Jumped Fence

Just before 1 AM, I heard the tell-tale rattle of a chain-link fence outside my bedroom window. In two steps I'm at the window with my fingers sliding apart two slats of the deep red blinds to look down into my back yard.
There, just passing beneath one of our large pine trees, threading his way through a labyrinth of toys left scattered across the grass by my kids earlier as they splashed in the blow-up pool, I see a tall figure illuminated in a white-blue light coming from the nearly full moon.
There's something slightly less than sinister about that loping unfamiliar figure, not hurrying, just strolling through the lawn I've only mowed a dozen times, towards the patio where earlier that evening we ate dinner with my in-laws. He's not heading for the house, just skirting along the back fence across the yard like he was cutting through a public park.
But that's not a public park and he doesn't belong there. I'm tired, nearly asleep, but I shout in a surprisingly robust voice through the screen in my bedroom window, "Stay out of my yard!"
Without turning or even starting, the figure bends into a jog continuing across the yard, unexpectedly tossing a "Sorry" over his lowered shoulder. It sounds obligatory and not at all contrite, as if he's hopped the fence a dozen times and attributes any sense of wrong-doing to outmoded views of property ownership that need revision.
The deck coming off the kitchen obscures my view of the part of the yard that he's in now, so I leave the bedroom. Instead of turning into the kitchen for a better view of the back, I veer to the living room window, wide open to let in the cooler night air. My house is a corner lot, so I expect this trespasser hopped my fence to cut the corner, though I can't see how it would save him any time. If that had been his route he should have reach the street by now. Peering as best I can down the road running parallel with my window I don't see a soul on the sidewalk.
After a short wait, I turn to the kitchen and scan the now-empty shadows. No movement, only the steady crickets texturing the darkness with their trilling.
Back in bed, Traci and I converse briefly about the intruder. She soon rolls over and sleeps. I lie awake. The crickets' chirping is tantamount to silence as I wait for other sounds. Though I'm nearly certain my yard is empty now, the silence fails to comfort me. I wait.

The first time I saw people cutting through my front yard, I was annoyed. Neighborhood kids did it on their way to school in the morning. A couple of loud-mouthed women had run across it one night months ago, tripping in a narrow rut running from the sidewalk to the front porch and dropping a nearly-full package of cigarettes which I threw in the trash the next morning with great relish.
The easiest solution to the problem would be to extend the fence line that enclosed my back yard along the west edge of my front lawn. Even the low four-foot chain link one would discourage most people. But apparently not everyone. To some, fences exist only to be jumped: there are no boundaries to some people's sense of self-entitlement, or their contempt for others.
I could put up a taller fence, perhaps a nicer-looking vinyl one. But I don't like the idea. A fence is not a friendly thing. In trying to wall too many things out, I fear I would only wall out more good than bad, while leaving myself feeling walled in. Transforming my yard into a prison, barring me from conversations with my elderly pigeon-keeping neighbors or friendly passers-by, would take a much greater toll on me than the guy who may just as soon scale an 8 foot fence.

Around 2:30 I call the police to report the neighbors to the east who are laughing loudly on their back porch and playing music, keeping me awake at least as much as my unease. Maybe that's why I didn't see him on the street: my yard was a more direct route to the backyard of my neighbors. Perhaps he lives right up the street from me. Or perhaps he's the owner of the small purple coupe parked on the corner by the fence that he jumped.
Either way, I don't know who he is, but he has an easy way to identify me. I'm the one coming out the front door of the large brown house on the corner with the low fences, trying to reconstruct an imaginary line that can't be crossed.

test

My computer was crippled by heat. Funny, I would have thought it immune to something so medieval.

canker

In the corner of my lip, burning

against my teeth with each attempted

smile, crying protest against forks, spoons,

salty foods, citric foods, almost any foods at all.
Just a canker, a small hurt. A two or three day
private tormentor, ending each expression
with a minor wince, interrupting conversations,
mincing words, giving the wrong impression.
Swelling into the precision machinery of incisors
as molars grind steak to mush, giving rise to more
of its own: a half circle of white inflamed craters
atop a hillock of dark red tissue just inside
my mouth. It's a small hurt, laughable

perhaps, to the guy who doesn't have one.

that time I dropped two CDs in the parking lot on my way in to work

I felt them slip from a grip I'd assumed strong
enough; the drop was over before I lowered my eyes,
catching only the impact, the crystalline explosion;
stratified in a single crack, fragmented, they spilled
then stilled themselves on unrelenting asphalt, but for
the discs which wheeled around the wreckage
like coins. I watch their circumscribing motion
circumspectly, til, with a dull clatter, they too
rest. On one knee, I pile layers together in one stack
and stand.
                 The jagged fragments I kick away skittering
to be crushed under tires or brushed down storm drains
or blown to the gutters with dried grass clippings and other
scraps. My load is handled with more care, carried
upstairs, to my desk, beside my keyboard, where I reassemble
as best I can without the missing pieces.

alignment

Orbits, nodes, celestial bodies, all became subjects of increased interest in my backyard yesterday afternoon as we sat in the lowering evening light, the kind that fills the blades of grass with that sublime, golden glow, and watched dots of light projected through pinholes in aluminum foil . On our papers, the moon crossing the face of the sun was evidenced by a painstakingly slow transformation in the dot until, after fifteen minutes of staring, a small indentation was visible in the perimeter, like a bite taken out of a cookie.

Later, as the bite grew larger, the light was changed. The familiar neighborhood outside my front door seemed altered somehow, the way the whole world does after a fierce rainstorm clears the sky of dust and debris and makes everything feel closer and more vibrant. Only last night it seemed filtered somehow. Perhaps it was just the thin veil of clouds that was stretching in front, but I can't help but think the moon's shouldering into the scene played its fair part too.

With the clouds and the lower light, our pinholes became almost pointless, projecting at best a dim crescent. If it hadn't been for Dave, the entire hour of waiting would have ended in bitter disappointment.

I had never met Dave before that night. His front door stands perhaps 100 yards away from mine. In eight months, I've walked by the house at least a dozen times, idly wondering who might live there but never actually expecting to have any interactions with them. He wore a grubby T-shirt that hung over a generous belly. His unkempt stringy brown hair blew around his forehead in the light breezes as he loped his way down the sidewalk. He had a welding mask in his hand.

"That's a great idea!" called my mother-in-law from behind our waist-high chain link fence, and the next thing I knew, Dave had crossed the street and was passing the mask around my gathered family.

I hope to remember that first tinted glimpse of the partial eclipse for a long time. At first glance, I believed I was looking at the moon. But the brightness of the crescent and the darkness of the black blot creeping in from the lower right, together with the brightness of the surrounding sky, altered that impression so forcefully that I almost felt a switch turn in my brain, evoking the same "oh, wow," I had heard from each viewer in turn before me.

As the mask passed around, I shook Dave's hand and we spoke only briefly. He then took his mask and continued on his way around the block to watch the rest of the eclipse.

A friend in New Mexico posted that while he and his family were watching the same eclipse, they met their neighbors who live across the street for the first time. I can't help but think that the same scene was acted out in hundreds of other neighborhoods throughout the eclipse's path. In Japan, California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, miles and miles to either side of that invisible track, people spent a little more time out in their yards, shared interests in the same thing as one another for a few moments, reached across lawns, across streets, to shake hands and draw the boundaries of their lives that much closer together.

30

There are 30 books on my Goodreads to-read list, though I could easily double that in an afternoon.
There are 30 emails in my inbox - 24 in my work email.
There's a list of 30 things I want to do by my next birthday, but a bunch of those I just made up. I've got a dozen or so more I could tack on, or else substitute.
It's not a remarkable number other than the fact that it ends in 0. The closer I get to it, the more artificial it seems as a milepost. It's not like I'll finally be able to drive or drink or vote or anything. What happens at 30? The twenty-somethings will tease me about being old, but the fifty-somethings will still think I'm a youngster.
It's the mark a new decade that happens to bridge the 20s and the 40s. I can't even remember turning 20. Back then, life was so narrowly-defined. I must have had a magnifying glass in front of my face all the time. I couldn't think ten years down the road, couldn't even see more than one year.
It's not that much different now. Just now I'll be 30 instead. Teenagers will think I'm impossibly old. I'll make jokes about being over the hill. I'll put up a confident front, but be just as uncertain about the coming years as I've ever been. The only change is that the uncertainty brings more trepidation with every tick on the calendar - because the stakes just keep getting higher.

commute

Yesterday I turned right into the end of a line of brakelights that wound over the rain-splashed roads at least as far as University Parkway. Not that I could see that far. It took ten minutes to cover those eight blocks, during which time the guy in the blue WWII era roofless jeep stood up only one time to reach over and wipe the rain from his windshield with a squeegee he pulled from the empty passenger seat.
Orange barrels lined my lane from University on, while to either side of the road, men and women in orange vests worked with machinery or held poles topped with one-word signs: "SLOW." Off to the left, new overpasses rose like ancient creatures being excavated from the brown sand strewn liberally around. Dump trucks rumbled, chains rattling their sides.
At last, coming around a curve at 400 North, I left the barrels behind. The line of vehicles was gone, and I was left alone on five lanes of new road. I rolled down my window and extended my arm to feel the sting of raindrops at sixty miles an hour.