Reunion

The thing about halves is that they’re not always half of the thing.

How often, for instance, do we talk about the “big half” and the “little half?”

So, if you put together the first part of one week and the last part of another, you’re able to make a whole, and if you equivocate sufficiently, you can crawl through that hole and see yourself, at one point, commemorating a local celebrity passing and at another, rounding out the evening pretty much where it all began more than a decade earlier, give or take a couple months.

The eyes have seen so much of this before which is why the destination bar is predictable even if its name eludes you for a good part of the way along the lake.  Language leaves us before spatial ability, apparently, but you can be reasonably confident that if you continue pedaling, eventually the verbal and the visual will stitch together and what’s sort of amazing after all this time—and just a little bit frightening, too—is that when it’s all over and done with, the bicycle somehow brings you safely home, even in the absence of perfect recollection the morning after.

Initially, the moon has yet to rise, and subsequently, it’s so new that it doesn’t at all, but in both cases, its influence abides, pulling you all the way from the north and the east to the south and the west and most of the way in-between: those gaps are gapped and the stops stopped at; insides stay inside and the outside remains on the outside.

Details run together, so that one week’s climb is the next one’s descent; you’ve heard that song before but not this rendition.  And after all, as long as a person can dance to it a little, then does it really matter when it happened?

Two bodies warm themselves by the fire, both prone, one for old time’s sake and one for now.

Louder

When of a night that the inimitable music bike is just the second-loudest source of joyful noise, you know you’re in for a special treat.

from Prom 4 by via Bo Ttorff

And when the sonically-dominant font of mellifluous racket is something like two dozen female musicians cranking out hits by such luminaries as Madonna and Lady Gaga on saxophones, trombones, trumpets, a couple of Sousaphones, a drum line, and via their very own shared voices, then, well, you know it’s a gift so extraordinary as to be singularly unprecedented and far more than anyone could possibly deserve.

Yippee for the Filthy FemCorps, huzzah!

To be honest, the annual school dance can feel a bit of a chore, especially on evening that begins all drizzly, but if you make just a bit of an effort with your attitude and outfit, pretty soon, the clouds have parted and the occasion is underway, rolling down three lanes of traffic and a hundred or so decibels of Twisted Sister.

It would have been enough satisfy the aesthetic appetite of anyone to simply have feasted on all that party finery against the backdrop of the almost-as-lovely downtown Seattle, but that was merely an hors d’oeuvre.

For the main course, you got to be immersed in the dish, with horns and reeds all around, topped with glitter and black light face paint, and, as a whipped cream with a cherry on top, fire dancers!

A shout out to the Prom Committee, hip-hip-hooray!

The park shelter managed not to ignite, but, really, that was about the only thing there that wasn’t on fire, so much shimmying and shaking to beat that unbeatable band that even the wallflowers were belles of the ball.

And while there may have been an official King and/or Queen of the event, everyone got to feel like royalty when those sighing angel voices were heard; just like a prayer, I know they took us there, (on bikes, no less, feels like flying), let the choir sing!

Duodecimal

Twelve things to remember (more or less) from Ben Country XII.

1.    The mate on the ferry joking with “club spokesman” Ben birthday-boy-guest-of-honor, that the captain had a special treat for us: he’d agreed to let us off before the boat reached the dock!

2.    Part One of BCXII Animal Planet: a whale!  (Well, froth and foam on the Sound, anyway; you fill in the rest with your imagination and the cheers of ferry rider families).

3.    Part Two of BCXII Animal Planet: kittens!  (It’s still hard to believe that TooTall didn’t tuck one in his jersey when we left.)

4.    Part Three of BCXII Animal Planet: A goat named David, a peacock showing off on a fence, and an albino pheasant that stayed under wraps.

5.    No one, (except maybe Mark, who might have been misplaced earlier), getting lost on the Lost Highway.

6.    Whenever you go down a hill, you have to climb back up; and yes, it’s worth it, especially when you eventually get to re-group and congregate at the roofless clubhouse for the special opportunity to urinate on broken glass.

7.    So much pizza!  And even more at camp.

8.    Just enough rain to make it officially a Ben Country, but that’s all; and pretty soon, the clouds part to reveal an almost full moon bright enough to shine brightly through your rain fly.

9.    Sensible portions!  (Except of the so-called “time,” which the Fancy Dancer munched like potato chips while those of us with lower tolerances or less experience experiencing timelessness rode the cresting temporal waves with just a few blue-tinted crumbs.)

10.    Thirty seconds; twenty seconds; ten seconds of quiet; Happy Birthday!

11.    Lying in your tent, staring at the ancient Egyptians dancing on the insides of your eyelids, wondering why all those people around the fire won’t stop tickling that poor woman.

12.    No shame in catching a truck ride home; showered, shaved, and on the couch napping by noon.