An Imperfect Life Is Made from a String of Perfect Moments

Last week’s blog entry about regrets is valid. As is the pretty-much opposite take, that being aware of tiny moments of perfection allows you to make a necklace, of pearls and gems and found shark teeth and tiny shells, that makes life as beautiful as I am wistful.  Problem is that it’s hard to remember these perfect moments; they don’t grind at you the way tiny wood chips in your socks do. The way regrets do. 

I have lots of blog entries here from moments of travel that stuck to me long enough that I could blog about them at the end of that day. When I looked up from searching for octopi in the low tide of the Oregon Coast to see who had squatted next to me. This tiny person visiting from Vermont as his dad did biology research, who gave me a perfect conversation. The couple in Arkansas who asked if we were staying, seeing as how the state could use, as they creepily implied they wanted to swing with us, “new blood,”—-I will always remember that dystopian moment. Kayaking on a lake somewhere, maybe it was an ox bow in the Mississippi, where a flock of migrating American White Pelicans flew in a uplift spiral above my head, showing the white then the black then the white of their wings as they tilted for the sun to shine on their slowly rotating bodies; as they looked down on me and I looked up at them from the middle of this pond in my kayak, I felt a moment of enlightenment right then that lasted several hours.   

Last night, Tracy and I rode our bikes to hear a band on the terrace of the fancy Edgewater hotel, right on the other side of downtown. We left home as people were commuting from work on a Friday afternoon, which in our neighborhood means parents with children stacked like upright otters behind them on extended bike seats, sometimes buckled into car seats that are buckled onto the bikes. 

As Tracy and I rode through the intersection at The Harmony Bar with its special bike crossing lights, we crossed paths with a woman biking three little girls home. They were sitting willy nilly but perfectly still, all in a large plastic bowl-shaped container between the front tire and her handlebars. All three were looking ahead into the slight breeze, with expectant expressions on their perfect pale faces. Their blond, wispy hair had been shoved into identical round, red helmets. Instantly, they were a nest of tiny baby birds, being cycled by their mom home for dinner and bath time and a soft, tired voice reading from a book before bed. At the next road crossing, I asked Tracy if he’d seen the three little girls, and he said, “No, I missed them.” It’s easy to miss these moments, but the good news is they are infinite in number and location. 

No one was at the hotel when we got there: we had the entire bike parking stand to ourselves. The radar said it was storming that moment and would, hard, for two hours. Nada. We sat at our usual terrace spot on tall iron chairs that are almost impossible to drag into place, but our spot is with the lake to our backs and the band to our fronts, and it’s perfect. 

As we waited for the band, we fretted that we had no Plan B for rain, nowhere at all to go because everyone with our inclinations had packed into all the breweries for the Great Taste of the Midwest beer event. We watched the various sailboats and windsurfers and water skiers and a set of three large canoes, betting which had seen the radar forecast, which hadn’t bothered to look. The sailboats all made a beeline in, and we mocked the jet skiers knowing they had no idea what was coming. 

As soon as band started, we could tell they were drunk. Between songs, they called from the stage for tequila, and they spoke sloppily and lovingly of the small crowd forming in front of them to dance. “We’re all wet on the inside, so might as well be wet on the outside, right?” they shouted. We love this silly bluegrass band, called Armchair Boogie. They played a song both Tracy and I think of as a favorite, not the song about “fat tomatoes from the garden,” not the one about going to the liquor store, but the one about waking up with a beer, or waking up with coffee, doesn’t matter which because, “something something.” Neither Tracy nor I remembers enough lyrics for me to look it up online, even, but we know enough that we had something to say to each other about it right then when we heard it, and that was why we were there. 

The radar turned out to be wrong. People poured outside, dressed fancy from weddings and work meetings. I stepped inside quick to grab a hotdog because I realized, suddenly, I was starving; I’d ridden my bike on an errand earlier, then to exercise class where I’d increased my weights in frustration because there are never the right weights in whichever of the two exercise rooms I’m in on that day, and the weights is why I pay for those classes. I felt good though; my arms are so tanned I look radioactive. 

Back outside, far in front of the drunk band, I knitted while Tracy finished my fries. The sun went down, and the now-large crowd in front of the sloppy band turned on command and waved goodnight to it behind the lake. At first I thought they were waving at us.

We rode home before the full darkness could come down. The streets were, amazingly, still empty. The only stoplight that caught us was right in front of the capitol, and that gave me a moment to grab my phone for this picture. 

The bike path near home takes us by Mickey’s Tavern, where once I thought I’d have to get off my bike and walk it to ensure a certain, comical drunk guy wouldn’t stumble in front of me on the path. That was earlier this summer, but I always think of it as I approach Mickey’s, and I slow down. This is very near where the homeless man was shot by police, recently. The only real threat to me last night was when an older man popped out of a front door with two golden relievers on leashes, and he didn’t appear to be in control of them, at least not as in control as I’d like, for me riding by. So, I slowed down. Will I always slow down there, remembering the look on his face of slight panic as his dogs barreled out the door in front of him?

As we rode side by side on the only stretch of the bike path that’s wide enough for that because it coincides with a street, I sang the guitar melody of Phish’s First Tube, just like the night we rode bikes home together from a Phish show. Tracy asked if I was singing that for him, and I answered, “Yes.” Of course, I was. 

After putting our bikes in the cottage, after taking Banjo out for her final pee, after getting ourselves mint Klondike bars from the freezer while we still have a freezer before the renovation, we sat together on the sofa, while we still have a sofa before the renovation, and we watched an episode of Star Trek the original series, where a former federation fleet captain, now inmate of an asylum for the criminally insane, tries to convince Kirk and Spock to join him in galactic domination.  

Tracy went to bed, I stayed up late and thought about what I want to make with the knitting I’d started by the lake. That I want it to be less like the hat I had in mind and more like the hat I’d bought at a yard sale this spring, the same yard sale where I bought the weathervane carved as mechanical baseball players. The wind blows, the pitcher throws, the hitter hits, the runners run. 

I gave it to Tracy for his birthday. Like with everything in front of him, it needs work to work. Like the forest behind the house, where invasive plants keep rising from the soil, where we walk my new path covered in wood chips several times a day, pulling them, checking on the native wildflowers planted by the person before us, planted by us, as well. Where the bee balm brings the baby hummingbird fattening up before the long flight ahead of her, where the goldfinches drop seed casings over the milkweed. Where monarch butterflies land on the cones of the tamarack because our milkweed didn’t produce flowers this year. Maybe next year it will, we don’t know. 

One item, among many different items, along a string.