The Smallest Kindness

I carved a heart upon a tree's trunk.  There was nothing unusual about this.  Countless others have done so before and will again unless tree-huggers fail utterly with Brazilian loggers converting the world to their way of thinking and buzz-sawing.  My uniqueness in this endeavor, that I add with little shyness I'll admit, stems from the time and place of my knife wielding.  The defacing occurred upon an ancient maple several blocks from my urban home and the act was performed only days ago.  It's a crowded setting, a place where pedestrians and motor vehicles each year increasingly approach the density of Manhattan's bustling sidewalks and thoroughfares. This now best describes my once semi-rural neighborhood. The glistening blade of a jack knife risks catching the eyes of occupants of a squad car. But the usual state of affairs (with Murphy's Law fully operational) is not, in the event, what transpires. For once, nothing goes wrong, i.e. no men with "stinking badges" appear, a rare similarity to their seemingly dependable undependability when  a crime is committed or accident takes place.

Well, so I chance it and my claim to singularity is not only the fact that this is not a sylvan glen where secret thoughts and dreams are nurtured by nature's vast and beauteous emptiness that so easily encourages contemplative and intimate reveries. It is the fact that I am of such an age that my weapon should arguably have more typically been employed whittling a small branch of this maple in solidarity with my approaching senescence or used to slice myself an apple as I sauntered down to one of a nearby public park's benches to sit on my weary duff. No, this arthritic little fellow, clinging to the last vestiges of exceedingly late middle age is utilizing this bodkin in order to express reprisingly, a pining, ceremonious act, that is a salute to what Henry Clay Work called "spectral fancies" that "flit." This happens when an adolescent love of nearly fifty years ago is buried alive and yet does not die. It was not a well turned ankle, a winsome smile or curvature of form that concentrated my attention. The young woman was simply kind and in a way that simple observations revealed to be not calculated or discriminating. Kindness to me and to others as well: to see it in action caused me to shiver with excitement and ardor.

The yielding bark, the ancient trunk with still a certain moistness and finally, the hardness of the instrument's steel: all play their part in allowing two sets of initials to rest in close proximity, circumscribed by the symbol of tender feelings or maybe just that of biological and psychological forces at a confluence in time when the urgency to mate was such that our older and wiser selves now understand fully the world of Romeo and Juliet and not so much that of 20th century middle class concepts of appropriately timed behavior. Young love has a wounding incisiveness about it that its own private realm of ecstasies and agonies knowingly enshrouds and even protects. But to pay homage to it now with this memorializing act, well, the only thing perhaps to recommend or excuse it is the shadow's salute, or a waning life's attempt to hail the halcyon years and the extraordinary power of their will to express their compulsions. This curious effort to be alive again will, like Michael Chekhov's psychological gesture, jump start a certain juvenescence even if the glowing embers of what was are sure to return to curling, gray billows and soon enough to nothingness, once and for all.