Bedroom In The Orchard in anticlimatic

My ma, who I love, is wild. She’s very unique/odd, but was always beautiful, so she got away with it. When attractive people talk about a benevolent God who watches out for them, or a spirit of Karma and Mother Earth or Universe that also looks out for them, understand they are speaking from experience. Things do always work out for them. But its not because of a God or other mystical force. It’s because they’re young and attractive and other people feel compelled to help.

But for all her flaws, she also has a number of superpowers- a few she passed on to me. One of them is the ability to manufacture a rich and creative meaning for anyone, or anything, or any situation. Minor tragedies can be spun into comedies. Relationships can take on cosmic significance and coincidence. A jar with a stain on the side that vaguely resembles a face can become an actual creature to care for and feel sympathy towards.

It can find you in the wild from time to time, but creating meaning out of thin air is a handy trick to have in the pursuit of motivation and commitment. Especially in today’s times, which seem oddly tailored to suck as much potential for “meaning” out of the culture as possible. I wonder if it’s deliberate, from some malevolent force, or just incidental to progress.

I don’t have a clue what is going on in the world of young people, but I wonder if they are as engaged in romance as people my age were when we were young. Do they romanticize things, still? Go on quests? Risk it for the biscuit? I used to climb out my bedroom window at night, climb down a tree next to the house, “borrow” my parents vehicle, take it to a girl I was sweet on’s house, climb in HER window, and make out for hours. Is that kind of thing even possible anymore?

There was a meaning in the danger of it- of making yourself personally familiar with the relationship between risk and reward- of revealing, to yourself, your ability to achieve such rewards at all. And, of course, there was the most sublime meaning in the rewards themselves…

Sometimes she’d come out, and we’d lay in the grass under the maple trees and enjoy one another there. I can still smell the June starlight.