the waltz of polymatheia

It's been a while since we had a poem.  Buckle up:

The Unluckiest Man

It was the early morning, the sun too drowsy still

To do much more than streak the walls of the old dance hall,

When he mistook the door, entering but to see

That glittering, spinning dynamo, and lose his mind.

He lost it in a modern sense, handed off control

To her, who just innocently practiced her footwork.

She didn’t know how he fixed on every leap and turn,

Never saw his widened eyes or heard his quickened heartbeat.

Her bright blue dress’s hem traced curving rhythms in the air,

Its infinite swirl obliterating his defense.

And she alit with careless softness, her feet finding

Purchase in the grey and crooked wrinkles of his mind.

With each step, a synapse flared, turned his head to follow

Her, who took no notice of the man she had entranced.

He looked for the words, but even as he gathered them

She twirled again, scattering neurons like a sparkler.

Before he was ready, still too soon, she finished, stretched,

Stepped out of her shoes and left them, buried, in his mind.

I based this poem off of my experiences going to competitive ballroom dancing competitions.  My wife is an absolutely fantastic dancer, and she goes to these sorts of competitions many times throughout the year.  Occasionally, I tag along to offer support, but there isn't much for me to do except clap and be amazed by the incredible skill on display.

I am not a person who is naturally inclined to dance.  I've told you before that I lack much in the way of an aesthetic sensibility, but I'm afraid the problem is much worse with regard to my kinesthetic sense.  If I'm not fully focused on my motion, I tend to move less like a prancing dolphin, and more like a ship coming into harbor (specifically, the Costa Concordia).  You might think that one with so little grace as myself would be especially impressed by the smoothness of motion embodied by the finest dancers, and that's not a bad guess !  However, when you view a lumbering rhinoceros as a creature of refined and economical movement in comparison to yourself, it tends to make you a little too easily impressed.  So most dancing just kind of washes over me, firmly within the realm of "things that are so far beyond my understanding that I cannot even fully perceive them."

And yet, there are times when I'm watching a couple doing a routine, and somehow, the fluidity and synchronicity of their dancing clicks in my mind.  It's like, after you've spent many hours studying a difficult problem, that sense of suddenly seeing the answer.  For those few short minutes while they spin around each other invincibly, I somehow get it.  Not just the fun or the appeal of dancing, but the actual beauty and genius that can both go into and come out of it.  A couple times, I've been moved to tears by what I've seen.

I am a writer, and that means that I absolutely envy the ability to bring out that sort of emotional reaction in people.  Other emotional reactions are wonderful too, but the finest of them will always reduce your audience to a sobbing mess.  And so, in those brief moments of heightened dance-comprehension, I find myself filled with the powerful urge to become a better dancer.  To learn what it takes to get out and there and move others as well as myself.

Those feelings will last for a little while, and I might even find myself practicing some dance steps or something.  But, inevitably, I'll crack open a book, or listen to some music, or watch a movie, and that will produce a powerful emotional reaction in me as well.  And just like that, the intense focus I'd had on the one thing is shattered, replaced with the burning desire to excel as a writer, a musician, a director...or whatever other craft is needed to connect with people in the way I've most recently been affected.

Maybe I don't have the discipline to be more than pretty good at anything I choose.  Maybe I'm destined to never be anything other than a jack-of-all-trades.  When I was younger, the idea that I might never becoming absolutely excellent in anything would have been absolutely repellent to me.  Now that I'm a little wiser, I've seen that there are plenty of people who never even become pretty good at anything, choosing to fritter away whatever natural gifts they may have into an empty and purposeless life of parasitism and zero personal growth.  And I still have plenty of time to excel in many, many ways.  But the discipline has to come first, and I'm not sure that I know how to develop it.

all I ever wanted help with was you

the pitter-patter of extremely tiny feet

Are you skittish?  Do you fear rodents?  Does the idea of their tiny little paws and claws walking across your arms and legs bother you?  If so, you should read no farther.

...

...

...

Still here?  Excellent!  You're in for the CUTE OVERLOAD of a lifetime.  I'm about to tell you about the cutest pets I've ever owned -- my pet rats:

These are the first pet rats I ever had.  The white one's name was Nymeria, and the brown one was Arya.

My wife works at a career & technical high school, and one of their programs is Veterinary Science.  To get the students used to working around animals, they keep a bunch of rats around; they're easy to handle and cheap to replace.  Well, one night, a couple of the female rats managed to break out, and found their way into the male rats' cage.  A month later, there were many, many more rats in the Veterinary Science department than they could comfortably keep.  The call went out to adopt them, and my wife, who'd spent a lot of time getting to know the cute critters, put our name in for a couple.  So they came home to us.

At first, we put them in an aquarium to live, but we soon realized that the lack of aeration and climbing surfaces was a major detriment to a couple of young rats on-the-go.  The smell was bad, and they were bored out of our minds.  Luckily, we were able to find a guy selling an iguana cage on craigslist, and it worked perfectly!  It had multiple levels that they could climb between, plenty of room to put in a little nest box, and a removable tray for the bedding!  The girls took to it immediately, and were climbing and playing with abandon before we knew it.

We liked to take them out of the cage to play, although sometimes that was a mistake.  Nymeria was pretty sociable, and willing to sit on your shoulder for long periods of time, but Arya was a bit of an escape artist, constantly trying to sneak away and explore.  Shortly after we brought them home, we set up some space on our couch for them to run around and play.  Nymeria had a grand old time, but Arya just wouldn't stop slipping under the cushions.  Eventually we got tired of fishing her out, and pulled the cushions off, only to find that she had wormed her way through a hole in the fabric into the structure of the couch itself!  We spent over an hour trying to lure her out with peanut butter, but she was just too wily.  In the end, we were forced to cut the back of the couch open to get her out.  We learned a lesson that day:  DO NOT LET ARYA OUT OF YOUR SIGHT.

Rats only live for a couple of years, and we made the most of it.  We let the girls ride around on our shoulders while we went about our daily tasks.  We bought them treats and toys, hid food in crazy places in their cage, gave them baths, watched them wrestle, and learned to love having them in our home and in our lives.  We took them on vacation!  They were an important part of our family.  But nothing lasts forever.

About a year after we got them, Nymeria developed a recurring sneeze.  We were a little concerned, but it didn't seem to be bothering her, so we just kept an eye on her.  Eventually, though, we noticed a bump growing on her nose.  It grew larger and larger, until eventually it was interfering with her eating and drinking. We tried everything we could; we even got her some dog antibiotics, and it helped a lot, but they ran out and it just continued growing.  She tore it open a few times, but it didn't help; we could tell that she was in a lot of pain, but we didn't know what to do.  We agreed that it wasn't worth taking a rat in to a veterinarian, so we just tried to make her as comfortable as possible.

One morning, I woke up and went into the living room to find Nymeria lying on the floor of her cage, stretched out and stiffened.  Her nose was torn open, but her sister was just staying away from the body.  We placed her in a shoebox with some of her toys, packed it with newspaper, and duct-taped it shut.  Then we went out to the dumpster, lowered her in respectfully, and said a few words about what a great pet she had been.  My wife cried, and I wanted to, but I knew I had to stay strong for her.

We were concerned about Arya -- rats are very social creatures, and without a playmate, we thought she might suffer some mental issues.  But she seemed to get over her sister's death without difficulty; when we got them, Nymeria had been the dominant one, but over the course of her sickness, Arya had slowly come to win most of their wrestling matches.  And it seemed that the newly dominant Arya didn't mind being alone at all.  Besides, she was nearing old age herself.  She continued on running around and playing as though her sister were still in the cage with her.

Arya slowed down gradually, until one day she started to have what appeared to be a seizure.  She got over it after a few minutes, but it seemed to have permanently damaged her control of one of her legs; after that, she moved around very slowly, and occasionally would just spin in circles when she tried to walk.  She became less and less interested in playing or climbing, until she finally decided to just stay on the bottom floor of her cage.  But before too long, even eating food seemed to require more coordination than she could handle.

I tried to nurse her along by feeding her peanut butter (it had always been their favorite food) and giving her rags soaked with water to suck on, and that seemed to bring her to her senses a little.  After a few days of that, she was back to eating food on her own, and was a lot more active.  But it was not to last.  She soon lost interest in eating again, and even the peanut butter I tried to give her had lost its allure.

One night, she seemed to be breathing heavily.  I wrapped her up in a little towel and took her out of the cage, trying to give her what comfort I could.  I held her, and in the light of the TV show I'd been watching, I felt her heart beating more and more slowly, until finally she went still.  I showed her to my wife, who, without speaking, went and got a shoe box.  We gave her the same burial her sister had gotten, but this time, I let myself cry.

Losing a pet is hard -- even a short-lived one like a rat.  We talked about getting more, but both of us knew we weren't really ready for that.  So it went, for months and months -- we cleaned their cage out, and it sat there, empty, sterile, lifeless.

But a few weeks ago my wife mentioned that the Veterinary Science department was looking for some people to provide a foster home for some rats over the summer.  It would only be a few months, and then they'd be going right back.  But it would give us the chance to put the cage back together.  It would give us the chance to come home to some squeaky little creatures who were nothing but interested in us.  It would put a lot of cuteness back in our lives, and it would make us very happy.  It would give us a family again.

A few days ago, my wife brought home our new girls.  Just for the summer, but ours nonetheless.

Rose and Eva:

My wife wants to call them different names, Notches and...I don't even know.  The names she picked are terrible.

It's going to be a really fun summer; that much is certain.

yearnings from a silent heart

What a weekend.

Somehow I have spent the last 22 years of my life living in southeastern Pennsylvania without ever having heard of an absolutely incredible annual event:  World War II Weekend at the Mid-Atlantic Air Museum in Reading, PA.  But this year, I heard about it.  This year, I went.  And it was absolutely fantastic.

But before I did that, I ate Korean BBQ:

(not pictured:  incredibly delicious seafood pancake)

Korean BBQ is probably the most perfect food in the world.  I don't know why we ever eat anything else.  I mean, take another look:

Big props to my friend 57, who is the first person ever to show me the joys of Korean BBQ.  57, I couldn't really appreciate it at the time, but I love you for it now.

But back to the World War II show!  A friend of mine mentioned it to me, and I knew I had to be there.  As someone who likes WWII enough to have written a book with that as the setting, it was a very exciting thing for me to attend.

A proud P-51 Mustang.  I saw this flying just a few minutes before it was being wheeled past here.

Also, being that my book is about tanks, you can bet I was excited when I saw this:

A German tank destroyer, the SturmGeschütz IV ("Assault Gun").  Not technically a tank, but still awesome.

There were re-enactors everywhere dressed in authentic uniforms, arranged by unit into camps with all sorts of genuine WWII military hardware lying around.  Terrifying SS officers made the rounds as well, striking fear into our hearts.  A miniature French village served as the set for a series of mock battles between US soldiers and the Wehrmacht (German army); all the while, fighter and bomber planes zipped overhead, tilting to give us a better view of their sleekly engineered beauty as they navigated the friendly skies of Reading.

It was loud.  It was muddy.  It was crowded, I was hungry, and it wasn't cheap.  But it was amazing, and I will be going back there every year for as long as I can make it work.  These things call to me, you know?  All those vehicles -- they all actually move!  And there were a bunch of historical figures wandering around, from FDR to MacArthur, from Frank Sinatra to some old gangsters (wait, do I repeat myself?)!

The day closed out with a big band playing swing music while we danced with abandon in an old hangar.  It was raucous good times, especially because a bunch of dance clubs came out dressed for the period!  It was a hoot and a holler to see the gents and dames ready for a night on the town, to watch GIs spin their lady-friends with easy aplomb.  Plus, I saw a few Indiana Jones villains dancing with old ladies, which was fantastic.  I also learned that I really appreciate what 40's fashions do for the female figure!  The hairstyles are pretty awesome, as well.  When are those going to come back?

I went with my wife, and she is a competitive ballroom dancer, so of course I couldn't keep up with her on the dance floor.  After a few dances where I gave it my all, I stepped out of the way so she could find a competent dance partner and get down to the serious business of sock-hopping, and I wandered off to see what I might see.  Out there on the tarmac, I found something that had been missing all my life.

Arrayed in even rows over the airfield were all of the planes that had flown that day:  slender, nimble fighter planes, thick and sturdy bombers, boxy training planes, gigantic transports, and a dozen unassuming biplanes made up only a small portion of the total flying machines that had been left to watch the night's festivities in somber repose.  In the dark, I walked among them all, admiring the engineering genius and care that had gone into designing and building such excellent planes.  I was able to reach out and touch them, to feel the thickness of their metal hides, to see the little sutures where one sheet of aluminum connected to the next and understand their construction in a new way.  I was able to push the planes and feel the slightest give, to see how superbly they were balanced.  I was able to stand in almost complete silence, the only sound being the distant noise of the dance, and pay my respects to these behemoths, large and small, that served and continue to serve with faith, speed, and strength.

I stood amidst the planes, and found I was almost overcome with tears; some deep part of me had only ever wanted this, had only ever wanted to be this close to them.  I have always had an interest in flight, as you must know; but even if I never fly them, in that moment, just being able to touch them was enough.  It moved me, fundamentally; it fulfilled a dream that I hadn't even known I had.

That's why I know I'm going back.  The rest of the day was surely spectacular, but it was no more than that: spectacle.  What I experienced walking around in the dark, with those planes as my only companions, involved me in a serious and special way.  That was the point when I knew that I would have to return, if only so I'd have the chance to once again commune with those princes of the sky.


and love is the ink in the well when her body writes

by the polar order

You know, I really don't want this to be a once-a-week kind of blog; it just so happens that I've been preoccupied lately.  That means you're going to have to deal with a lot of unrelated nonsense coming together now, for which I apologize deeply.

Now, the things that have been preoccupying me:  writing!  Germany!!

I started editing my book, and so far I've gotten through about 10% of my first go-through, which is aimed mostly at fixing basic spelling and grammar errors, improving readability of some sections, and noting which parts need a rewrite or to have something added to them.  It's tremendously fun, not at all the busywork I had imagined; still, it's also really stressful to be confronted with all the mistakes I made in the writing process.  Granted, I was writing under serious pressure, but I have to maintain certain standards of self-disparagement, or I'll never learn.

And, every now and again, I come across a passage that I really like, and I feel great about myself!  I just wish I could remember the secret blend of diet, sleep, and daily rituals that put me in the mode of writing beautifully on some days, and awfully on others.

Ok, so what else is cooking?  Just that my wife and I are going to Germany!  We booked our tickets, and we'll be shipping out for the second half of July.  I've got a lot to prepare.  I have to figure out if my phone will be usable with a SIM card in Europe.  I have to brush up on my German.  And I have to decide whether seeing the resting place of Charlemagne is worth the several-hour train ride...

But oh man, to see the place where Europe's greatest king was crowned Holy Roman Emperor!  I mean, the Holy Roman Empire wasn't formed yet, it was a purely ceremonial title, but still...that is some rock-solid history.  And history is a large part of what I am about.

I've been thinking about history a lot lately, and especially the idea of history repeating itself.  The concept that events can happen in a similar configuration over and over, with only the actors and their circumstances changing, is really appealing to me, even if it's a little absurd.  But what interests me even more is how this might tie into individual lives -- if we don't change, are we doomed to repeat the same kinds of interactions over and over again?  Are there cycles of action-reaction that we are locked into by our personalities?  Will the circle be unbroken?

Personal growth, I know, is hugely important if you want to engage with the world in a positive way.  And I deeply, deeply want that!  It's easy, when you aren't happy, to see the world as a mucky, unkind place, more prone to granting the wishes of the undeserving than we unfortunates.  That's why I cherish every little reminder that the world is a wonderful place, full of humor and joy.  For example:

If a penguin can become a knight, surely the world has room for any of us to achieve our dreams.  It's just a matter of being brave enough to waddle up to them.