Flood stage

It began with the fir trees. One morning, on our way to school, we saw affixed at every streetcorner the green seals that seemed to tie up the city like a great Christmas package of a hundred corners and edges.  Then one fine day the package split, and toys, nuts, straw and ornaments spilled from within: it was the Christmas market.  With them, though, something else spilled out: poverty. Just as apples and nuts might be tricked out with a bit of gold foil next to the marzipan on the Christmas plate, so too the poor people, who came with their tinsel and colored candles into the better quarters. The rich would send their children out, to buy wooly lambs from the poor, or to give alms they themselves, out of modesty, would not bring with their own hands. Meanwhile the tree already stood on the veranda; my mother had bought it in secret and had it carried over the back stairs into the house. And more wonderful than any effect of the candlelight in it was how the coming feast wove itself every day more closely into the branches. In the courtyards the hurdy-gurdies started up, to beguile the last few days with chorales. Then finally it had passed, and one of those days had come again, the earliest of which I will remember here.

I waited in my room till six o'clock decided to arrive. No holiday of later life knows such an hour, an arrow trembling in the heart of the day. It was already dark, still I didn't light the lamp, so as not to have to look away from the windows above the courtyard, where now you could see the first candles. It was the most fraught moment in a Christmas tree’s whole life: when it offered itself up to the dark to become nothing more than a constellation, near and unapproachable, in some dull carriage-house window. But when only one constellation here or there consecrated some deserted window, while so many others stayed dark, and others even more sadly faded into the early evening gaslight, it seemed to me then that in those Christmas windows all loneliness, all age, all privation - everything the poor people kept silent about - found itself gathered.

First part of Dogen’s Fukan-zazengi, a scroll thought to be in Dogen’s own hand. At the link below, Mike Cross offers a character-by-character expansion of the text. I can’t read or speak the language, but even this much contact with Dogen’s original is enough to suggest the movement of his thought in a way that English translation just can’t.

There were two dreams. They were separate dreams, but I dreamt them the same night.

In the first dream, I stand at the other end of the kitchen. It’s daytime. Patti comes out of her bedroom. She comes out of the darkness of the hallway leading to the bedrooms into the light from the kitchen window. She shuffles onto the linoleum in her footie pajamas. She has a haggard look. She has something she wants to say to me, but her voice is hoarse and she can’t say it. It’s Mom who tells me this. She’s better now, her voice will just be hoarse for a little while.

In the second dream, I stand in the hall, or in the kitchen just off the hall. Patti is in her bedroom, where I can’t see her. The gold shag of the hall where I stand is bright. The bedroom, the hallway reaching it, are enveloped in dark. They’re taking me in there to see her. They’re explaining to me, or it’s been explained, that she’s going to be alright, she just has to stay in an iron lung for awhile. So I can talk to her when I see her, but she won’t be able to say anything to me.

We called the A&W in Old Town Florissant just “the drive-in.” Should we go to the drive-in? There were sit-down stools outside the drive-in, where people took ice cream, but if they had inside service we never used it. It was always a summer night, humid, on the way back. (That’s when you could have things, on the way back.) Maybe we had been shopping, maybe we were coming home from Grandma and Grandpa’s. Old Town was quiet at night, the A&W on Rue St. Catherine was a small one and out of the way, and in the stretched intervals of cars pulling in and going out you could hear cicada drone rise and fall in the big trees, the ones my parents agreed must have been there forever.