The Myth of the Dot ("Little Wonders" by Rob Thomas).

Photo by Rio Brown

 

Spring fever and heavy cold is not a great combination.  To make things worse, my brother asked me to go on a long drive deep into nowhere, but I have deadlines and commitments.  Not quite ready to face them, I went looking for a poem about unquenchable desire, what I used to call the forever search, captured magnificently in Bob Seger's "Fire Inside."

I found some old poems that focused on that theme to be sure.  My life was once driven by the need for escape, a constant hunger for something else.

But somehow I've stepped through that door and into another reality.  Sure, I still sometimes want to hit the open road.  I still long for quiet, dark corners of an empty bar, even though I don't venture into such places anymore.  Coffee always has a hand on my shoulder while it whispers in my ear, Go ahead have just one sip, which I don't do because I honor my religion.

But the void no longer calls me to fill it.  There simply isn't that much left to fill.  God has taken residence and I am satisfied.  So instead, I was drawn to a poem I'd completely forgotten about:

The Myth of the Dot

It's a dark and rainy day.
A line of twenty or more ATVs
roars up Canyon Road,
headlights dancing
off the splashing rain.

Everyone wears matching
green and yellow
fluorescent plastic.

Everest and I go outside
to watch the tourists
ruin our way of life.

When they are gone,
he shows me his bug bite.

"You got bit by a mosquito."

"No, it's just a dot."

"How did you get it?"

"It just floated down from the sky
and got stuck.

Then someone glued it."

The poem was probably written the summer of 2004, and so Everest would have been four.  O how I loved our long job-free summers at Dry Creek.  Some of the magic was removed when we moved here, as it is now our standing place in life rather than a carefree retreat.  Still, the magic of small wonders remains.