This Time in the Winter

What a lovely bike-ride this morning with my younger daughter.  I got her up before six, and gently stirred her, prepared for flat-out rejection with my reminder that it was time to roll.  With knitted brows, she considered my disturbance of her dreams and I told her in a quiet voice to meet downstairs in ten minutes if she wanted to go to the gym, as she’d suggested she had wanted to.  I went back down, put on my jeans, found my school facilities ID card, and the keys to the front door, fully expecting to head out on my own this morning but she soon made her way down. 

I considered but demurred on drawing her attention to how beautiful it was to bike around in the early, spring morning.  She might experience that, but it would almost certainly kill the sentiment to have it broadcast.  On the way out the compound we past the high school principal who was walking his two, strikingly beautiful Golden Retrievers.  “Hey, you’ve got her going this morning?”  “Indeed.” 

We got their early and were ready to leave early as she insisted we do.  I was able to share with her, with someone, for the first time all year what it was like to do this bike ride over first thing in the morning.  “This time in the winter it is pitch black.  You can still see the stars.”  Biking home I pointed out the place that had been a teacher’s watering hole with one or another small market beside it that had recently been demolished.  There’s glass in the street.  We don’t need to drop another thirty dollars for two more inner tubes as we did over the weekend.

When I got home, I had a few minutes in the kitchen before my 8:00AM call would start.  My mom had entered the words “Notre Dame” in my phone.  I know how she communicates, and this was unlikely to be good news.  And my mind turned towards the college in the Midwest, somehow.  Ignorant, I assumed that there had been a school shooting at the Catholic university.  I checked the ‘New York Times and nothing was listed.  What was she looking at?  Then I searched for the term “Notre Dame’ and then, bang, there it was, the burning of the cathedral.

Like a murder or a car accident I shouldn’t have watched the video but couldn’t help it.  And it felt, as I’m sure it did for more than a few people, oddly reminiscent when the fragile tower in this holy landmark toppled, the same pang of pain I felt when I witnessed the first of the Twin Towers fall, as though human impermanence were suddenly revealed and mocked in flames.  What a sad thing to see, the large oval eyes, the flying buttress, that always made this gothic cathedral look like a terrestrial whale, or Jules Verne octopus, helplessly burning away, while the world looked on. 

Tuesday 4/16/19