Moss' three-year-old golden retriever, Izzy, is over for a day and a night. The Moss' return from their son's wedding in Italy tomorrow and since we live just two houses apart, we share puppy tending responsibilities when one of us needs a hand, or a paw. I will say, I don't believe in hoary concepts like 'women's work.' But such country conviviality is wholly the domain of L, my wife. She seems more popular in this ramshackle of a community than a snow-plow in the winter. As a consequence, everyone, also knows me, and not just as the dopey slug who's married to L, but very nearly, and for the first time in my almost 69 years, a person in my own right.

Even with my cold, fall has come to New England, and its a nostalgic season for me. For once, for the first time in a long time, the weather feels seasonable. We carbon-exhausted and green-house-gassed away the seasons. We seldom have cold Octobers any more and the frost is seldom on the pumpkin. Millionaires owned by billionaires play baseball in stadiums paid for by poor folks for the benefit of giant corporations. They play into November, when they should be wearing long johns.

However, today I woke, with billowing Winslow Homer clouds and a light spit. The waves thundering from the remnants of some storm somewhere. But by 5PM, when I took Izzy out for her post-dinner needs, the sun had emerged and Winslow Homer had given way to Andrew Wyeth and a golden wheaty sun.

Many of the streets in my little neighborhood have been milled clean of asphalt and the dirt beneath has been machine tamped down prior to laying another three inches on asphalt down once again. This cheap ripping up and laying down of new pavement is in many amerikkkan municipalities the equivalent of a full-employment plan for local construction companies. I'm sure millions change hands at a time when new home construction and summer re-modelling work is slow. Would that I owned a Peterbilt and a backhoe and could collect some largesse almost as an annuity.

As I walk, I know what this land looked like--or I imagine I do--before 'first contact' with europeans, on my block around 1636. The indigenous people were many and while the wars between different groups happened often, there was an agreement--unspoken of course--to limit their devastation.

Their wars weren't western wars of annihilation. Each side would kill six, kidnap ten, then trade captives and go back to their separate spheres. They fought a bit like Sparkle and Izzy fight in my house. A nip and a growl then a hour sleeping on the sofa.

Just four-hundred yards from my house, 390 years ago british musketry cut down hundreds of Pequot. The better to bring them the one true religion.

By the time the english came to these shores, or even the dutch who sailed by some decades prior, the indigenous had been living here for over 10,000 years. 

To modern people that's an inconceivable amount of time. We are today, closer in time to Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the building of the great egyptian pyramids, and 5000 years before they were built, there were already people living here in Connecticut.

The sky from our front step.

As I walk under pink skies over the dirt-revealed streets, I think about the 300 generations of people who walked here before me, and maybe--with luck--the 300 who will walk here after me. 

I suspect that their shoulders were also heavy with pain and responsibility and the burden of worry. The stress of making a living, the cacophony of what always has been the modern world of too many demands and too little time and being too much of what the romans called a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying in the desert. 

I walk down these dirt-revealed streets, the asphalt stripped away and I look into the sullen soil for sinew, and shards, and bones of those voices crying before me. Of those millions and millions here and gone and un-accounted for and, unless you read long-histories, not even recognized as having lived, since it seems that in amerikkka today every person thinks they're the first person ever with all the rights and privileges as if the world belongs to them.

There are no bones, no past, no memories in our denuded streets. They would be bad for commerce if a horde of Yale archaeologists scholared in and started sifting. Better just to pave the past over and pretend it never was, and look up at the pink cumulus rather than the sere of what was.

There are ranch houses to be built. Streets to be paved. Dogs to be walked. And colds to be fought.

Achoo.