Today is my sister’s birthday today—even if I know she prefers to go into hiding on such a day and not really recognize this fact. This is not a criticism— more of an observation and yes indeed perhaps a bit of admiration for her ability to stay faithful to her own preferences. She has always been that way. And it is indeed an inspiration.
But she complained that in my last post, I neglected to share a photo of the Peroni beer and deconstructed streetlight that I observed on the Roman sidewalk last week. And I actually did think to take a photo while passing by somebody’s discarded science project….but in the end I didn’t think it would serve any purpose. Rome at times can seem like one big discarica AKA landfill, and so this scene was ultimately chalked up to just more of the same.
Today I returned to that spot and found the street has much changed. Even within the space of a week. But first a word on dead squirrels:
I remember in high school, Mr. Weiner our English teacher read us a poem he wrote about his observation of a squirrel that had become road pizza. It was clearly roadkill that he passed day after day. A collection of minor data points that, like most fusion think pieces, found its way onto a piece of paper. The poem was of the The Red Wheelbarrow variety: sparingly written, recounting the tree rat’s metamorphosis on the asphalt. How it slowly disintegrated until it was almost nothing again. “Back to fetus”.
Yeah that’s not exactly birthday greeting card discussion but likely more of the Birthday Letters variety. Moreover, I have no idea why I remember a teacher’s poem that I heard only once back in 1994. But I do remember those versus much like I recall the profanity my sister once yelled while standing next to our Mashpee Middle School bus driver– how she hollered the very colorful words clear down the single bus aisle, clear past me until it reached the intended recipient in the very back. Today I thought of the squirrel poem after walking past that beer box and streetlight. I remembered because after repeated walks past, there is now very little to see. The Red Peroni box is now devoid of bottles and is flat on the ground. It has been raining for two days so the red paper construction is quickly losing all sense of itself. The massive streetlight—I also don’t know where it went— and what remains now is only a single green arc of plastic that is virtually unrecognizable to newcomers passing by.
And so the birthday gift to my sister is an even crappier of photo of disintegrating trash in an advanced state of disintegration:
Other families might think that this is nonsensical, but I would suggest that it’s largely on par with how we do business. I mean, at least I didn’t take a photo of a decaying squirrel and post it on the blog. Nor did I bag up a possum that was stunned dead in the road and then have our little brother bring it onto the school bus for Show & Tell — because that is something that our father actually did one year. Incidentally that prospective Show & Tell item lasted about 10 seconds on board before the bus driver came to a screeching halt. Between the profanities and the real live dead possum, it’s safe to say that our family does things in our own way. Just as I know that every other family has their own version of such things.
In addition to illegally parked cars and neglected trash, I will also note that the punch of spring has added new obstructions to my daily walks. I’m talking again about the flowers. No, not the wisteria, but it’s rather the trees that are asserting their presence. Now, in order to arrive at the Peroni box, I have to divert what is normally a clear path to avoid a bouquet of tree branches that are comically laden with flowers. One part of the tree is now so weighed down that it appears to be trying to tiptoe over to the street and add itself to the navigational hazards that comprise Rome. And because I know that my sister will ask about it, I did stop to take a photo.
I spend a lot of my time thinking about communication. Communication between each other and about how well we really listen to each other. Or rather, whether we want to listen to each other. My sister and I don’t really talk much— but this is not by deliberate design, nor is it born out of some kind of spite. We’re just living our lives as we each have chosen individually and that is 100% fine with each of us. No rancor, just issueless acceptance for how we both move around in the world. But I do find value in what she says, and I do listen when she offers up something (yes, from the swear words to whatever is going on in the modern day). When I say that my gift to her is a photo of something pointless, I am more saying that my gift is an expression of my appreciation for her words. I find value in her willingness to communicate. And to show I am listening, I respond in ridiculous Hallinan ways by posting photos or talking about lifeless stuff on the road.
As someone recently (and very politely) observed, I spent most of March inhabiting a lousy headspace. It has been the kind of period where I didn’t feel like posting anything at all because, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it at all” seemed to be a better alternative. So I chose to focus on the flowers until they started to occupy the bulk of my field of vision. They started to impede my foot passage on sidewalks. And now that we’ve once again arrived at my sister’s end of month birthday, I do feel better about things. There are enough memories combined with modern day examples of the death and rebirth of things that things feel more palatable again. The world is still not exactly tip-top great, but at least the Chernobyl workers were allowed to go off shift, and maybe, just maybe, we can see an end to so much destruction. My sister is a firefighter paramedic, and as such I am sure she’s seen a lot of dark shit in her time on the job. But she still manages to carry on and find joy in the little things in life. For this I am glad that she is around and manages to remind me to do the same. So I hope she likes my crappy pictures and this wandering blog entry.