Been thinkin’ about…Rules of travel

Dusk, gray and lavender in the dark, settles over the old neighborhood. At the top of the stairs, the shadows lengthen, then sharpen, then fade. Sister and brother stand on the landing talking. “I think you’ll like this album. I wouldn’t have thought I’d like it. It’s country music, but it’s really good. I heard her interview on NPR.”

There is a memory — soft and sad — in the closing of the day, a strange sadness eclipsing schedules and homework and even ambition. “All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.” Somewhere, a clock is ticking, plastic hands propelled by city electricity, and the ticking calls the coming night. “Will you remember me / Like the circled stones / On the ancient hills / Where you walk alone?” Twilight softens the heart and the clock is still ticking in these shadows of September, a month shadowed by loss.

Only the sound of the big air conditioner, quietly kicking on downstairs, answers. That September was a hot one. Beyond the soft industrial hum, chorus of cicadas also answers. Round and pale, the near-full moon rises, anchor in time, another day, another night, another month, another year, another decade, or two, or three. Twilight, like memory, like hair, is gray, weirdly malleable.

Another pale and glowing face, round in the dark, faces a hushed and wriggling crowd inside the cool cavern of the town theater. Outside, marquee is bright and flashing. Inside, only a waiting silver screen — and that big, moon-like clock glowing with green, ethereal immortality. Blocky Art Deco sans serif numbers mark the moments ticking closer to seven o’clock. Impatient child wriggles in his seat.

Weathered hands caress young arm, the touch calming, warm. Here, on her wrist, another clock face, a wrist watch from a time when mothers wore such things, delicate lettering forever behind glass, a watch to be wound once a day, a preserved memory ticking fiercely, now matching time with the glowing face on the wall, counting the seconds until magic for real unspools in the dark and a fairy godmother’s magic wand cascades a shower of sparks and hope across memory and future.

The masquerade of time, marching, marking, reaping in harvest, never goes backwards. Faint sounds, a favorite sitcom echoes from the next room. The wallpaper here is classic, patterns of world travel for the rich and hopeful, a reminder of a yuppie time when there was heady hope in a new century — a world that was lost before it could begin, lost in fire and ash and two great September towers.

Outside is the hum of a great former city, momentum carrying forward against the odds, a city of portals and arches in time and space, large and small, often overlooked in the clouds of schedule and ambition. The Second Empire was strong here, as were Moscato-drenched brunches when we thought we could steer our future — a great ship of sorts — down a river of our own making. Time has a way of handling the proud, and handling the merely hopeful as well.

“I think Mommy would have liked this music,” the brother is saying. His eyes are sad. The last light of dusk slips from unseen horizon. Outside, the cicadas yet call in the pure night.