Click it or ticket?

On my way back from hawking the other day, I encountered one of those massive electronic signs on the motorway—hardly noteworthy, as they have become ubiquitous—except that I was struck yet again by how misused they typically are.

ACCIDENT AHEAD
PREPARE TO STOP

is useful, I admit.

WINTER WEATHER CONDITIONS
DRIVE WITH CAUTION

could I suppose be useful as well, although one would think most motorists would have noticed already. But as often as not, these signs bear messages—multi-screen messages, mind you, with each screen displayed for several seconds to accommodate the slowest reader in the fast lane—along the lines of

HELLO, I'M AN
ENORMOUS ELECTRONIC SIGN
PLEASE READ ME AND ALSO
DISTRACTED DRIVING IS BAD.

(Have these DOT people never heard of the Stroop-Stirling effect? You can't really opt out of reading these things, not without a great deal of conscious effort, anyway.)

But the one that triggers my ire, despite its brevity, is CLICK IT OR TICKET. Really, that's the best we can do to promote the use of safety belts, CLICK IT OR TICKET? Pathetic.

Allow me to suggest an alternative. It would really work best as a PSA on the radio, read in an authoritative voice...British accent...hint of menace. I'm thinking Mark Strong, or maybe Vinnie Jones. But if DOT want to put it on a big flashy sign, I reckon the precedent is there... Anyway, here it is:

SEAT BELTS ARE SAFETY DEVICES
THE REASON TO CHECK THEM ALL TWICE IS
TO AVOID A CITATION
OR A DEFENESTRATION
'CAUSE YOU DON'T WANT TO PAY THOSE STEEP PRICES

Ice fishing

I

I remember a little boy at an air show
Gazing in fascination at the helium balloon
Tied by a string to his finger,
Utterly oblivious to the Blue Angels roaring over our heads.
I think sometimes of the pilots,
Knights of the air
Steeped in complexity,
With hundreds of hours of textbook mastery
And thousands of hours logged in the cockpit,
Surrounded by buttons and switches and dials,
And of the little boy with his simple noble-gas miracle,
And think of them as colleagues—
Partners in flight.

II

An old man is out on the ice;
A friendly fellow, he waved as we drove by.
The colors stand out on the snowy expanse:
He sits on an orange bucket that once held drywall compound,
A yellow chainsaw, a green thermos, and a coffee can beside him.
Red can. I won't lay a bet, but it just might be Hills Brothers.
Behind him, pageantry plays out,
The sport of kings:
The hounds zigzagging through the woods,
The hawk following above,
The silver song of Lahore bells carrying through the still winter air.
And though a couple of rabbits run out of the woods
And then dash back in closely pursued,
The old man never turns to take notice.
With earflap hat pulled down against the cold,
And perhaps a lifetime in a machine shop behind him,
It's possible he's unaware of our presence.
But maybe, I think, he's simply rapt,
Engrossed in his own version of sport,
Waiting for the pressure on the line
That connects him to another life,
To another world where they breathe water
And everything happens out of sight.

III

Eventually, the hawk pins a rabbit to the ice of the creek.
The hawk eats on my fist as we walk back to the car,
The dogs eagerly anticipating their share.
As I wash my bloody hands in the snow,
The falling sun painting the cottonwoods in flaxen tones,
The old man's Carhartts glow in a patch of sunlight,
Wheat-coloured canvas transformed into burnished gold,
And I find myself thinking of that yellow balloon.

Olde Towne Slidell

Lampposts and crape myrtles,
The night-blue sky,
Loom and recede,
Loom and recede,
And the chains in their eyebolts creak their joyful song.
She beams under a floppy straw hat,
Describing an arc
Like the carpenter bees of childhood
Tethered with horsehair and straining for the sky.
We are all children once in a while,
Or ought to be.

Tea ceremony

She might think it's laziness,
Or another manifestation of eccentricity,
But to her credit she says nothing
As the tags from teabags accumulate on the counter.
Lemon tea when her throat was sore,
Orange and spice with Chinese takeout;
Masala chai to get to work in the morning,
Earl Grey to unwind at night.
Irish Breakfast to celebrate her heritage,
English Breakfast for mine;
Assam, Ceylon, Darjeeling.
Freed from their strings,
The little squares of coloured paper are like tickets,
Bringing the world to this little kitchen—
A world of sunny hillsides
& warm rain
& dark hands
& green leaves.
It might look like laziness,
But the tags are purpose-saved,
And one day I let them fly.
She doesn't like confetti
For the way it lingers,
Still turning up days or weeks or months later,
But her eyes sparkle as the tea tags flutter down about her head,
And she laughs in exasperated delight.
Of such small blessings

And such brief moments

Is a marriage in friendship made.

Unexpected

The eyes of the doe are perfect.
Large, luminous, liquid, lovely,
they reflect the world through which she walks
and yet do not reflect the world's nature,
for they are perfect,
and the world is not.
The eyes are pools of beauty,
and even deeper is the spirit behind.
The spirit knows things the doe cannot.

Her sistren are apt to be taken down
by those who speed through the world unmindful
of their impact on the gentle and the sensitive
and the beautiful.
But the spirit guides her clear.
The wolves are long gone from these parts,
the cougars barely a rumour,
but never having seen them, she picks her way through the woods
still aware.
No way to tell, looking at those eyes
brimming with innocence and wisdom,
how many winters she's seen,
or if she's seen winter at all.
The spirit has seen them all.

And yet even the spirit can be taken by surprise.

Cupid is not flitting around
flashing his pink bottom at the world
and making the woods ring with childish laughter.
Cupid is up a tree,
quiet,
with paint on his face
and strips of rags hanging from his clothing
that move like leaves in the autumn wind.
And wary as she is
of wolf and cougar and all the hazards of the world,
not everything can be planned for.
And one day she will stand just so,
and the arrow may find its mark.

Do you believe?

All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

—Francis Pharcellus Church to Virginia O'Hanlon in The Sun of New York

Saint Nicholas. Father Christmas. Sinter Klaas. Santa Claus. Known by all these names and more, he is one of the most recognizable characters in Western consciousness. In the English-speaking parts of the world especially, but elsewhere as well, his image has been shaped by writers like Clement Clarke Moore and Charles Dickens, and even more importantly by visual artists like Thomas Nast, John Leech, and Haddon Sundblom. Sundblom, who also created the Quaker Oats label, did a series of paintings for Coca-Cola in the 1930s that essentially locked in Santa's image: often depicted previously in other colours (most often green) and sometimes as a younger, trimmer figure (see, for example, Leech's illustration of Dickens' "ghost of Christmas present"), he is now depicted almost exclusively as...well, I needn't bother with a description, for you all know what Santa Claus is supposed to look like.

And yet I see him differently: More barrel-chested than pot-bellied. His coat is not red, nor even green, but the subtle and beautiful brown of sealskin. There is perhaps just a bit of white fur trimming, from an arctic fox or maybe even a polar bear, taken reluctantly and with genuine reverence. Under his hood, his face is not pale and rosy-cheeked but the colour of an old penny. No beard; I can't even think where that idea might have come from. His nose is broad, and his eyes are narrow, genetics combining with a lifetime of squinting into bright Arctic sunlight reflecting off water, snow and ice to give him a look as sly as it is jovial. His age: indeterminate. Clearly he's an elder, no doubt a man of standing in his village, but he retains a certain youthful vigor, the natural athleticism of the hunter.

His traveling companions are not reindeer, but husky dogs, and they are hitched not in pairs along a gangline but in a fan pattern, Arctic-style, for there are no trees to get caught up on and few if any established trails to follow; the dogs spread out and run as a pack, which allows them to choose their own footing and probably feels more natural to them. His sleigh is light and flexible, as well-adapted to the conditions as the dogs that pull it.

I believe, based on excellent presents I have received over the years, that he is in fact a falconer. He flies a gyr, of course, at ptarmigan and Arctic hares. Its jesses are sealskin, its bells silver Pakistani ones acquired in the course of the old gentleman's travels. (Somehow I don't think he uses telemetry, trusting instead to his senses and the openness of the terrain to locate his hawk after a long flight.) When game is flushed, and only then, he does yell "Ho! Ho! Ho!" Otherwise, as befits a man who has spent half his life in close quarters in a small village, and the other half alone in the wilderness with his dogs and hawk, he is soft-spoken, his voice barely rising above a whisper, which might give strangers the impression that he is shy when in fact he is merely self-contained.

As for his kindness and generosity, again I believe those are explained by the realities of village life in the Arctic, where everyone is interdependent and a hunter's good fortune is naturally shared with others. Our man travels more widely than his neighbours, into regions where his generosity is considered remarkable, but at home he is just a solid citizen—as I said, a man of standing in the village. On these travels, he is pleased to help the locals celebrate Christmas, or Eid, or Kwanzaa, but he personally celebrates the winter solstice, when somewhere on the other side of the world the sun stands still and then reverses course, heralding the climax of the long Arctic night and the welcome return of daylight. For a man who lives in the elements, it could hardly be otherwise.

Yes, there is a Santa Claus. And I do believe firmly in him. If my beliefs are a bit unconventional, well, then, perhaps so am I, and the strangeness of my beliefs merely attests to their sincerity. I shall wear my gyrfalcon cap out hawking this afternoon as a tribute to Santa Claus and his travels as well as the return of snow to this part of the world. Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night.

Deer mice

naked in a globe of twigs, springtime—
for now
it is the world

* * *

a dusty shed,
holes in the clapboard...
breathe shallow while sweeping

* * *

quiet as a mouse—
made that way
by owl and marsh hawk

* * *

dots in the snow,
a broken line between:
the larder is empty

* * *

held to the ground,
rendered asunder—
another life awaits?