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The page stares back at me. It’s blank and white and expectant.
There are far too many rules. If I say it doesn’t need a title, then it doesn’t. Okay?

Just moments ago, as I stood outside alone in the cool night air, the breath of another fading summer drifting softly past, I wondered. Just how much does anyone know? About anything?

One year ago on another August night, I was also writing. Then as now, the sounds of thousands of countryside katydids kept me company in the enveloping darkness. Then as now, I sought to make descriptive sense of my surroundings. And since, many people have passed from this world, while many more have arrived.

I’ll never, ever forget the face of my youngest child looking up at me with widened, questioning eyes.

“Daddy? What was before?”

I looked down at him and asked for clarification. “Why, what do you mean? Before?”

“Before I was (here).”

I paused, stricken. Then I tried to understand further the nature of his query. After a few exchanges, and I wish I could recall exactly what I asked and how he answered, it became clear that he imagined there was no world in existence before he arrived. Yes, he was very young, barely beyond the point of learning to speak. I recall trying to explain to him that it was only he that was not here before, and I’ve often wished I had not. Because for all intents and purposes, there was no world for him, before his moment of arrival. I wish, in a way, he could have kept all of his beautiful innocence.

Many, many summer nights before that moment, my first child had been about the same age when a nineteen-year-old co-worker of mine was killed in an automobile accident. Though my co-worker was younger than I, he was a friend, and I was getting dressed a few days later to attend his funeral. I don’t remember what exactly was said, but for some reason I believed my little daughter was aware. In fact, death was a concept that had never crossed her mind.

“Daddy?” She looked up at me with the same cherubic expression I would eventually see again from my youngest. “I hope your friend gets better.”

I knelt, and I held her close. I wept, for the innocence I knew she would lose, and the one and only time I would do so for my friend.

Now I fold my arms and sit back in my chair, and stare once again at the page. In a way, it’s beginning to look like it has some life. The page is something like a life, too. It may or may not have a great beginning, but one hopes for a purposeful end and coherent existence. It’s like every page that may or may not hit the trash can.

So the question stands, the one I had when I sat down across from the blank page. One can live for a decade, or two, or ten. When it’s all said and done, how much does anyone actually know? In the course of a lifetime, we meet people, we learn to play the game, we parry and thrust and deliver barbs, and receive some. Sometimes we even fall in love, get married, have children. We decide what’s important and we live for it. We learn, and change our minds, and then we live for something else.

At long last, here’s my concern. Walk through a cemetery sometime. There’s where both you and I will be someday, too. I received a child’s question about that, once, as well, and I don’t wish to remember that one, but I do. But all of those people, a la Carl Sagan... “billions and billions” ...all gone. Oh, for certain, some of them left a mark, a few of those, indelible. Some changed the world for the better. But the great bulk of them? Not so much.

And the older I get, the more it becomes plain to me that I actually know very little. Oh, sure, to some extent I’ve learned to play the game. I have my beliefs, and things that I live for.

But what will I die for? And what have I done?

And how much, exactly, do I know? Practical things, useful, as it stands, only to myself.

Tonight I felt a grand hope, hope that the whispering breath of another fading summer would always be renewed by the passage of the other seasons.

Tonight, at least I knew that in this place, all nights in August are truly beautiful. I knew that katydids deserve to exist every summer, everywhere, and forever.

And I knew I was alone.

Survival Will Not Be Enough

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             Each day passes, most, very much like the one before it. One finds oneself repeating familiar motions just because they’re familiar, putting the toothbrush back into its holder the same way, doing things in a certain order that defies variation. I’m sure it’s more than just efficiency, it’s habit. I will do things this way because it’s the way I do them.
            When I eventually complete all of my usual morning tasks and head out for the daily commute, I’m well-aware of what I will soon face. Thousands of other drivers with their own individual habits and objectives are also going somewhere. Some are on vacation, others are already on the clock, moving a commercial load from point to point, and many more are doing the same as I am, going to work. We all have our own ways of doing that, too.
            And I wonder, what level of importance does anyone else place on how they do it? Does anyone else prefer an easy, pleasant drive? It surely doesn’t look that way. It’s a daily early-morning expression of impatience, aggression and selfishness. Yes ma’am I can see that you’re late. And excuse me, sir, I realize that reaching your destination is ever so much more important than my reaching mine. Pardon me for being here. I’m sorry, am I too slow? Ten miles over the speed limit isn’t enough to keep you off of my back bumper? Here, let me signal and pull off. There you go. Now, was that gesture really necessary? Oh I see, it took too long for me to get out of your way! I’ll do it more quickly tomorrow. Of course, that won’t suit your ass either.
             I tell myself as I wait for the opportunity to re-enter traffic, it was probably always this way. When I was a child my dad was usually driving, and then it was his job to deal with it. I was just a passenger. But I know that’s not true. Even in my own lifetime I’ve seen a change, and it’s worsened. I’ve reasoned, maybe it’s just because I’m older, and tiring of it.
            But without mentioning types or brands, take a look out there. There are many more high-end, extremely expensive vehicles on the road. There aren’t fewer high-speed drivers at the elevated fuel prices of today, there are more. The majority of drivers are also using phones. Only a very few are careful enough to pull off to use them.
            It’s a shockingly accurate reflection of changes everywhere, none of them good. It seems to me, very few people give a rats-ass whether the glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising, or that drinking water is being sold the way milk once was, while many don’t even have milk. That the cycle of wildlife worldwide is on a downward spiral, that government, business and financial institutions are becoming indistinguishable. That the utilities run the utility control entities, that graft and money make the rules.
            I’m sure it has nothing to do with the permanent concrete barriers between lanes that prevent migration of wild animals, as their bodies collect along them on the highway. What do we care? Cleaning them up creates jobs. Or with the cops lined up along the road to catch speeders in road-construction areas that haven’t been active for a week. Hey, let’s all just be assholes. That way we can die sooner and make room for the children.
           Don’t even get me started on the children. There’s no way you’d finish this short piece. It does have a bottom line, coming right up.
           I’d like to suggest that we all start paying attention. Martyrdom only serves a purpose if somebody cares. And there are some things, if we’re looking, that deserve a closer look. It all has to begin somewhere. And where will that be?
           Consider, I might have written a hundred more pages about the changes that are needed, to prevent very real things that go on right where you live. Everywhere, it’s increasing government surveillance. And yet, in some places it’s still slavery. Here and elsewhere, it’s actual human trafficking, including of children, and regrettably, not for parenting. Swindle and theft. Terrorism. Drug cartels. Gang warfare, drive-by shootings, rape, muggings, murder. The list could go on and on. And none of those things even touch what humanity is doing to the planet on which we depend for our very existence. As waterways open where the glaciers once were, corporations and governments team up to claim them.
           As I age, I’ve realized there’s something more important to me than even companionship or love. I wonder if there exists anywhere, any man or woman who feels the same?
           It will not be enough for humanity to survive.
           To be worth the effort, we need to begin to deserve it.






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