Cool toes

Lunch time walks these days, since the company has crossed the Allegheny and planted itself on the North Shore, mean lots of proximity to water. The path along the river is truly nice and very walkable. You could be strolling along the waterfront for hours, if you weren't paying attention.

You can boat, too. I haven't been kayaking yet but hope to before September ends. Venture Outdoors has a livery right below the Roberto Clemente bridg. Lots of boats for cheap.

What I have been enjoying is/are the water steps outside PNC Park. There are very specific warning signs (Slippery! Danger!) but they are universally disregarded in the summer months. Kids, teens, tweens, grownups, passersby with their dogs, everyone wades in and splashes about. But now that the days are waning, not too many people. Only water.


I wander over and slip off my shoes and cool my feet under the slanting September sun.

Time

There is, among many, a great scene in the movie "Blade Runner," toward the end. Rutger Hauer's character is dying as Harrison Ford's character watches. Its in a deep, depressingly rainy, decaying and dark city. Hauer's character, as a replicant who has developed human emotions, aches to think that all he has felt, learned, touched, loved and experienced, will be lost "as tears, in the rain."

It's hard to describe what those words mean to me. They mean everything.

Today, the day broke to a turquoise sky, to carpets of gold and bronze, to the sounds of .... leaf blowers. (We interrupt this reverie! Attention: Please put on your noise-cancelling headphones!)

Yet, it was all my morning, my day. I watched the dogs put their noses to piles of leaves, I listened to leaf blowers and to football games on TV. I sat outside in the slanting afternoon sun and picked a November bouquet out of herbs and flowers luckily untouched by frost.

A tear to remember. Holli, evening walk in the park. She wades into the stream, into a small pool, dips her needle nose down and drinks.

She finishes and a few drops fall from her nose. The pond's surface ripples and I see dark shapes, linear and uneven. The ripples lose energy and the surface becomes still, the reflected images clearer. The still mirror becomes a canvas for the bare trees.

I think this is the meaning of tears in the rain. To notice, and to remember, the beauty of the most ordinary of moments.