It’s spring, ferrealz, and all the kids have headed toward water for a bacchanal. The clarinets were auditioning for the Grant Park symphony all day yesterday in the shell. The dogs are having a ball eating rotten things that have melted out of the thick ice, and then puking. Along the Chicago River, they’re testing out the bridges for lifting so the rich people’s yachts can come through to the marinas, the grinding and the signaling and the blinking, like soothing war machines from another planet. An artist said, as the sun rose, “I’ve been listening to War of the Worlds read to me. Oddly, it calms me down.” Bacchanals by the lake are the most soothing bacchanals
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The beachcombers go swimming for bricks, sweeping their metal detectors looking for doubloons and filling bags of polished stone for their driveways. The dog scrounges for dead crawfish, yum. Mostly, there are the patient pokers for sea glass, little bits of bottles and jars ground down by sand and wave. I’ve done a little poking myself, but I am impatient, impatience being the 8th deadly sin, and I remember how my grandmother would sit for hours in her lawn looking for one four-leaf clover, seeking out the freak, when there I was all along, waving my hands, over here.
Watching from day to day how the deposits of sea glass change (volume, size, quantity, how clear or cloudy, location on the beach, color) is both subtle and obvious. In the squalling lake this week, it got ground down to little bits, so I was leaning over to pick more up. In Dante’s Paradiso, our bodies—which we only use now and then, inhabiting them just to talk to jabbering poets—are pearlescent, the color of the sun on misty water, or the cloudy clearness of sea glass, I figure.
ohhh lakes and rocks and other treasures. I wasted quite a bit of time this afternoon watching a guy hunt for agates on the north shore of Lake Superior. He found one that was SO SPECIAL that he decided not to cut it. B/c it was so so special. I was just itching to yell CUT IT NOW! I WANT TO SEE THE INSIDE! NOW! RIGHT NOW!