DAYS OF CLEARVIEW AVENUE
(Text recopied and edited from an earlier message board entry) .
PREFACE : To say that I miss the stucco house on Clearview Avenue and its surroundings in Lakeland , Florida --is a cosmic understatement . I wish that Granfather and I had found an alternative to selling it that could have handled the mortgage problem ...The funny deal of it is that for years I had intermittently complaiined about it . Notably --I said it was too small though it was not quite as small and stark looking as this present residence on Kissingen Avenue, in a rather nowhere- like town called Bartow, Florida . Granted the house on Clearview Avenue would have seemed somewhat more roomy without a relative's collection of stuffed animal collection --which, mercifully, was largely donated away during the weeks before the sale .
During the last three years on Clearview before the move which took place arond July 20 , 2006 --the house and the neighborhood started to look strangely better . There were more breezy afternoons there ---where the light and the breezes often looked more dreamlike ...where there were more afternoons that in the words of the Argentine storyteller : Jorge Luis Borges , were, ' intimate, infinite ' .
There were more shafts of dreamy spring and summer light on the walls that would stream through the windows . Sometimes they would stream through the cut glass windows in the living room and fall on the stucco walls of the dining room and corridor --sometimes with fragments of rainbow spectra . To attempt to describe those shafts of light --some of which were small elements of rainbow spectra---others were shafts and swaths of pale melon colored light---with words on a computer screen or on paper --would fall so short of the immediacy and vividiness of the experience as to be threadbare ...so the prospect of doing so tires me at the very start---knowing that I would not go nearly far enough with such a description .
Before leaving the one story house on Clearview, I managed to take some photos with my aunt's instant camera . Aside from how the snapshots were (though they were not as total a disappointment as I feared) both:
(1). Not as many as should have been and (2). not always having quite the exact illumination that would have been best to capture the image and (3) . not always as the angle as would have been best .
There is not the sense of the flow of the rooms and the greater sense of extended space in the snapshots as one might have with, say, a 16 millimeter or other moving camera .
The hope is that one day , I will have someone who has much more computer saavy than a borderline computer illiterate like myself will be able to ---what's the word ?
" upload" the photos I have taken onto the internet in order to give observers a little more than an inkling of what the house, yard and surrounding vistas seen from the front and sides or back of the house on Clearview , looked like .
I hope and pray that the couple that the house on Clearview was sold to , do NOT change it to much. I'm saddened to see that the azalea hedge at the side of the house --where, in the spring of 2004, I read the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes ,as well as art magazines , wrote the story of Caswell and part of another novel , and talked with the little Spanish speaking boy : Joseph son of Jose and Gloria ..who was quite fascinated with the flowers, and the twigs that were on the yard----is now cut down . (I hope that there will be some roots or rhizomes to help it come back one day. I will always miss that azalea bush with its enormous, fat , shimmering bumblebees that droned amid the riot of hot purple petals and the lattice like leaves of yellow-green ) . It was there that I looked at a photo in one of my grandparents art and antique magazines of a painting titled ' Feeding The Sheep' by the 19th century painter S.S . Carr, and in another similar magazine a painting of a girl with short hair feeding a bird titled 'the Macaw' by McGregor Paxton --who looked just like my long lost girlfriend from September and October 2001 : Amy-- who was from near Asheville, North Carolina. .
The skyscapes during the past 3 years on Clearview seemed different in the past 3 years . The clouds the sky seemed often to take on the dreamy lights and tints you mind find in Igmar Bergman films .... It is all too easy to say, "Oh yeah, well it usually happens like that the place looks better when you are about to leave it , or after .." and be lazy- fast to chock it up to some sort of nostalgia, or just some everday sense of a place looking better before one leaves it-- of a NON-specific sort , and thus gloss over how very specific the look and the feel of the place was in the past 3 years was...the presentation of sights, sounds, and smells that had not been like that in quite the same form before .
Recently this month of May just past (May 2006) --there seemed to be such a generous pour of afternoons with a sort of sunlight that was creamy pale gold (that description too doesn't quite do it as well as it could be described) which tended to light up the front porch of the house on Clearview, with its jalousie windows and the yard with its swath of sky between the houses and trees, on the opposite side of the red brick residential street . There was an afternoon of course with its dragonfly with its arc of long returns that I wrote of earlier in another post in this present message board .
And there was the morning that was some 2 to 4 weeks or so beyond that day in May, when I saw that dragonfly , that I saw and smelled some rather exotic, almost unearthly experience of the landscape, that would be what William Blake might have called 'cleansing the doors of perception ' .
That morning had been one where for some time now i had been listening to a rather extraodinary musical tape by a musician in St.Petersburg, Florida, who was named Andrew Delaney . That tape had been given to me as a free gift by his wife Melissa, (who had, the same afternoon I had seen the dragonfly, come by with her toddler son :a bright eyed inquisitive young lad, after hearing that the house might be for sale and came inside and had a look around) , was quite unusual .
(We later sold the house to a different couple who had called about the house sometime earlier , but it was good to make the acquaintance of Melissa and her son, and ,later, her husband Andrew ) .
I have been wondering for sometime whether or not the music and lyrics of the tape-- by musician Andrew Delaney --which had been recorded quite a number of years prior might have induced the experience of the landscape that I had on that morning in mid to late May--a morning I wished I had dated on a calender. The music produced by Andrew Delaney on the tape titled 'Dreamscape' was quite dreamy, oceanic, breezy , echoing...one might even say orphic (I think of Orpheus the musican from Greek folklore with his musical harp) and the lyrics with their inflexions quite amazing . (The music and lyrics call to mind a phrase by writer Thomas Wolfe (as I seem to recollect of a bell heard through ocean water ) . One of the songs on the musical tape was titled 'Concave Blue' !
I had been listening to that musical tape by Andrew Delaney for some time, during those weeks in May and also into June , weeks when I had gone out that one May morning near the exterior front door of the porch, of the stucco house on 1030 Clearview Avenue, and stood right near the white plaster urns on their thin side platforms and the mailbox unter the lintel of the doorspace --. (The front porch was set out a bit in a rectangular space with its jalousie windows ) . I may have gone out to walk my medium sized dog :Willow . If I remember rightly, that's why I had gone out that early . Then again, I may have gone out to move the garbage cans either out of, or to, the front yard .
There was a generous steady breeze blowing in a generous, flowing pour of wind --like a stream of wind pouring from the west . It was more like a continuous breeze---it was not what you would call a flapping wind . There seemed to be a washed sort of chalky white color in the cast of the light coming in from the western swath of sky over the houses and trees on the opposite side of the brick street and yet there was a strangely pellucid blue to the sky from the light ---although the sky did have a hint of a pale orange -yellow that just tinged the blue in such a way that reminds me of the sort of cast of sky in Superman cartoons, or in Maxfield Parrish posters , and or the tint of sky one might see in a painting by Scheeler and the Precisionist school of painters ---in those paintings that show long thin skyscrapers of some cityscape bathed in some soft dreamy light . Before I return to describing the visual experience of the landscape , it is worthwhile to note the interesting smell that the landscape took on . There was in the breeze I noticed a strange scent that smelled (unlikely enough) like the ocean . Lakeland, Florida is some 60 to 70 miles inland from the ocean in terms of the Gulf Of Mexico on its west coast and some 80 or more miles removed from the ocean on the Atlantic coast on its east ...and yet there was a chalky, calcite smell like unto small seashells encased in chalky rock, which made me think of the smell of the ocean .
I could hardly hazard a guess as to what exotic atmospheric factor could possibly enable smells from the gulf coast to be transmitted by the wind so far inland , though it is even from a inductive standpoint remotely possible , I rather doubt that these were smells being sent by the wind from the ocean . I do not know what materials in the nearby surroundings of my street or the surrounding streets and yards would have occasioned that smell ...the experience was quite anomalous .
The visual experience seemed to go with the scent inasmuch as the images of the swath of sky over the houses, and yards, and its horizon behind them/ over them, took on some visual quality that made one almost visually intuit an *apperceptive image* the sort of alternate possible landscape and/or skyscape as one might imagine in some other epoch of time . Earlier, I had mentioned the dreamy , fantastical posters of the late 19th early 20th century artist Maxfield Parrish . Well that is somewhat like the sort of look the landscape on that morning seemed to approach . The horizon seemed more prominent as a sharp line of an arcing sort of panorama of space in the west as seen in the skyscape just barely above the line of trees and rooftops on the western side of my street .
There was a bird :that looked like it could have been an osprey or a hawk- like bird that was a glaucous , or creamy off-white (which had if I remember rightly some small speckles on its torso and/or wings) that kept sounding a large echoing squawk that made one think of the sound a large seabird might make . The bird ,which resembled some other birds I had been seeing for some months prior which had been making nests further down the street, kept flying out close to the horizon line and arcing around and returning in midair . The bird too looked unusual in that unusual light of the western sky . First of all, it looked somewhat a little bit oversised in terms of the length of its frame---oversized even for a bird of prey of its type . Mind you , it was not a giant bird of Pterodactyl or Roc bird type proportions , but it seemed a little bit too big for usual birds of prey ---and that little bit seemed to give it a just on the verge of being preternatural look .
Furthermore, the birds wings at times *almost* (I'm not going to take poetic license and exaggerate here so I'll use the word 'almost' ) resembled in minature the sort of flippers one might see in illustrations of those long ago ocean dinosaurs like the Pleiosaur ! At times I looked at the bird as it made its arc in the sky with the sort of curiosity, as if I were looking at what I wondered might be some exotic unknown species of bird ! The area around the horizon, which had come to resemble the rim of some panoramic semi-circle , seemed to be somewhat elongated by a few degrees beyond the sense of length or girth that that patch of sky usually has . The cast of light, the breeze, the scent like of the ocean , the squawking slighly oversized bird that had wings that looked the flippers on an ocean dinosaur , the seemingly elongated horizon and area of sky just immediately above it, all called to mind the hint in the mind of an imaginal landscape like one found in some of those fantasy art genre posters and illustrations from the 1970's and early 1980's which would often depict an arcing panorama of oceanscape or beachscape depicting some imagery like from the epoch of the dinosaurs (when much of what is now Florida was under the ocean) or from some alternate earth that features some similar features .
The experience did seem miraculous in a quiet non-dramatic way . There was a sense of strange awe ---a sense of finding what some might call 'a postcard from the Infinite .'
During many of the nights in May, and possibly early June, around the week in which that morning took place, there was another somewhat exotic experience of many nights where I went out late walking on my street and there were a lot of exotic smells of flowing plants that I do not recall having smelled before or since . During one night when I walked out and smelled those plants I smelled also a telephone pole on my street Clearview and the scent of the wood and/or perhaps the resin or varnish they put on the wood of that telephone pole seemed magnified ---far more vivid .
Of course, such sights, sounds, and smells as on those particular May afternoons and nights are not an affair that happens everyday . Go there on the wrong day, and you may not find them at all (though if you wait around long enough and look through enough umbrella trees and walk around looking you may find something quite memorable given enough time ).
Go to Clearview Avenue on an overcast day and it might very look quite dull and prosaic ---as afternoons in years past on the street could often be . (Though even an overcast day on Clearview Avenue is still like the outskirts of the Garden of Eden compared to an overcast day on the even far more dreary and banal Kissingen Avenue in Bartow, Florida !)
For years, it is worth mentioning for the sake of accuracy , that Clearview Avenue did not always look good and for years I complained about the way it looked . And please , Dear Reader, do NOT come away from reading this present memoir essay with some trite, mendacious, glib notion like "be thankful for where you are" or "it's not so bad where you are after all" or any mendacious baloney platitude like that---for that is certainly NOT what I wish to convey at all !
Yet Clearview Avenue had those rare window moments of time ---those afternnons and evenings where the landscape took on new glints ...where the landscape both within the house and out became like a wine that took on new nuances over time---days in which the sky opened up . I wish I could freeze all those moments of time in their exactness ---exact down to the last details out of a love ; a cherishment that is exact, precise and will NEVER settle for fuzzy generalities--- and share those moments of time and landscape with everyone here .
The interlude in the Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald comes back to mind where Gatsby tells his friend on Long Island how the summer is going by too fast and how he wishes he could reach out his hand and hold it back ---make it stay . There is indeed a beatitude in clinging to the right moments from the past. There is a beauty and virtue in the very act of clinging itself ---provided one wishes to share what one clings to with someone else---even if that someone is the Universe itself which you hope is "listening" somehow . Clinging is a form of savoring . Such savoring can be amost like unto the mood you find in a Psalm .
I'm also reminded of the apparent quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, where the writer makes reference to places that were not loved enough in the fleeting hour and how Rilke apparently wrote ,
'How I long to make good from afar ,
the forgotten gesture, the additional act '
(Rilke apparently longed to continue those moments in time that were not savored *as much* though they were savored some even then) as they should have been and apparently longs to savor them in all their specificity in the same place they originally happened . So do I !)
Much of the time I spent on Clearview Avenue , I was often pining in turn for other places I had lived in before I moved there . To some extent I longed for an earlier residence on Honeytree Lane--which I remember had fireflies that my Grandma and I watched from the front poorch on nights in late 1984 or early 1985 . Honeytree Lane was the house in which my pet bird: the yellow cockatiel Vincent, was able to fly about outside his cage and walk about, before we moved to Clearview walong with Vincent in the summer of 1985 . Even more often than that, I longed for the landscape that surrounded my former house not far from Lake Walk-In-Water several miles to the southeast of Lake Wales , Florida . The beauty of the surrounding sand hills with their scrub forest , the beauty of the ponds with their lilly pads and wild weeds , the beauty of that enormous breezy lake Walk In Water is ineffable . ( I 've revisted that neighborhood by Lake Walk in Water several times while my residence was on Clearview ) .
Yet now I find that i'm longing and rightly so for Clearview Avenue ---a place where the sky seemed to open up ---a place which had glints of beauty that you longed all the more to grab and hold and tie to the wall --because they were often so flittering . Thank the Creator I did begin to cherish those moments and attempted to some degree to savor them--but not quite with the degree of ardor which should have been even more. I am thankful to the Creator and Jesus in particular, as well as to Zack , and Grandpa ,and Grandma , and aunt Amanda, and Joanie , Melissa and her husband Andrew Delaney: the musician , Yahoo , Garrett & Siri, and others ---that I was able to savor it during those last 3 years. In the last couple of weeks before the sale of the house, the author of this present memoir was running around like an earwig moth (which Clearview Avenue had lots of , incidentally) trying to get more glances and savor it with doubled intensity !
The place at times had those various and sundry features that detracted from its beauty, such as stuffed teddy bears that one of my relatives collected , a tube of cat hairball removing cream, and here and there little plastic McDonalds resturaunt minature figurines that stood on the bookshelf next to books like the 'Timaeus' by Plato, and 'Labryinths' by Jorge Luis Borges ...Such kitch as the relative's McDonalds figurines somewhat detracted from the secret blessings of a stucco house that had a craftsman window, with a trailing thin philodendren, in the kitchen, a stucco made curved breakfast alcove , also in the kitchen , art nouveau electric lamps with interesting lampshades, an interesting wood cabinet in the dining room, an old "highboy" wood cabinet on the front poorch, and other curiosities .
The house was one which we shared with two consecutive dogs : Sam: the long lost black and white Shih-Tzu who we unfortunely lost around January of 1995 , and Willow : my half bassett hound, half German Shepherd-- who now lives in some dreary backyard kennel, due to the fact that the cats in the house, in which Grandfather have now moved, are wary of dogs .
It was the house in which my Grandmother and I discussed UFO's at length and the amazing sorts of civilizations that might be on other planets . It was the house in which I played the music of the English folk band 'Pentangle' from the autumn of 2004, and intermittently again until early in this present year of 2006 --which I played on my stereo in the dining room on Clearview (with one speaker working ,notwithstanding) for Grandfather , along with the beautiful song 'Morning Glory' as sung by the Canadian musical band 'Blood, Sweat, and Tears ' --a song earlier sung by singer/ songwriter: Tim Buckley . (Though the music did inspire curiosity and a ponderous look on my Grandfather's face, I think he still prefers Cole Porter to some extent) .
Clearview Avenue was a house where my father and I had fascinating discussions via telephone on whether there might be unknown colors , synesthesia, photons and what light might be, art, alien life , where I discussed with him of the majesty of Shaker farmhouses and Shaker art in general , plants and exotic animals, the deserts of the American Southwest ect .
Clearview Avenue was where I found via telephone information service my long lost friend Travis ( fellow tree hugger and anti-nuclear protester ) who I had known in the very early 1990's and who had since moved back to the Titusville , Florida area .
It was at 1030 Clearview Avenue that Grandpa and I had the Barn: a barn- shaped toolshed where Grandpa kept his saws , hammers, nails , washers ...much of which I put in boxes that are now in the garage at this present residence in Bartow .
(I have but one photo of the toolshed, and I 'm hoping that computer photo imagery enhancing technology can make a larger image of the barn exactly as it was in its best light --because if I attempt to describe it I fear that it will not reveal to the reader even a passable glimpse of what it was like to be in that toolshed . The toolshed had two somewhat small thin windows that let in some sunlight . i'm hoping that the new couple will preserve that toolshed as it was . How I long to be there hammering nails into wood with a hammer again while my Grandfather stands with his own hammer in hand ) .
There are so many moments --so many gems of time--so many afternoons filled with promise and insight, so many particular breezes with particular shafts of light on particular walls , so many postcards from the Infinite-- that took place at and around the house on Clearview Avenue , that I fear I will leave out . If I get a chance to include more in other memoirs and posts , I fear there will still be other anecdotes that i will leave out--- that I will remember after i have written or posted of other moments --where I will remember after the fact and I will say (or think ) ' I should have included that!', 'I should have mentioned that one !'
On Clearview was the poor, fortune- blighted travelling magazine subscription salesman (his name might have been 'Andre' but I am not sure of that) who if I recall rightly was wanting to help his infant son (or so he said) who (if I recall righly) his wife or girlfriend had custody of , who I invited onto my front poorch and entreated to listen to seashells, which I kept on a glass table on that front poorch, one evening, a little after dusk Decembe,r of last year (2005) . This man who was about in his thirties put several of the seashells to his ear and smiled with apparently earnest joy and awe when he heard the "sound of the ocean" in these seashells . For that moment he apparently had the earnest curiousity and awe and innocence a young boy might have. It was a blessing to share such joy with a travelling stranger .
I fear that I will one night or day have a dream and will see myself back on Clearview with Grandpa and it will seem that I had never left / or that I had certainly returned and then I will wake to find it was only a dream, and tears will run down my face till I am soaked .
I hope (and will always hope) that those afternoons on Clearview can be recaptured exactly as they were experienced--the better afternoons and evenings that is --and will be able to savor more fully, and extend them in some epoch or realm of time to come . With God all good, consistent things are possible ....
Then (or perhaps before then by some exotic means) I hope to share those moments in their vividness exactly the way they looked , and sound, and smelled with others ... . I also hope that others all with their special houses and the amazing moments of the past will be able to do the same
(Text recopied and edited from an earlier message board entry) .
PREFACE : To say that I miss the stucco house on Clearview Avenue and its surroundings in Lakeland , Florida --is a cosmic understatement . I wish that Granfather and I had found an alternative to selling it that could have handled the mortgage problem ...The funny deal of it is that for years I had intermittently complaiined about it . Notably --I said it was too small though it was not quite as small and stark looking as this present residence on Kissingen Avenue, in a rather nowhere- like town called Bartow, Florida . Granted the house on Clearview Avenue would have seemed somewhat more roomy without a relative's collection of stuffed animal collection --which, mercifully, was largely donated away during the weeks before the sale .
During the last three years on Clearview before the move which took place arond July 20 , 2006 --the house and the neighborhood started to look strangely better . There were more breezy afternoons there ---where the light and the breezes often looked more dreamlike ...where there were more afternoons that in the words of the Argentine storyteller : Jorge Luis Borges , were, ' intimate, infinite ' .
There were more shafts of dreamy spring and summer light on the walls that would stream through the windows . Sometimes they would stream through the cut glass windows in the living room and fall on the stucco walls of the dining room and corridor --sometimes with fragments of rainbow spectra . To attempt to describe those shafts of light --some of which were small elements of rainbow spectra---others were shafts and swaths of pale melon colored light---with words on a computer screen or on paper --would fall so short of the immediacy and vividiness of the experience as to be threadbare ...so the prospect of doing so tires me at the very start---knowing that I would not go nearly far enough with such a description .
Before leaving the one story house on Clearview, I managed to take some photos with my aunt's instant camera . Aside from how the snapshots were (though they were not as total a disappointment as I feared) both:
(1). Not as many as should have been and (2). not always having quite the exact illumination that would have been best to capture the image and (3) . not always as the angle as would have been best .
There is not the sense of the flow of the rooms and the greater sense of extended space in the snapshots as one might have with, say, a 16 millimeter or other moving camera .
The hope is that one day , I will have someone who has much more computer saavy than a borderline computer illiterate like myself will be able to ---what's the word ?
" upload" the photos I have taken onto the internet in order to give observers a little more than an inkling of what the house, yard and surrounding vistas seen from the front and sides or back of the house on Clearview , looked like .
I hope and pray that the couple that the house on Clearview was sold to , do NOT change it to much. I'm saddened to see that the azalea hedge at the side of the house --where, in the spring of 2004, I read the Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes ,as well as art magazines , wrote the story of Caswell and part of another novel , and talked with the little Spanish speaking boy : Joseph son of Jose and Gloria ..who was quite fascinated with the flowers, and the twigs that were on the yard----is now cut down . (I hope that there will be some roots or rhizomes to help it come back one day. I will always miss that azalea bush with its enormous, fat , shimmering bumblebees that droned amid the riot of hot purple petals and the lattice like leaves of yellow-green ) . It was there that I looked at a photo in one of my grandparents art and antique magazines of a painting titled ' Feeding The Sheep' by the 19th century painter S.S . Carr, and in another similar magazine a painting of a girl with short hair feeding a bird titled 'the Macaw' by McGregor Paxton --who looked just like my long lost girlfriend from September and October 2001 : Amy-- who was from near Asheville, North Carolina. .
The skyscapes during the past 3 years on Clearview seemed different in the past 3 years . The clouds the sky seemed often to take on the dreamy lights and tints you mind find in Igmar Bergman films .... It is all too easy to say, "Oh yeah, well it usually happens like that the place looks better when you are about to leave it , or after .." and be lazy- fast to chock it up to some sort of nostalgia, or just some everday sense of a place looking better before one leaves it-- of a NON-specific sort , and thus gloss over how very specific the look and the feel of the place was in the past 3 years was...the presentation of sights, sounds, and smells that had not been like that in quite the same form before .
Recently this month of May just past (May 2006) --there seemed to be such a generous pour of afternoons with a sort of sunlight that was creamy pale gold (that description too doesn't quite do it as well as it could be described) which tended to light up the front porch of the house on Clearview, with its jalousie windows and the yard with its swath of sky between the houses and trees, on the opposite side of the red brick residential street . There was an afternoon of course with its dragonfly with its arc of long returns that I wrote of earlier in another post in this present message board .
And there was the morning that was some 2 to 4 weeks or so beyond that day in May, when I saw that dragonfly , that I saw and smelled some rather exotic, almost unearthly experience of the landscape, that would be what William Blake might have called 'cleansing the doors of perception ' .
That morning had been one where for some time now i had been listening to a rather extraodinary musical tape by a musician in St.Petersburg, Florida, who was named Andrew Delaney . That tape had been given to me as a free gift by his wife Melissa, (who had, the same afternoon I had seen the dragonfly, come by with her toddler son :a bright eyed inquisitive young lad, after hearing that the house might be for sale and came inside and had a look around) , was quite unusual .
(We later sold the house to a different couple who had called about the house sometime earlier , but it was good to make the acquaintance of Melissa and her son, and ,later, her husband Andrew ) .
I have been wondering for sometime whether or not the music and lyrics of the tape-- by musician Andrew Delaney --which had been recorded quite a number of years prior might have induced the experience of the landscape that I had on that morning in mid to late May--a morning I wished I had dated on a calender. The music produced by Andrew Delaney on the tape titled 'Dreamscape' was quite dreamy, oceanic, breezy , echoing...one might even say orphic (I think of Orpheus the musican from Greek folklore with his musical harp) and the lyrics with their inflexions quite amazing . (The music and lyrics call to mind a phrase by writer Thomas Wolfe (as I seem to recollect of a bell heard through ocean water ) . One of the songs on the musical tape was titled 'Concave Blue' !
I had been listening to that musical tape by Andrew Delaney for some time, during those weeks in May and also into June , weeks when I had gone out that one May morning near the exterior front door of the porch, of the stucco house on 1030 Clearview Avenue, and stood right near the white plaster urns on their thin side platforms and the mailbox unter the lintel of the doorspace --. (The front porch was set out a bit in a rectangular space with its jalousie windows ) . I may have gone out to walk my medium sized dog :Willow . If I remember rightly, that's why I had gone out that early . Then again, I may have gone out to move the garbage cans either out of, or to, the front yard .
There was a generous steady breeze blowing in a generous, flowing pour of wind --like a stream of wind pouring from the west . It was more like a continuous breeze---it was not what you would call a flapping wind . There seemed to be a washed sort of chalky white color in the cast of the light coming in from the western swath of sky over the houses and trees on the opposite side of the brick street and yet there was a strangely pellucid blue to the sky from the light ---although the sky did have a hint of a pale orange -yellow that just tinged the blue in such a way that reminds me of the sort of cast of sky in Superman cartoons, or in Maxfield Parrish posters , and or the tint of sky one might see in a painting by Scheeler and the Precisionist school of painters ---in those paintings that show long thin skyscrapers of some cityscape bathed in some soft dreamy light . Before I return to describing the visual experience of the landscape , it is worthwhile to note the interesting smell that the landscape took on . There was in the breeze I noticed a strange scent that smelled (unlikely enough) like the ocean . Lakeland, Florida is some 60 to 70 miles inland from the ocean in terms of the Gulf Of Mexico on its west coast and some 80 or more miles removed from the ocean on the Atlantic coast on its east ...and yet there was a chalky, calcite smell like unto small seashells encased in chalky rock, which made me think of the smell of the ocean .
I could hardly hazard a guess as to what exotic atmospheric factor could possibly enable smells from the gulf coast to be transmitted by the wind so far inland , though it is even from a inductive standpoint remotely possible , I rather doubt that these were smells being sent by the wind from the ocean . I do not know what materials in the nearby surroundings of my street or the surrounding streets and yards would have occasioned that smell ...the experience was quite anomalous .
The visual experience seemed to go with the scent inasmuch as the images of the swath of sky over the houses, and yards, and its horizon behind them/ over them, took on some visual quality that made one almost visually intuit an *apperceptive image* the sort of alternate possible landscape and/or skyscape as one might imagine in some other epoch of time . Earlier, I had mentioned the dreamy , fantastical posters of the late 19th early 20th century artist Maxfield Parrish . Well that is somewhat like the sort of look the landscape on that morning seemed to approach . The horizon seemed more prominent as a sharp line of an arcing sort of panorama of space in the west as seen in the skyscape just barely above the line of trees and rooftops on the western side of my street .
There was a bird :that looked like it could have been an osprey or a hawk- like bird that was a glaucous , or creamy off-white (which had if I remember rightly some small speckles on its torso and/or wings) that kept sounding a large echoing squawk that made one think of the sound a large seabird might make . The bird ,which resembled some other birds I had been seeing for some months prior which had been making nests further down the street, kept flying out close to the horizon line and arcing around and returning in midair . The bird too looked unusual in that unusual light of the western sky . First of all, it looked somewhat a little bit oversised in terms of the length of its frame---oversized even for a bird of prey of its type . Mind you , it was not a giant bird of Pterodactyl or Roc bird type proportions , but it seemed a little bit too big for usual birds of prey ---and that little bit seemed to give it a just on the verge of being preternatural look .
Furthermore, the birds wings at times *almost* (I'm not going to take poetic license and exaggerate here so I'll use the word 'almost' ) resembled in minature the sort of flippers one might see in illustrations of those long ago ocean dinosaurs like the Pleiosaur ! At times I looked at the bird as it made its arc in the sky with the sort of curiosity, as if I were looking at what I wondered might be some exotic unknown species of bird ! The area around the horizon, which had come to resemble the rim of some panoramic semi-circle , seemed to be somewhat elongated by a few degrees beyond the sense of length or girth that that patch of sky usually has . The cast of light, the breeze, the scent like of the ocean , the squawking slighly oversized bird that had wings that looked the flippers on an ocean dinosaur , the seemingly elongated horizon and area of sky just immediately above it, all called to mind the hint in the mind of an imaginal landscape like one found in some of those fantasy art genre posters and illustrations from the 1970's and early 1980's which would often depict an arcing panorama of oceanscape or beachscape depicting some imagery like from the epoch of the dinosaurs (when much of what is now Florida was under the ocean) or from some alternate earth that features some similar features .
The experience did seem miraculous in a quiet non-dramatic way . There was a sense of strange awe ---a sense of finding what some might call 'a postcard from the Infinite .'
During many of the nights in May, and possibly early June, around the week in which that morning took place, there was another somewhat exotic experience of many nights where I went out late walking on my street and there were a lot of exotic smells of flowing plants that I do not recall having smelled before or since . During one night when I walked out and smelled those plants I smelled also a telephone pole on my street Clearview and the scent of the wood and/or perhaps the resin or varnish they put on the wood of that telephone pole seemed magnified ---far more vivid .
Of course, such sights, sounds, and smells as on those particular May afternoons and nights are not an affair that happens everyday . Go there on the wrong day, and you may not find them at all (though if you wait around long enough and look through enough umbrella trees and walk around looking you may find something quite memorable given enough time ).
Go to Clearview Avenue on an overcast day and it might very look quite dull and prosaic ---as afternoons in years past on the street could often be . (Though even an overcast day on Clearview Avenue is still like the outskirts of the Garden of Eden compared to an overcast day on the even far more dreary and banal Kissingen Avenue in Bartow, Florida !)
For years, it is worth mentioning for the sake of accuracy , that Clearview Avenue did not always look good and for years I complained about the way it looked . And please , Dear Reader, do NOT come away from reading this present memoir essay with some trite, mendacious, glib notion like "be thankful for where you are" or "it's not so bad where you are after all" or any mendacious baloney platitude like that---for that is certainly NOT what I wish to convey at all !
Yet Clearview Avenue had those rare window moments of time ---those afternnons and evenings where the landscape took on new glints ...where the landscape both within the house and out became like a wine that took on new nuances over time---days in which the sky opened up . I wish I could freeze all those moments of time in their exactness ---exact down to the last details out of a love ; a cherishment that is exact, precise and will NEVER settle for fuzzy generalities--- and share those moments of time and landscape with everyone here .
The interlude in the Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald comes back to mind where Gatsby tells his friend on Long Island how the summer is going by too fast and how he wishes he could reach out his hand and hold it back ---make it stay . There is indeed a beatitude in clinging to the right moments from the past. There is a beauty and virtue in the very act of clinging itself ---provided one wishes to share what one clings to with someone else---even if that someone is the Universe itself which you hope is "listening" somehow . Clinging is a form of savoring . Such savoring can be amost like unto the mood you find in a Psalm .
I'm also reminded of the apparent quote from Rainer Maria Rilke, where the writer makes reference to places that were not loved enough in the fleeting hour and how Rilke apparently wrote ,
'How I long to make good from afar ,
the forgotten gesture, the additional act '
(Rilke apparently longed to continue those moments in time that were not savored *as much* though they were savored some even then) as they should have been and apparently longs to savor them in all their specificity in the same place they originally happened . So do I !)
Much of the time I spent on Clearview Avenue , I was often pining in turn for other places I had lived in before I moved there . To some extent I longed for an earlier residence on Honeytree Lane--which I remember had fireflies that my Grandma and I watched from the front poorch on nights in late 1984 or early 1985 . Honeytree Lane was the house in which my pet bird: the yellow cockatiel Vincent, was able to fly about outside his cage and walk about, before we moved to Clearview walong with Vincent in the summer of 1985 . Even more often than that, I longed for the landscape that surrounded my former house not far from Lake Walk-In-Water several miles to the southeast of Lake Wales , Florida . The beauty of the surrounding sand hills with their scrub forest , the beauty of the ponds with their lilly pads and wild weeds , the beauty of that enormous breezy lake Walk In Water is ineffable . ( I 've revisted that neighborhood by Lake Walk in Water several times while my residence was on Clearview ) .
Yet now I find that i'm longing and rightly so for Clearview Avenue ---a place where the sky seemed to open up ---a place which had glints of beauty that you longed all the more to grab and hold and tie to the wall --because they were often so flittering . Thank the Creator I did begin to cherish those moments and attempted to some degree to savor them--but not quite with the degree of ardor which should have been even more. I am thankful to the Creator and Jesus in particular, as well as to Zack , and Grandpa ,and Grandma , and aunt Amanda, and Joanie , Melissa and her husband Andrew Delaney: the musician , Yahoo , Garrett & Siri, and others ---that I was able to savor it during those last 3 years. In the last couple of weeks before the sale of the house, the author of this present memoir was running around like an earwig moth (which Clearview Avenue had lots of , incidentally) trying to get more glances and savor it with doubled intensity !
The place at times had those various and sundry features that detracted from its beauty, such as stuffed teddy bears that one of my relatives collected , a tube of cat hairball removing cream, and here and there little plastic McDonalds resturaunt minature figurines that stood on the bookshelf next to books like the 'Timaeus' by Plato, and 'Labryinths' by Jorge Luis Borges ...Such kitch as the relative's McDonalds figurines somewhat detracted from the secret blessings of a stucco house that had a craftsman window, with a trailing thin philodendren, in the kitchen, a stucco made curved breakfast alcove , also in the kitchen , art nouveau electric lamps with interesting lampshades, an interesting wood cabinet in the dining room, an old "highboy" wood cabinet on the front poorch, and other curiosities .
The house was one which we shared with two consecutive dogs : Sam: the long lost black and white Shih-Tzu who we unfortunely lost around January of 1995 , and Willow : my half bassett hound, half German Shepherd-- who now lives in some dreary backyard kennel, due to the fact that the cats in the house, in which Grandfather have now moved, are wary of dogs .
It was the house in which my Grandmother and I discussed UFO's at length and the amazing sorts of civilizations that might be on other planets . It was the house in which I played the music of the English folk band 'Pentangle' from the autumn of 2004, and intermittently again until early in this present year of 2006 --which I played on my stereo in the dining room on Clearview (with one speaker working ,notwithstanding) for Grandfather , along with the beautiful song 'Morning Glory' as sung by the Canadian musical band 'Blood, Sweat, and Tears ' --a song earlier sung by singer/ songwriter: Tim Buckley . (Though the music did inspire curiosity and a ponderous look on my Grandfather's face, I think he still prefers Cole Porter to some extent) .
Clearview Avenue was a house where my father and I had fascinating discussions via telephone on whether there might be unknown colors , synesthesia, photons and what light might be, art, alien life , where I discussed with him of the majesty of Shaker farmhouses and Shaker art in general , plants and exotic animals, the deserts of the American Southwest ect .
Clearview Avenue was where I found via telephone information service my long lost friend Travis ( fellow tree hugger and anti-nuclear protester ) who I had known in the very early 1990's and who had since moved back to the Titusville , Florida area .
It was at 1030 Clearview Avenue that Grandpa and I had the Barn: a barn- shaped toolshed where Grandpa kept his saws , hammers, nails , washers ...much of which I put in boxes that are now in the garage at this present residence in Bartow .
(I have but one photo of the toolshed, and I 'm hoping that computer photo imagery enhancing technology can make a larger image of the barn exactly as it was in its best light --because if I attempt to describe it I fear that it will not reveal to the reader even a passable glimpse of what it was like to be in that toolshed . The toolshed had two somewhat small thin windows that let in some sunlight . i'm hoping that the new couple will preserve that toolshed as it was . How I long to be there hammering nails into wood with a hammer again while my Grandfather stands with his own hammer in hand ) .
There are so many moments --so many gems of time--so many afternoons filled with promise and insight, so many particular breezes with particular shafts of light on particular walls , so many postcards from the Infinite-- that took place at and around the house on Clearview Avenue , that I fear I will leave out . If I get a chance to include more in other memoirs and posts , I fear there will still be other anecdotes that i will leave out--- that I will remember after i have written or posted of other moments --where I will remember after the fact and I will say (or think ) ' I should have included that!', 'I should have mentioned that one !'
On Clearview was the poor, fortune- blighted travelling magazine subscription salesman (his name might have been 'Andre' but I am not sure of that) who if I recall rightly was wanting to help his infant son (or so he said) who (if I recall righly) his wife or girlfriend had custody of , who I invited onto my front poorch and entreated to listen to seashells, which I kept on a glass table on that front poorch, one evening, a little after dusk Decembe,r of last year (2005) . This man who was about in his thirties put several of the seashells to his ear and smiled with apparently earnest joy and awe when he heard the "sound of the ocean" in these seashells . For that moment he apparently had the earnest curiousity and awe and innocence a young boy might have. It was a blessing to share such joy with a travelling stranger .
I fear that I will one night or day have a dream and will see myself back on Clearview with Grandpa and it will seem that I had never left / or that I had certainly returned and then I will wake to find it was only a dream, and tears will run down my face till I am soaked .
I hope (and will always hope) that those afternoons on Clearview can be recaptured exactly as they were experienced--the better afternoons and evenings that is --and will be able to savor more fully, and extend them in some epoch or realm of time to come . With God all good, consistent things are possible ....
Then (or perhaps before then by some exotic means) I hope to share those moments in their vividness exactly the way they looked , and sound, and smelled with others ... . I also hope that others all with their special houses and the amazing moments of the past will be able to do the same
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