Miscell, eh, nee?

*The hospital auditor from Kansas bought a special travel purse to protect her from New York's pickpockets during the 3-week sojourn. She used to live in Texas, and just bought her first sailboat. There are places to sail in Kansas; good ones, with strong wind current. She uses Clinton Lake, near Lawrence, water made from a dam.


*Outside Grand Central this morning I found a moleskine notebook splayed on the ground near a rusted trash can. It looked ole and weathered, and, noticing nobody nearby who seemed to be searching, and with time to spare before work, I picked it up and began reading. It was three-quarters full with journal entries by a nameless male someone. I carried it to the Tudor City, found a park bench, and began to read.

The first few pages detailed the minutiae of the man's life- mild complaints about money and women- without delving too far into specifics. The jottings belonged to a sane, somewhat pedantic, typical human, full of self-interest and immersion in his sphere. Uninteresting, for the most part, and I almost returned it to its nook before noticing an entry longer than the others.

It contained a breathless account of how the man encountered a God on 42nd street one morning, near Grand Central, and how it swooped down from a light pole where it had been hunched, waiting. The God was Coyote, of the southwest Indian tribes, a lithe, virile creature who approached with a smile. He wrote in hurried prose that it surprised him to learn the Native Americans were right, among all mythologies and belief systems, if Coyote was being honest moments later when he claimed himself as the one true creator of Earth.

After brief discussion (during which time the passerby floated east and west as if in a dream, unaware of the God and man paused in their midst) Coyote told the man he could be granted one wish. While I read, the maddening question of why the author had been chosen above all others lingered like an itch, but went unanswered, unscratched. He never even seemed to wonder himself.

Without thinking, the man made his wish, for he'd been dreaming it a long time: that for 365 days, ever year, in every corner of the world, each day would ensue with the same exact weather. No changing of seasons; just cool mornings, sunny afternoons reaching eighty degrees, and balmy, breezy evenings, with overnight temperatures never dipping below 55 fahrenheit. Coyote honored the wish and disappeared.

Time went on, and though the climate change was initially viewed as a fun anomaly, in almost no time the awful consequences became apparent. Without seasonal patterns, the agricultural economy collapsed, food shortages spread worldwide, famine ensued, the ice caps began to melt, disease spread with flooding, massive starvation killed millions, warfare erupted in all corners of the globe, and the man with the journal fell into a deep depression. He knew he had to atone, somehow, but could think of no other way than setting off on a journey, searching for Coyote, begging for a reversal.

So he went, and it was days of wandering through ravaged land, always going north, surviving at long odds by sheer, strange luck, before he found himself in a small clearing amid a pine forest, and there Coyote alit from the boughs of a tall tree and met him again. The man begged for a restoration in time to stave off the world's apocalyptic meltdown. Coyote smiled and told him he'd do better, that he'd be willing to reverse time to the day of their first meeting, and have life go on as before, as though there'd been no interruption.

The man thanked him and cried, rejoicing in shouts, carrying on, jubilant, until he noticed Coyote's mocking stillness and understood that the saving grace came with conditions. He waited. Coyote spoke. One must be a martyr for his mistake, a lost saint for the cause. Despairing, the man sunk to his knees. Coyote's grin disappeared, and he stared in the man's eyes and showed him in flickering gray images the extent of the suffering he'd wrought. The man accepted.

"Can I have one more day? To stay in the forest and say goodbye?" he asked.

Coyote laughed. "No."

The last entry of the journal was written in the morning, as he rode the train to work. Time had been restored, and the man knew something would happen to him when he emerged, when his steps fell upon the same spot where the God had first been met. His writing didn't betray as much fear as I expected, but then again it was only writing, and probably couldn't reflect his true state of mind.

I decided not to keep the notebook, but throwing it out seemed uselessly destructive, and so I buried it beneath a pile of mulch in the Tudor Gardens. Whether it's found again, and what the new holder might choose to do with the knowledge...I leave all that to chance.


*Sylvia Plath - all I can think about.