The Miracles and Calamities of Last Night

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Sometimes I ride my bike into the white sky poem of morning when the hills are hushed by fog and the day is still seamless and secret, a blank page onto which anything can be written or nothing at all. I pedal across the cattle guard, past the abandoned hammock suspended between two leafy creekside sycamores, and up into the zigzag of the canyon, familiar and strange.

A hawk darts and glides in the distance, a clamor of cows thrashes about in the brush, a shy turtle slides from its stone into the safety of a dark pool. There is life everywhere, and death; often I discover the scattered calamities of the night before, small remnants of dramas, the morning news, as it were.

Several days ago the infamous Gaviota winds were gusting with special ferocity and for much of the night I lay awake wide-eyed listening to the howling and banging outside. Four metal rail car covers blew off a freight train passing on the trestle that night and landed on the beach below – that’s how bad the winds were. But the next day brought a welcome lull, and I bicycled serenely toward the west end of the ranch where I came upon a large and beautiful barn owl lying lifeless in the middle of the road. I looked closely at his talons – enormous and powerful – and his soft golden plumage, almost like fur.

I had never been so near to an owl. I tried to push him to the side with a stick and was startled by the heft of him. A heavy thing has fallen, I thought, and even in the wake of larger news, that daily barrage of horrific truths and righteous lies, even with that, the death of the owl made headlines in my heart.

I don’t know how to make sense of things. Sometimes all I do is spin my wheels, spitting up small angry stones. But I can’t just push aside a mystery with a stick or give more weight to its ending than the miracle of its existence. And no matter how battered I feel by winds distant and near, I will not bow to hopelessness.

All I can tell you is this: one summer night I awoke suddenly for no apparent reason, opened my eyes, looked toward the window, and saw a shooting star in the midst of falling, creating a distinct arc of light against the sky. I say a shooting star because I don’t know what else to call it; it may have been a remnant of the meteor showers of a few nights earlier. But in fact, it was like no shooting star I had ever seen before. It was more like a sailing planet, large and luminous, a miraculous thing that I would never have glimpsed or even imagined had I not inexplicably opened my eyes at that precise moment. This is symbolic of something, I thought, though maybe it was pure serendipity. Still, it served to remind me that wondrous things are occurring every second, even if unbeknownst to us.

Not long ago I sat at a computer in a ragged little village outside Naples. It was my grandfather’s birthplace; he knew well the silhouette of Vesuvius framed by this kitchen window, the pastel-colored houses made of stone and cement, the rowdy bells of the church of Sant’Anna honoring the hours. In 1905 he boarded a steamer for New York and never saw his homeland again. Now a century later I had come in his stead, tapping at a keyboard in an ancient sunlit house, sending digital bits of language into the universe. It was a scenario that my grandfather could not have even dreamed. But every day we accept as ordinary that which was once beyond the capacity of human imagination, and this is precisely what gives me hope: un-dreamable things are yet to unfold and some of them will be good.

Rockets and missiles streaked across the sky last night, lives began and ended, and a young friend of mine was juggling in Millstreet, Ireland. Here, oranges were dropping to the ground, busy mice tucked macadamia nuts into the engine of our car, and coyotes yapped and howled as the train rumbled through. The full moon nearly rolled into my room, and I was awash in silver light. Many things happened in the course of the night, but another shy morning has now dawned, white and still.

I think that maybe fog is our version of snow, for it enters silently and forgives everything. I choose to write a story on this day’s blank slate that envelops possibility, speaks its thanks through deed, and accepts what grace is offered. I excuse myself for my embarrassment of blessings and will allow a little license to taste tomatoes and choose shoes and keep ghosts at bay. But I live in a community where lives do touch, radiating far and wide in concentric circles, each one a center and a start, and there is promise in that awareness. I am weary, just as you are, and I hunger for a change, but the morning news is not all bad if you know how to look and you ride straight in.