Comets

"Spell with patience
And care."

-- Mitch Mahoney in The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

--

The best view of the city is not of the city but its reflection. At night, I drive across this bridge, a blue suspension bridge, and the reflections catch my eye. The river looks black and the night is dark, and the lights of the docked ships and shoreline streetlights hit each wave and ripple in advancing angles, the brightness fading as if into the depths. These lights are like comets, the reflections the tails. The comets sprout towards the stars. These tails, side by side, create a random spectrum of amber and red and blue, indicating the element of man.

I can never get a good look at it because I only see it while driving. The bridge is a beautiful spot for drive-by viewings, but it is forbidden to night walkers. Shadows on the sidewalk hide selfish, desperate people.

One exception to that rule. It being July, the horses and their buggies are out of stable, traversing the river every night. Cars slow behind carriages. Couples make lifelong discoveries behind a semi-blinded animal and a man in a top hat.

Safe in the vehicle, idling along at five miles per hour, I can turn glances to gazes, and the city is beautiful in the river at night.

--

Saw another kids' show tonight, a summer camp project. They took an obscure 1970's musical about drugged-up teens and performed it for their parents. It is precisely the kind of show that is more unsettling than it needs to be (for example, two girls sing a duet about how a two-year-old's death by rat attacks will benefit the family because the landlords finally have to renovate the building; maybe, they sing, they will get a toilet bowl). Shock for shock's sake is a quick bore, and it perverts serious subjects with patronizing cliches. It oversimplifies grief.

In general, I'm starting to loathe urban-themed shows. Maybe the depressing problems of city life are exotic to bumpkins, but not to me. How many times must I hear about coke going through someone's veins, or being called a nigger, or how cutting yourself makes you feel cool?

Not to mention, this all loses its potential punch when these monologues come from the mouths of babes--babes who, for all their imaginings and late-night movie watching, have not the slightest idea what being high or drunk or addicted or hopeless is like. Angst does not equal crisis. It's all a mystery to them, and it remains a mystery. As it should.

There is no mystery, however, in a person who simply wishes to be mysterious.

--

I don't think I'd ever want to be a star, a tiny blot that twinkles on and off with a million brothers and sisters. Not even a shooting star, which blazes in a streak and in an instant is gone. And certainly not a meteor, which is beautiful until it crashes and burns and kills the dinosaurs.

I think I'd rather be a comet, the magical thing that comes almost once a century, the occasion that demands the waiting, a symbol in the sky that lingers for its time and fades with dignity.