Digging a hole to plant some purslane, I found a penny, old, worn, thin, dirty. I rinsed it in the kitchen sink and squinted, then took a picture I could enlarge. 1982. I was 18. Graduated from high school that May, then off to college in August. Feeling grown, feeling alone, feeling hopeful. The world ahead bloated with possibility.
If I hadn’t planted the purslane, the penny might have remained buried for years or longer, much longer, until it aged into a relic from a time no one would remember.
Like this time will one day be – the demons and the dangers and the demagogues of this era rubbed thin and rusted and hard to even read. Buried. Spent. Their bloated possibilities nothing but history, nothing but the dirt-caked bones of a time no one will know.
My father had been a star athlete in high school, and his coulda-woulda-beens came out in the form of teaching me the games as we watched on our black-and-white TV, then the color TV, then cable. Because of him, I could spot a foul before the whistle blew and confidently yell at the screen when the refs so obviously got it wrong.
He taught me basketball, baseball, and football. With those transferrable skills, I picked up on hockey, golf, tennis, and soccer with relative ease.
Then, at some point in my early 30s, I stopped watching all of it. It didn’t happen all at once. I started to become concerned about the potential brain injuries in football. I became increasingly sensitive to the angry atmospheres of basketball arenas and hockey rinks. I began to see championships as exercises in futility followed immediately by the 0-0 record reset. What was the point? So, gradually, I stepped away from sports completely.
I blamed my spiritual journey. A world of win-loss competitiveness didn’t seem compatible with non-duality. And the inability to endure the vitriol of a live game atmosphere seemed to share DNA with the hours I had accumulated spent in meditation. I had evolved, and athletics were clearly happening on the level of base materialism.
Then the world started to fall apart. One Trump term, a worldwide pandemic, a second Trump term, a direct attack on DEI, a gross lack of compassion, an entire generation of social security recipients facing a fear they never imagined, . . . the list is endless, it seems. I can’t hide under a rock and ignore it, but my sanity can’t take a steady drip of horrible news. I can’t meditate 24 hours a day, but I also can’t survive engaging in life in continually demoralizing ways.
And then I turned on a basketball game.
For a couple of hours, I focused solely on the Memphis Grizzlies. The understanding of the game instilled in me by my father returned with gusto. Most importantly, I was 100% PRESENT. I was in the moment. The very brass ring I reached for in meditation was the free gift of sportsball.
So I’ve filled out not one, but four NCAA tournament brackets — two each for the women’s and the men’s tournaments. I’m taking my wife to her first live NBA game in a couple of weeks. I’m a proud supporter of the basketball, baseball, and softball teams at the community college where I work. And I’m already excited about Vandy football this fall.
I am once again a sports fan. Who meditates. A double-header.
Spring cleaning has me in the darkest corner of the sunroom with a stick in hand, wrapping old webs around the far end like drab cotton candy.
The spiders staked their claim last fall, orb-weavers, I think. I didn’t get too close, and nights were longer and cooler and spent indoors, so I let them have the corner.
When I reclaim it on a warm May day, the abandoned webs cling listlessly to wall and screen and bench and reach as if alive for the oar I offer from a far shore.
The weaver of the orb mustn’t mind rebuilding her home. It seems to be the point, to start again from the beginning.
The cardinal builds a new nest every year, sometimes even twice. Moles burrow constantly and don’t use the same tunnel again.
The hostas in my front yard disappear completely each winter and always come back, from a tiny green peek through the dirt to a maturity even grander than before, fueled by energy both fresh and remembered.
Everything starts over. Life is not always added to. It is sometimes begun anew.
John William Hill, “The Dead Bluejay,” watercolor, 1865
I saw him on the bench as I pulled into the carport, a bluejay, on his back, pencil-lead feet curled around a ghost perch.
I took my dinner inside to eat before it got cold and to give the bluejay a chance to rouse if it was only a stunning.
It was not.
Satiated, I went to the shed, got the shovel, then thought twice, and got two shovels.
With one flat at the bluejay's edge, the other tipped him onto the metal -- I feel it was a him -- bluejays so often seem more they/them.
I suppose I could have thrown him in the woods. But I didn't. I took him to the spot where I dump yard trash -- not trash trash, yard trash -- sticks and weeds and the dried husks of hanging baskets I forgot to water.
I dug a grave, a shallow grave, no more than six inches. I was tired, and my full belly didn't care for so much activity. But, still, I dug a grave.
I put the body of the bluejay in the hole and stood for a moment. Should I say something? I didn't know what. I just looked at him, saw him, stayed with him in that moment.
It took just two heaping shovels of dirt to secure him in his final rest, and I thought, I wonder if he knows that every time I take yard trash to this spot, I will think of him. He will be remembered. HIs grave will be visited. He will be mourned.
I took my shovels back to the shed and only then did I think of my father, placed into a cremation oven before I could see his face one last time, buried in a jar that sits on my stepmother's mantel, I suppose, or was he scattered in the mountains? No one ever told me.
I have no grave to visit, no headstone to decorate, no symbolic point where his memory lives on demand.
His voice fades a little every day. His smell, I can almost . . . not quite. His laugh, the music of his laugh, dying away. And I don't know where to go to bring any of it back even for a moment.
Deb Moore 