March is mainly a Pisces, unpredictable. Its sliver of the year is either hot or cold, neither winter nor spring. It can’t seem to make up its mind which to be. It happens to be the month of my birthday. I have difficulty in deciding things, too.
As if turning 75 a few days ago isn’t bad enough, I have come down with the flu like the rest of the world. Adding insult to injury, it’s also Lent, which demands the devout to yield up something precious to demonstrate their commitment to repentance. March blew in the perfect trifecta of life’s woes.
The 75 number is not too much of a bother, assuming you can dismiss the social stigma of how others think you should act at this age; or, if you can somehow ignore the reality of aches and pains while wandering through life with a silly smile on your face. You deceive no one.
Now the flu is another matter altogether. You hover helplessly in a nether world of confusion while running the rapids of the River Styx clutching a bottle of Robitussin. You become a pariah to all living creatures. Your own family shuns you, shouting as to a leper, “Unclean, unclean.”
But worst of all is the hasty vow taken on Fat Tuesday, pledging daily repentance from the addiction of chocolate until Easter. It’s a cheap act of contrition, I admit, and probably on par with the promise of flossing your teeth every day. Neither will get much recognition in the after-life.
Today’s howling winds tend to unsettle my somewhat unstable thoughts, and my mind drifts off to its own version of ‘the end times.’ I think of all the things I did in life, and things I wanted to do and never got around to them. C’est la vie.
We tend to forget a lot of what we did do. Old photographs and certain recurring aches remind me of them. I once fell in love with the book, “Bridges of Madison County,” read it three times. I supposed myself to also be an itinerant photographer in similar situations. But like my ideas, it amounted to fiction, and my expensive film camera died along with Kodak.
There was a time when I wanted to be a piano rock star, have my own band, play on TV. But Jerry Lee Lewis beat me to it. Now look at him. I got lucky the winds blew me in another direction. Besides, a guitar is the money instrument.
Most of what I missed could be chalked up to silly dreams and illusions of possibilities, and most of them unrealistic. But there’s not a March that comes and goes that I don’t regret going barefooted.
The thing about March is you never know from one day to the next what the weather will hold. And in the little town of my youth we could hardly wait until the ground got warm enough to pull off our shoes and feel the sand and clay squish between our toes.
One day is special in my memory. It was after school one afternoon. The rain had come and gone. The sun was bright, the air cool. The winds had scattered the brown leaves from water oaks across streets and lawns.
A newly-plowed field lay between town and the Spring Creek. Two of us, both 13, shucked our sneakers and walked across that field in our bare feet. The wet, red clay oozed between our toes like stepping in a tub full of mayhaw jelly.
I admit that no 13-year old thinks philosophically, unless it’s about food, music or the mystery of females. But that day, that simple yet strange experience, was the first time I can recall feeling connected to something solid, something greater than myself. Some memories are inexplicable.
Maybe you don’t have recollections of red clay, of shooting baskets in backyard sandlots and going barefoot around town. Still, everyone has their own special days and times. They tend to have meaning beyond the reality of the moment and carry significance greater than the actual experience.
Today my feet are tender like yours. I can barely walk a few steps over the gravel driveway to grab the newspaper. I keep saying I’m gonna toughen them up, but the stones continue to mock my feeble attempts.
Sometimes just the simple memories of those red-clay days in March are sufficient to survive the day.
Bud Hearn
March 17, 2017