Green Onions

Wild Onions

March 27, 2015

Innocent Pleasures

       What fun would there be without guilt? – Joy, maybe, but no 
       fun. Are there any pleasures that are not guilty pleasures?
                                                                              - Uncle Albert

Maybe one or two.

Imagine, with John Lennon, there is no heaven. Or – and does this follow? – imagine a world without magic. There is nothing here but us and our stuff – a whirlwind of gnarled metal, splintered wood, broken glass, loose change, torn bills, shards of stock certificates, ripped clothing, shoes abandoned in the middle of the road . . . stuff – and all of it old and falling apart.

Then, spring arrives.

          Everything old becomes odd: this desire that takes hold of me walking home through the rain, so that, half shivering, I still stop by a tangle of forsythia to look into the buds. Then, when I come in and go into the bathroom to dry my hair and there are Roz’s pale blue panties and her gym socks in another tangle in the middle of the black-and-white tile floor, there is this sense that I’m looking at symbols as in Sanskrit or Mandarin and I could make sense of it, if I knew the language.  And this sense expands instantly so that I’m convinced, still standing wet-headed and dripping onto the tile floor – I’m convinced that every bit of the world touches every other bit - yews, flowering redbuds, gray squirrels and vultures; panties, gym socks, those lone shoes alongside the highways; sugar doughnuts, hard cider, soft shoulders, and blue song – but, again, they are like letters run together into a language I cannot read: av8ubrwĦǽЊчdeщлosgЖheaЙw.

I am at an age when I should begin thinking of renouncing the world: all stuff; all resentments and prejudices, including language; everything in which I find comfort and pain – sannyasa - going desert-wandering, sans roof, sans shoes, sans shirt, sans everything. But instead of thinking of leaving the world, I stand cold, dripping, shivering, and pining for it - yearning, aching for it, as if I had left and it had come running after me, grabbed and wrestled me to the muddy ground, to save me from renunciation, to reverse my sinful, sorrowful middle-aging, so I am become a child again. I will be that ignorant eight-year-old walking in the woods by the house on Hemlock Street where only years later the Dutch family, the Harmenszoons, would chop down and build – walking in the woods, looking for, finding, and stuffing myself with wild onions.*

          Worth it even when that night my stomach turned sour right up to my ears.

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     *A bit of whimsy from about the same time: