Floating

 

 

I’m lighter than air

as I glance around the

room where I write.

 

I see a dreamlike life

in snapshots of me, who

I was and who I will be.

 

The row house where

I was just a kid,

a monument of cement

and brick is so much

more as a flood of memories

washes over me.

 

Colleen and I in the early days

next to a photo twenty-five years later

while now we’re pushing fifty and

finding out we can take nothing for granted.

 

Anniversary photo of my parents

who’s substance is inside me more than I used to think.

They are next to an unknown enigmatic couple from

the old country found in a family album. Their stern faces

reflect a troubled time before my grandparents

escaped to this new world.

 

Three pictures of Todd Rundgren whom we called toad

in junior high and became a rock star surrounds my

Bar Mitzvah picture with me in the center of a

family with suits, flowers in lapels and fancy dresses

that looks like it deserves to be in a period movie.

 

Vacation picture of me on the beach with a son on my

shoulders and one on my lap, palm tree in the distance

strangely foretells where both of them now live.

 

Below my computer screen is a postcard of the Rocky statue in front of the

Philly skyline from where I grew up. Also photo of a spiritual gathering in India

and postcard of the East Berlin soldier jumping over barbed wire in the early days

of the wall that is famous in Berlin.

 

My high school graduation photo is above the tipi I pitched with no idea what

to do next in my life. I had nothing to lose and everything to gain by slowing

down my life and asking the powers that be to please guide me.

 

What I learned is that sometimes if I’m really lucky, the stars are aligned and perhaps

fate ties in somewhere…I can jump and the net will appear.