Moment

...a very brief period in time.


Moments form hours which form days which form years. Years link into the protracted chain of time. The chain lengthens...a temporal scorekeeper against which we measure our peregrinations. What does it all mean?

I have spent much of my life pondering that question. When I believe I have the answer, its will-o-the-wisp verity dissipates into the miasma of melancholy. Does an answer's elusiveness denote its unattainableness?

I am now 129 days from six decades on this plane, an impetus for reflection. I view my life as a repository of moments.

I am about six years old. My father rushes into my room because he heard me retching violently.  I had decided to be a sword swallower and was attempting to swallow a wooden dowel. I'll never forget his reaction when I told him what I was doing.

My father putting stitches in my head. This is an amalgamation memory as most of my youth was spent either getting head injuries, my father sewing up same, or removing said stitches. 

The Saturday morning I took the SAT test for college admissions. A girl across from me gives me the stink-eye for humming the Final Jeopardy tune a little too loudly. 

Walking around Siena College in an altered state. Several figures in cloaks with cowls over their heads walk towards the private golf course adjacent to the college. I follow them. They meet others of the same ilk, form a circle and begin chanting. I'm not sure how long I watched. Time was amorphous. Eventually I  wander back to campus. To this day I don't know if it was real or an hallucination.

Hitchhiking at an on ramp to the New York Thruway outside of Buffalo, NY in a hellacious snowstorm. A state trooper pulls up to inform me that the Thruway is closed from there to Rochester. I wander into a diner and nurse a cup of coffee wondering where to go.

Bringing home Hans, the Great Dane, and my mother's face when she realized Great Danes weren't those cute little wiener dogs. Mom never was good at identifying breeds.

Crisp fall predawn hours sitting on the boardwalk in Atlantic City waiting for sunrise.  Sharing a bottle of champagne with a friend as we discussed mortality and roulette.

Sitting at Max's Taphouse during Snowmaggedon 2010, watching the snow fall in the Square. A figure in a parka, boots and shorts carries a guitar towards Leadbetters.

 Playing guitar in a friend's aerie-like apartment in Fells Point. It's almost dawn, I'm tired, inebriated and hoarse from singing.  I should stop, but cannot. Camaraderie begs me to continue.

William Butler Yeats proposed a theory of cyclical history as
overlapping gyres. To me it's more kaleidoscopic. My life's vision is moments meshing and morphing into mandalas of remembrance. That could be the result of the numerous childhood head traumas, or too many hallucinogens.  As ever BB


"Faeries, come take me out of this dull world, 
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the disheveled tide, 
And dance upon the mountains like a flame." - William Butler Yeats