So did the old woman: “None that are broke!” she commanded.
The clerk gave her a smile on automatic pilot and replaced the defective cookie, slipping them into a white sack and placing it on the counter. “A dollar-seventy-six please,” she told the old woman.
The old woman turned her back to me and began fumbling in her purse, which was the size of a small knitting bag. After much muttering she finally produced two dollar bills rolled together and neatly bound with a yellow rubber band. She addressed the clerk with a staunch formality: “Also I would like some peanut butter cookies. The little ones. Twenty-four cents of them.”
The clerk, with a look that pleaded God, I wish my period would start, scooped out three small peanut butter cookies and, without bothering to weigh them, slipped them in the bag with the others. The old woman rolled the yellow rubber band off the two bills and spread them out on the counter, pausing to smooth them flat before she secured the white sack in her knitting-bag purse, dropped in the yellow rubber band and the receipt, and left at a brisk shuffle. I lost sight of her in the flow of the crowd as I stepped forward to place my order.
About a half hour later, however, while I was sitting on a bench at the other end of the mall, still pondering the money and points as I polished off a last hot dog, the old woman appeared and, after considerable maneuvering, plopped herself down on the far end of the bench.
Without any acknowledgment of my presence, she opened the white bag from the Cookie Jar. At a bite each, with slow and luscious enjoyment, she ate the three small peanut butter cookies. When she’d finished, she peered into the bag to check the other three, the big ones, and then, as if to confirm their existence, their promise of delight, she named them one by one:
“Friday night.
Saturday night.
Sunday with tea.”
The path of water is not noticed by water, but is realized by water. –DōGEN
Thinking things through.
Thinking through things.
Things through thinking.
Through thinking things.
At fifteen,
the imagination
torments;
at fifty,
it consoles.
Another transformation
changing nothing.
I don’t know
and I don’t know
what to do about it.
I simply hit a point
where I lost heart for judgments
and was swept
into the voluptuous, harrowing
complexities composing a single breath.
AN HOMAGE TO WALT WHITMAN
Reality is the work of imagination.
Imagination, the flume of emotion.
After all the tears and laughter,
emotion empties into spirit,
and spirit condenses on reality
like dew on a leaf of grass.
A salmon leaps.
Transcend what?
Vicky and I were steelhead fishing on a secret riffle of a nameless Pacific Northwest river, perhaps the best iron-head water between the Russian and Bella Coola, to which you may receive directions for a thousand dollars cash. It was late afternoon, the sky the color of wet ashes, the river high but beginning to clear. I was drifting a roe-glo through the upper stretch of the run when I felt a slight pause in the tick-tick-tickity rhythm of the pencil-lead sinker bouncing along the stony bottom. I set the hook. The rod tip bowed and began to pulse, the heavy, solid throb running through my shoulders.
“Fish on!” I hollered to Vicky forty yards downstream.
She turned and looked at me, yelling back, “Really?”
For some reason, this is the usual response of my fishing companions, leading me to believe they regard me as either an astonishingly inept fisherman or an insanely reckless liar.
“Really!” I assured her at the top of my lungs, lifting my doubled rod as proof before turning my attention to the battle.
Actually, it wasn’t much of a battle. The fish was sulking in the strong mid-channel current. I tightened the star drag slightly and applied some pressure; the fish turned lethargically and headed downstream. I lightly thumbed the spool; at the added resistance, the fish swung toward shore down by Vicky, who had just reeled in and started walking my way, no doubt to offer encouragement, counsel, and general assistance.
As my line sliced toward her, she stopped and peered into the water, then shook her head. “Hey,” she called, “you’ve got a big ol’ sore-tail salmon.”
“No,” I begged her.
She pointed emphatically a few feet offshore. “I can see it. Big, beat-up sore-tail.”
I took the Lord’s name in serious vain–no wonder the fish wasn’t fighting–then tightened the drag to reel in the fish for quick release. The fish offered little resistance until it was about twenty feet away, then made a sullen move toward swifter water. When I clamped down, it swung back, passing in front of me. Sure enough, it was a spent salmon, its rotting fins worn to nubs, the battered body mottled with patches of dull white fungus.
But something wasn’t right. The sore-tail was languidly corkscrewing along the bottom, a movement that didn’t match the steady quiver I felt through the rod. Then I saw why: The sore-tail, in blind expression of the spawntill-you-die imperative, was engaged in
