Heaven is Just Like This

The corner of 53rd and Thompson pulls me into its arms at least once a week. I park there an hour before work and read. It is a tiny intersection and the panorama afforded from the cab of the truck yesterday was punctuated by moving black; a crow flew directly at the windsheild, indeed stirring the fresh spring air as it flew low over my window, while a small, black cat glided lazily oversoft grass across the street. Standing in front of me, across the corner on the median between street and sidewalk were three trees in full white bloom, their roots immersed in the rich soil, quietly thinking, while in their arms two children climbed, whose motion caused a shower of fragrant white petals from the over ripe blossoms. To my left stood two houses built in the early 1940s with foundations and fireplaces made of river rock smoothed by years of huddling next to one another under the purr and gurgle of some forest stream, near or far.

It was here that I sat in what barely passed for a car some time ago and finished reading a bleak and beautiful novel, and was moved to describe the moment experienced upon turning its last page and looking at this corner. Yesterday, seasons later I finished another bleak and beautiful novel and thought to write how those two companions, Bleak and Beautiful inform each other, for bleak describes beauty by carefully inscribing its absence. Looking out the window I thought of other companions, fear and courage, hunger and satisfaction, war and play, and it felt as if I was suddenly in the sea of this Fierce and Beautiful World as in a current, swirling madly. I remembered a quote from a Jewish philosopher who it may be said killed himself on the Spanish border when his escape from Nazi Germany had come to an end. He wrote, "Heaven is just like this, only slightly different."

The Gray Squirrels, busy with their practical obsessions are unaware of this.