Asakiyume mita

So here is what the tree in my dream looked like: like bamboo, but with leaves like a locust... except in this drawing, the joint-rings aren't raised enough-looking, hence the second, eye-searingly colored (expertly! with a mouse!) diagram/digital doodle to show you how the rings fit round the trunk and boughs.






Also...

Heard the first wood thrush of the season today. I was wondering how far south they go for winter--do they make it all the way to Colombia? ... Google says no; they winter in Central America. Google also tells me they're the state bird of Washington DC.

The song of the wood thrush: it’s entrancing, enchanting--and nourishing? Consider the case of Brian Blessing, the new music teacher at Powell Middle School. Maybe being a music teacher had something to do with it, or maybe not. Maybe it would have worked out the same for you or me, if we’d been in Brian’s position (God willing, we’ll never be in Brian’s position).

And that position was, bundled into Allan Wilson’s car, with one of Allan’s brothers on either side of him, headed for the spur of track that serves the sawmill. There Allan intended to make Brian understand, in a visceral way, that it was a bad idea for Brian to flirt with, let alone go out to dinner with, Allan’s ex-wife Marnie, who taught seventh grade in the classroom next to the music room.

Just when it was seeming that assault and battery might progress to homicide, a police car turned onto the sawmill access road, spooking the Wilson brothers, who shoved Brian into a decrepit shed beside the tracks and took off.

Back in town, no one knew what had happened to the music teacher, and as for Brian himself, even when he managed to find his way back to consciousness, he couldn’t muster the strength to lift himself up, and his broken jaw and cracked ribs precluded the sort of loud hollering that might possibly have caught someone’s attention, if they had happened to be walking along the spur line behind the sawmill.

So Brian lay in that shed all night, and all the next day, and the following night, and the day after that. No food, no water. Several times a day the shed shook as railroad cars loaded with lumber rolled from the spur line to the main tracks. The rest of the time, Brian could hear the sounds of the sawmill’s operations--and birdsong. From before the sun rose, cardinals and song sparrows, catbirds and starlings, robins and orioles. And the wood thrush. Adrift in a sea of pain, Brian clutched at the wood thrush’s song. It soothed his wounds and thirst like springwater; it filled him and satisfied him like bread.

Finally, five days after the Wilsons had grabbed him, Brian was discovered, a delirious wreck, so the medics first assumed, when Brian tried to tell them how he had subsisted on thrushsong, and yet at the hospital the doctors confirmed that he was not dehydrated. His blood sugar levels were normal, and there were no ketones present. Very strange, everyone agreed.

Brian was never quite the same after that, and I’m not talking about the limp. I’m talking about his diet. He’d always bring a sandwich to school for lunch, often something from Subway. But during the green months, from May to September, if you caught him at home in the early morning or around suppertime, you’d see him sitting outside, facing the trees, an empty plate balanced on his knees and an empty mug in his hand, listening to the wood thrush.


photo by Lloyd Spitalnik