Burned
Once, the groom of a wedding in which I was a groomsman surprised me and the other groomsmen by taking us skydiving. On the morning of the wedding. Instead of a bachelor party, we had gone camping, a favourite activity of the groom’s, and in the morning as we drove back toward the wedding, the groom veered off course, the rest of us dutifully, if confusedly, following. We follow his Jeep way, way, way out of the way and mystified, piled out of our cars at a tiny private airfield in the middle of nowhere.
“Surprise!” the groom said, “I’m taking you sky diving!”
Later we learned he had told no one, and yes, that includes his bride-to-be, and this was in the days before everyone had a phone-camera-internet browser-music player in their pockets, so after we arrived at the wedding late-ish, each of our tuxedos in varying stages of being properly put on, the wedding was delayed even a bit more for the groom’s first-but-not-last marital chewing-out.
But! Before all of that, we tucked ourselves into flight suits and strapped on harnesses, and clambered into a tiny, tiny airplane and rode it up not as high as humans have ever gone but definitely much much higher than I have ever gone and absolutely higher than humans were intended (by either evolution or a Creator, or both) to go, and then we looked down at the only world we have and will ever have, seeing its curve fall away from us in every direction, with northern South Carolina and southern North Carolina spread out around us like a picnic blanket, and, latched to professional sky divers, jumped (which is to say: being fastened by various buckles and straps to the professionals with our backs strapped to their fronts such as that the pros jumped; we were pushed) out of that airplane into the big emptiness that is our atmosphere, which is to say the air, which is to say there was nothing substantial between our fragile, breakable bodies and the very large, incredibly hard earth below.
And it was magnificent. Gorgeous, thrilling and (for me anyway) intensely spiritual, by which I mean I felt incredibly close to the whatever-it-is that many people call God, which sounds absurd, the idea that in freefall, with the wind of my own descent’s lethal velocity roaring in my ears, I might somehow perceive the presence of the divine, but there you have it. I wept, both at the beauty of what I was seeing, and also at the sense of being-with I felt.
I was also in a considerable amount of pain. There is an old Buddhist parable about a man who, chased by a tiger, falls off a cliff, and on his way down, grabs on to the roots of a plant, and as he hangs there he sees the plant is a strawberry plant and on it is a perfectly ripe strawberry. “Oh! A strawberry!” he exclaims in delight, and then eats the strawberry, with the roots coming unmoored and the tiger growling above.
This was sort of the inverse of that. Here is what happened: in the hangar, before the flight, while putting on my flight suit, I noticed a wasp doing its angular, jittery dance around me, so like any sane person, I scooted away five or six feet. The wasp followed me. So I jogged about twenty feet away further. The wasp followed. So I ran, to the opposite end of the hangar, and out onto the tarmac, and ran about the same distance more, for good measure, and then the wasp swooped right under the collar of my flight suit and stung me on the shoulder.
I slapped it dead for its vendetta, but the damage was done. I walked back to the hanger, with a growing, pulsing wasp sting and, somewhere in my flight suit, a wasp corpse, to everyone’s puzzled faces (from their point of view I had just taken off running for no good reason, and then seemed to be slapping myself). It was time to go, else we’d be late to the wedding (which, recall, we ended up being, not because of the wasp, but because the groom was, and probably still is, late to everything.) I could either stay on the ground and nurse my sting, or I could proceed with the jump. Of course I went up.
All the way down, in between gobstopping waves of awe and a distinct awareness of the holy, my shoulder throbbed and stung. All the way down the harness rubbed against the swelling welt, while all around me was arrayed the sublime and matchless beauty of the world alongside the wild and bright sense of being the most free I had ever been. And then again, ow, ow, ouch, ow.
It was sort of like when one has long hair and the hair keeps getting in one’s face, obstructing one’s vision, except the long hair falling in the face is the piercing, hot burning pain of a wasp sting and the vision is of the entire world in a way you’ve never seen and may never again.
I’m reminded of that day today because I decided, this morning, to go out on an adventure. My ridiculously talented wife is cast in a play at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre for the summer and I am out here with her, which mostly means working remotely from the cute little apartment the theatre puts her up in, spending mornings and some afternoons with her, and then on nights and weekends, when she is working, finding something to do with myself. Today I am taking the bus to Pacific Beach, swinging by a used bookstore, and then getting coffee, and then, ideally, walking along the beach around sunset, and I want to wear this lovely block-print short sleeve shirt my wife bought for me on one of our trips to visit her mother in India, (whose block print pattern is these little Mughal-style designs that look like queens in chess, or maybe palace windows, making me a palace, or a chessboard populated by three dozen queens) but it needs ironing, and wouldn’t you know it, I glanced my inner arm against the hot iron and have a nice quarter-sized burn to show for it.
I was a line cook for years while putting myself through college, so I am no stranger to first degree arm burns. My arms used to be decorated with purple lines and spots, all in various stage of healing, because getting burned while working on the line is inevitable, and a more or less daily occurrence. So I knew how to care for the wound, which is mild, and will probably stop stinging and throbbing by the end of the day and be healed in a week or so (this is just to reassure you: I’m fine) but it does mean that my adventure now comes with a side of sting, and that sunset will also include this minor pain, and though I cannot explain it, this feels exactly like picking the strawberry, and I don’t mean the bookstore, the bus ride, the coffee shop and the beach are the strawberry, I mean the burn is, or rather they all are, the burn is one of many strawberries I get today, which is to say I am looking forward to the feeling of sand beneath my toes and the miracle purples and pinks on the horizon as the waves all try to speak at once and ow, ow, ouch, ow.
Art
Have you seen the musician Nick Cave's sculptures? During the pandemic, Cave began learning to sculpt in ceramic and the result is a series of small sculptures depicting the life of The Devil, and they're strange and wonderful, both as individual sculptures and as a series, which is to say as a story. You can see photos of many of them at the website for his gallery, Xavier Hufkens.
Music
I've been trying to make a playlist of my current listening habits every month or two this year; here are links to Apple and Spotify versions of the most recent one, documenting songs that were totally my jam in May and June.
