By the end of yesterday, I had gotten over the loss of "my" book, and the attendant routine I had come to enjoy since New Year's Day, of walking out to the park and reading a chapter while sitting at the picnic table in the shelter. Of course, I could have taken the book for my own and then walked out with it to the park, but somehow it didn't feel like the right thing to do. In that sense, it was a test of my character, to cope with losing it. It felt like it was meant to happen.
It had all begun only last week as a way of getting me to take more walks outside in the New Year, after a year and half of feeling cooped up. Perhaps that is what I missed immediately, the motivation to follow this new routine, and also the feeling of it being the New Year. I love New Year's Day. It may be my favorite holiday. I love that it is an arbitrary date on the calendar, but everyone gives themselves permission to feel like the world is, fleetingly, brand new again. I love the low-number single-digit days of January and always feel a little sad to see the world settle into the everyday calendar again. Seeing the book missing yesterday was like being rudely jolted out of my extended New Year's dream, like an alarm clock going off rudely while one is in the midst of a pleasant dream (note I almost never use alarm clocks, and when I do I invariably wake up before it goes off.).
The other subtext in this drama is that last year, going for walks in the little park had become painful. This is because, as I mentioned, they finally got around to clearing out the rest of the undeveloped desert that I have cherished so much since we moved here. The building of the park itself had been the first step in that, back in 2021, but it left the vast majority of the remaining land untouched for the time being, and it remained my almost private wandering area where I could get "lost". I done this kind of things since I was boy, making a piece of woods or a vacant field into my little of kingdom.
I know it makes me "weird" and few understand this about me, that I can turn a bit of scrub desert into my own palace grounds and give names and character to each part of it, like Adam naming the features of the newly created Earth. So rare is it to find someone who understands this too. There have been so few people in life who understand how I am constantly driven into some form of "magical thinking", where I am compelled to interpret my life in some kind of mythopoetic storyline, even on the smallest everyday level. If I take you into my confidence as a friend, then I begin to share these things with you, and share the sources of magic around me, if I sense you think me mad, that it is ok until you call me mad, but then we must part and I must go on my way. There is no sadder moment than when a shared magical journey stops, and one is left alone, the mourn with the confort of the trees and the landscape that once was the text of a fairy tale before one's eyes.
This kingdom of the undeveloped desert was not my property. .Except for a small rump section, has been scraped to a flat brown plain, and what remains will taken soon as well. It's like a nuclear exposion to destroy the magic terrain. I could turn away from the sight of it and mourn the loss of my kingdom in private, but as I walk up the path of the park around the pond, I am confronted by the vision of this featureless plain stretching all the way down a half mile to the highway. Soon they will begin paving it over no doubt. My mind wants to see where the dirt road once went under the power lines, where I could pace out my thoughts and draw together ideas into a creative whole. All of that is behind. work fence now. The little draw that wound down towards the highway, flanked by delightful brush where animals played, is totally gone, replaced by a chain link fence that feels like a prison.
All of that was too much to bear last fall as it was happening, which is why I stopped going to the park. It was too painful. Somehow the library and my book club allowed me to pretend all of that wasn't happening. I often go walking without my contact lenses or glasses, and so it was easier just to cope with things that way, and not see the blankness of terrain, awaiting the asphalt, that was once such a joyful bit of discovery each day. I could focus entirely on the little library.
Thankfully, amidst it all, there still remains the little bit of paradise that was my original private sanctuary---the Sandy Bottom, as I have called. That part of the draw still remains because it is just inside of the original dedicated park, but was never developed. The draw will never be filled with water again, due to the re-engineering of the drainage in the park, but the Ironwood lives on, as does the Saguaro and the Palo Verde nearby, although I rarely go and sit there as I did, because there is no longer the same privacy in doing so. One feels rather "on display" there to people in the park walk on the road that passes nearby, that did not exist before.
And thankfully the "Chapel" is still there---a spot along the old draw just downstream from the Ironwood but upstream from the draw where several trees hang over the channel of the draw to create an interior space that is private but from which one can see out. The Chapel barely survived. Alas just downstream from it, the channel is now cutoff by the chain link fence and where the full scraping of the land begins. The delighful row of trees there have been uprooted and removed.
The pain in my heart remains for the other places in my kingdom that I cherished that are now permanently gone, a victim of zoning plans made decades ago now being undertaken, despite the change of character of this part of Scottsdale.
It by no means the first time in my life that I have carved out a private kingdom for myself like this, that only I seem to know about but which is ignored by everyone else. Over and over I have seen such places taken away. That's the way of the world. I will get over this as well. The destruction of it will make it easier to leave this place when we go, whenever that is, hopefully to a place where I can wander along forest paths again. I miss that a lot. Perhaps it is a blessing to be able to detach from it in that way.
Today, however, while we still live here, even though we are leaving behind the magic single-digit days of the year, I intend to go walking again into the park, and I will bring my own book to read, and it perhaps become my own book club again. I think I already have the book in mind.
As for the.yellow-highlighted copy of Robin Hood, my mythopoetic impulse drives me t to interpret the fact that yesterday I found the door of the little library flung open when I arrived to mean that the book, like a bird, escaped from its cage and was set free. A copy will come back to me when I am ready to finish it. Patience. King Richard shall return yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment