The first leaf-drop of the season may have taken place just moments ago. Whether it was the first one or not, watching the leaf break away and float to the ground seemed symbolic to me; change is on the horizon. The air outside is absolutely still. Looking through the windows is akin to staring at a still-life painting. When gentle breezes or powerful gusts pry hundreds of leaves at once from branches and twigs, one can miss the transformative symbolism. But a single leaf falling in the absence of even a hint of air movement calls attention to the metamorphosis. If I allow myself to focus intently for just a few minutes on what that leaf’s surrender signals, I feel privileged to experience something readily available to millions—but ignored or dismissed by all but a few of us. Our good fortune is not evidence that we deserve something special; it is simply a piece of luck whose jagged edges have been polished to a luminous, smooth, high-polish luster.
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Years ago, when I lived in Chicago, a woman with whom I worked initiated a friendship with me. Her husband (who, if memory serves me correctly, was an immigrant from a Middle Eastern country) was an engineering professional, though I do not remember what kind of engineering he practiced. Whatever it was did not satisfy him. His wife said her administrative/managerial role in the company for which we both worked was just as unfulfilling to her. Both of them sought radical changes in their lives. She told me they wanted to move to Puerto Rico, where they hoped to buy and operate a venue they could transform into a bed-and-breakfast facility. Their visions for the venue were vastly different, though. The venue of her dreams was a stately old mansion. I think he, though, would have been thrilled to buy or build a place with a much more modern style…closer in concept to the Lakeshore Drive building which had been designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, in which they rented a condo in Chicago. My memories of her husband are hazy and rare. Because she and I worked together, I recall my relationship with her more clearly. But my memories of both of them end abruptly. I do not know what happened. She could have been fired and subsequently disappeared from my tiny social circle. They may have moved suddenly. There could be a thousand reasons my memories about both of them simply stopped being made. One of the last memories I have of visiting with her took place at El Rancho Mexican restaurant, a delicious dive of a place where I think she introduced me to tacos al pastor. It’s odd that she is on my mind this morning. I believe we worked together and knew one another for no more than two or three months. Nonetheless, that brief budding friendship remains imprinted on my brain for no discernible reason. Perhaps an article about van der Rohe I skimmed recently was the trigger for my short detour down memory lane.
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I built a shrine to the sky, using stars to define the monument’s most distant edges. Within the shrine’s inner sanctum is an endless tribute to understanding and truth. Construction of the altar began long before I knew how the story would end. By then, though, too much time had passed to enable me to start over. I could only hammer at the weakest sections and, when they collapsed, replace them with improbably timeless alternatives to words that no longer have meaning: tomorrow, later, forever, always. Shrubs and trees are related in the same way as are crime and criminality. They erupt from a common bloodline that’s ripe with opportunities for deviance. Watch carefully as vines assert their dominance by smothering interlopers. Peer deep into the night sky to see the full shrine and its pieces fall into place.
