Tuesday morning

Four days in a row at the park. 3 of the 4 Jessie and I took long walks and we stopped in the rock garden where Jessie sat in the shade of the stone wall and hoped for a careless chipmunk to pass by, while I practiced T'ai Chi. It really is a perfect place to do T'ai Chi and I owe a debt to the man I used to see practicing T'ai Chi in this same spot some time ago, which is what gave me the idea to do so. That was before my cancer diagnosis, when I used to bring Jessie to the park on weekend mornings, but later - in fact what I thought at the time was "early" but now seems so late, around 8:00 or 8:30 a.m. This morning (and yesterday to some extent) there were quite a few more people there, some already as we arrived, and others arriving while we were there. That suggests to me that people make coming to the park at around 6:00 a.m. on weekdays a regular thing, but they like to sleep in on weekends. Better for me. My goal is to get up and get to the park by 4:30 a.m., or whatever time the sun is actually really coming up. Even 5:45 is too late at this time of year. The sun is well over the horizon. Of course, we're now into the shortening days period - hard to believe. Certainly the 6 months that the days lengthen seem to take a long time, while the 6 months that the days shorten seem to fly by.

It's supposed to reach 100 degrees today. The third day, I think, that temperatures will have exceeded 90 degrees, so we are officially in a heat wave. And it won't be over today, either. 90+ weather for the rest of the week, too. I am taking today off of work, which is sort of a drag, since it is too hot to want to do anything except find air conditioning and plant oneself.

Already as we arrived at the park this morning, I could feel the heat beneath the day's surface, waiting to jump out. At first we didn't see the Canada geese, and I thought perhaps they had finished their molting, taught the juveniles enough to prepare them for the journey north (to more comfortable temperatures), and had left for their namesake country. But when we completed the east loop, they were there, at the pond with the Mallards. Their plumage does look fresh, and they sat on the bank of the pond with long black necks stretched out. Meanwhile, the Mallards - especially the grey-brown females - looked melted into the dusty shore. And at 6:00 a.m., it was only 70 degrees. Even the surface of the pond looked dusty, stagnant, hot. Makes me want to .... go bowling. When my kids were young and we lived in NYC and had no air conditioner (unlike our spoiled existence now with 1 window air conditioner that cools my 12 x 15 foot living room, barely), when it became unbearably hot I would take the kids to the movies or bowling. I always associate bowling with hot hot days.

I try to imagine the people and the creatures of the Gulf Coast, where this weather is the norm rather than the exception, and now the smell of oil and tar permeates the air. Yesterday I heard 30 seconds of a radio "news" story talking about the fact that it costs about $50,000 to "clean" a bird and some small % of the birds cleaned survive even a year. Sometimes I am ashamed to be a human being. Some time ago I heard about a book called "The World Without Us" and I read about half of it. I need to go back and finish it. It is about how the earth could restore itself if human beings were just to disappear. I don't know the ideology of the author, or his "point," but sometimes I turn back to my memories of that book as a solace when my heart hurts for the planet we treat with such indifference. And that's not even to consider how we treat one another. We should be ashamed of ourselves. I think to myself if I live long enough that my grandson grows into a young man, and he came to me and said, "Abuela, how could you let this happen to the earth? To its creatures? To its plants and grasses and trees? To the fishes and the wide blue ocean? What did YOU do, Abuela, to stop this?" what will be my answer?

Peace.