If your lover has ever sent you on a shopping spree at Tiffany & Co., you may have some idea of what to expect. For those trying to forget the fact that your (ex?) lover never did, don’t worry. This is much better. Just like your next lover will be.

But enough about you. My personal perspectives on crime, justice, and people associated with these terms are built upon, and more or less entirely based on little more than absolutely no reasonable knowledge, and two deeply held assumptions:

1. “Every man has within himself the entire human condition.”

Michel de Montaigne, French essayist (1533-1592); and

2. “I am who I am and I believe what I believe because of where I grew up and who raised me” (or something like that; I couldn’t find the exact quote and might have made it up entirely).

Franz Boas (allegedly), the German “Father of American Anthropology” (1858-1942).

I think it significant that the foundations of my personal perspectives are in quotations, as I didn’t articulate these ideologies any more independently than I arrived at the cognitive observation deck from which one might see the world from this angle without asking directions.

Speaking of which, haven’t you ever found that the more you ask for directions, the more answers there are regarding contemplative places you might go, and things you might see through the binocular machines provided, for fifty (or some nearby multiple of twenty-five) cents?

Those who have successfully completed seventh grade algebra (and, I now realize, apparently even those who didn’t) know that altitudinous viewpoints are requisite to the vista of a broad horizon. The broader one’s vista, the higher one’s viewpoint, and the greater the perspective’s dependence on the people who built the ladder of ideas to reach it. You might take an elevator, but even those are man-made.

Before your hopes of accruing some sort of independently attained originality are dashed to the wind, I assure you that these hopes are, in fact, hopeless, but even the sexy, likeable Montaigne and Boas didn’t articulate the ideologies I’ve quoted independently. True, they did write them down. But they (as everyone must) wove their perspectives with thread they found along the paths they traveled, and the people, places, and possibilities they encountered while figuring out where, exactly, they were going before they were gone. I adopt the two assumptions they wrote down but didn’t write, based on the unique pattern of my experiences, which began the day I was born to a protestant minister who had decorated the nursery without thinking to consult me on what color thread to use for the baby blanket I would be wrapped up in for the first year of life.

Like time spent in infancy, time spent in prison engenders the experience of being wrapped up in a blanket made of thread one didn’t choose. Aside from that metaphorical indulgence, however, infanthood and prisoner hood have little in common. The point is that we all, at least once, end up in places where we never meant to be. Right now is an example.

The winds that blow us into any place we experience are complex. Promises of gold and other falsities (and sometimes truths, but not in this case) impact the strength of an otherwise pure or natural wind force upon the one who was lied (or sometimes not) to, that is, the one being blown in whichever direction by external (i.e. any and all) forces.

The strength of these winds are not exclusively dependent on an individual’s free and natural will (as the little girl who wanted to play discovered one rainy day, nature has a tendency to ruin plans); nor is the intended route pre-selected by the traveler who wished to arrive somewhere of much relevance to wherever they actually end up, since most “viable” routes have already been outlined by maps and guidebooks, and if you don’t follow the signs, you’ll get pulled over and might end up in jail, or if they can’t stand you there, in an anthology of personal essays.

Since you were wondering how my route has managed to avoid both prison and any possible hope of publication, I tell you that I’ve ricocheted down a route with signs covered in select Bible passages (mostly the ones about loving your neighbor), lines from plays (mostly the ones about recognizing yourself in your neighbor), and intermittently, the odd hand-written poster that reads, “YOU CAN DO IT!”

I’ve picked up thread along the roadside. Interwoven in each stitch I’ve made in the random pattern I’ve been working on are those three words, all in caps, always with an exclamation point. Thanks, mom.

In light of my theatrical, religious, and broke international jet-fretting background, I am convinced that I and even my angel of a mother are capable of thinking, saying, or doing everything anyone else has ever done (“good” or “bad”), though the breadth of our capabilities become fewer and fewer everyday as we gravitate (or are gravitated) toward a particular zone of habit or behavior. (If it isn’t already clear: for the purposes of this paper, physics should be understood as subject to the forces of money or lack thereof; cultural perceptions on gender; skin color; and maybe one’s weight, although it’s a weak indicator since it fluctuates almost as much as does one’s “nature” and unshakable convictions).

Since I’ve just incriminated myself and the woman dearest to me in the world by admitting we’re human (and thus potentially mass murderers), I’ll now share my inclination to consider crime (particularly violent crime) a symptom of a society that fails to provide “legitimate” routes (or means to an end) that are equally accessible to everybody. There are too many discriminatory tolls and too few EZ-passes. Lines are annoying; prisons, except for those who have to go there, are not.

I acknowledge and respect the fact that prisons are an excellent solution to the question of rush hour traffic. But whether we “get rid of,” “put away,” “serve justice to,” or “euphemistically from our Garden of Righteous Eden boot out” those deemed “offenders,” we may ease the pain of families of those deemed “victims,” if transiently. We may ease the fear of EZ-pass holders anticipating a possible merge with the lane of reckless drivers on the route ahead, if superficially. The noblest potential of a perfect criminal justice system that involves incarceration is a negative peace, where there is no physical violence to be seen, at least from the observation deck (whose eight-dollar admission fee is subject to change). In a perfect version of this (inherently flawed) system, those who might resort to violence in order to attain some otherwise unattainable end (i.e. those with little power over the forces that control physics, as listed above) are stripped of what little appreciable power they previously had, most rights, and any opportunity to affect most other people in any way, although the rest of us don’t have to wait in any annoying lines (unless you go to the post office, whose debasement deserves a list of its very own and which I will write before your next birthday). In short, those who threaten to or do destabilize existing power structures are deleted from those structures. Everyone who counts wins.

Until we started counting those who don’t count because we had to figure out how to fit them all into X number of X by X spaces. And we needed to create jobs for people who might otherwise resort to robbery because when the new employees counted those who don’t count, they realized most of them had resorted to robbery because they couldn’t find a job, income to feed their baby or pay for birth control or buy drugs that would convince them for a moment that their lives didn’t suck. Okay, they might be people too. But we can’t turn back time. What’s done is done. Victims have been scarred. Offenders have been sentenced. Most importantly, the Constitution has been written. Those who try to ratify the Constitution risk frustrations of even greater magnitude than those who try to learn anything conclusive from this essay.

Clearly, the prevalence of violent crime is the fault of everyone except those who actually perpetrate it. Unless we’re talking about non-criminal violence perpetrated by the keepers of justice, such as beating or raping institutionalized offenders and administering (you guessed it!) the death penalty, in which case it is everyone’s fault but the victim’s.

You may have (correctly) guessed that I have never met a so-called “institutionalized violent offender,” or a victim of a violent crime that was handled by the justice system. It is with this disclaimer out of mind that I continue with the claim that I know exactly what I’m talking about.

The death penalty implies that when one is inaugurated as a Judge, he is simultaneously inaugurated as a prophet of God’s will and (I welcome submissions of an equally accurate synonym) judgment. This is even more abominably offensive than the consideration that a Judge’s breath, which smells of pesto from the turkey sandwich he had for lunch, should blow harder, and thus push us more bumptiously in one direction or another, than any mother natural wind. Even Adam and Eve were blown out of an enclosed perimeter. To fiddle around with a system of blowing someone in to an enclosed perimeter suggests the fiddler was born, at most, six days ago, and therefore should not be credited with the charge of judging even the issue of which color thread would be best for his own baby blanket.

With this in mind, let me be clear: I don’t know anyone who is in prison and whose presence there benefits anyone as I don’t know anyone who is in prison at all; but I do know people who are not in prison and whose presence there would benefit them, me, society, and, most importantly, my own personal vendettas.

If you weren’t convinced, this latest statement proves the validity of my list of charges entirely. Clearly, I and we are all crazy floozies who do nothing more than drift about in demented gusts of invisible nonsense and the occasional (out)burst of childish vengeance and exceptionalism. Thus, we are all unfit to judge the soundness or suitability of any other human in any context unless we realize we’re crazy and subsequently gain legitimacy, which those who run the criminal justice system in this country have not done and I have, rendering the part of the list that indicates my suggestions for the improvement of the criminal justice system complete, although my uniquely sane mental disposition leads me to refuse the position you were about to offer me as dictator of the justice system, as in my enlightened state, I’d rather run around the goldmind in circles and get started on a list to send the post office.

But the moment passed; it was time to play. Jenga towers are not meant simply to be admired, but to climb and crash, go forth, and back; that’s why Hasbro doesn’t paint the blocks, or rub the naked wood to give them luster.

I went first. I was new to the game and did not consider a strategy, although I chose a piece, of course, toward the top. No need to tempt fate.

As the story goes, Jenga – at least the boxed version of it – is the great accomplishment of Britain’s Leslie Scott, whose immaculate conception of the game inspired the Hasbro version in 1987. But the earliest version of what is now called Jenga, originated in Africa.

When Scott received a gift of wooden blocks bought from a carpenter in Takaradi, Ghana, she had been there with her family for some time. She grew bored of the blocks quickly, unpainted and rough as they were, so the girl (who receives to this day, cunning praise in certain circles for her creative originality) bore “Takaradi Bricks” on a sunny day in 1974.

Eventually, the British caught wind of Scott’s brainchild and claimed it as their own. Soon after, it was sailed to the United States, rechristened an American tradition, and manufactured for sale there, since history repeats itself, and Scott was at school in Oxford when she took out the copyright; although this latter part was by chance.

The man in Takaradi was not available for comment, though in 1978, the truth came out and “Takaradi Bricks” was finally unveiled as an ancient African tradition. The purveyors of truth, Jeff and Pattie Parsons, of England and the United States, respectively, have since sold the game “Ta-Ka-Radi!” by mail order from their Maine home, through a partnership with Lands’ End. Eternally loyal to their principles, the couple recently developed a Kwanzaa edition.

Both (“)Original(”) and Kwanzaa Ta-Ka-Radi! are great family fun, Jeff wrote; but the customized editions are a great corporate gift – since 1984. Or thereabouts.
Twenty five years later, in 2009, it was my turn again. I poked a left-center block gently; it glided swiftly out of the tower and fell to the floor. I picked it up and placed it carefully on top of the tower. The reorganization was successful. Nothing fell, nothing lost.

Jenga translates to “fall” from Swahili, which is not and never was spoken in or near Ghana. Other linguistic interpretations of the game engender more causal reasoning: the Spanish call the game “make fall.” But what make fall? In Hebrew, it’s “avalanche;” in Portuguese, “earthquake.” In Denmark, they call it “klutz tower.”

They would.

Before I knew it, the third turn was upon me. I wasn’t worried; I remembered that three is a lucky number in every culture or, at the very least, every civilized one, because God is a trinity. I pushed one of the blocks on the right side, which ended up being the wrong side, and it all fell down before I could even move my finger or curse the Lord for slacking.

The tower I had built with such assiduity was in shambles, and I was the loser. The person immediately beside me was the winner. It says so in the rulebook, above the bullet-point on good sportsmanship.

We play again, of course, but I won’t stack it this time. It’s frustrating when people muddle with what you’ve built and make it all fall down, especially when you lose. Let the winner build her own tower for us to ruin for sport; when it falls, I won’t care. It’s just a game when someone else tower topples, even if I pulled the piece that made it fall. “Losing” doesn’t feel so bad when you haven’t actually lost anything; I wouldn’t build the tower so I’d know I wouldn’t lose. Problem solved. The game goes on.

I actually ended up losing that round, too. I really didn’t care; the game may have gone on, but I wasn’t really playing.

In the beginning, there are flights: 18 levels of three blocks each. While there are always 54 pieces in a Jenga tower, the number of levels increases, as players remove blocks from lower parts of the tower and place them on the very top. The highest tower ever recorded at a Jenga tournament was forty (and two-thirds) levels high.

The victor, Robert Grebler, reached similarly successful heights in other unrelated, but nonetheless passionate aspirations, when he was granted the U.S. copyright to Jenga in 1987 and subsequently made $400 million in twenty years.

Grebler gives interviews, but I didn’t want to distract a stressed businessman. Furthermore, after a frustrating bout of phone tag with everyone except the carpenter from Takaradi, I didn’t want to spend any more time guessing and testing unlisted phone numbers to find him; and the police indicated that if I couldn’t help it, they had two-to-five ideas about other ways I could spend my time. So, as far as the Internet and I know, Grebler is still an inventor (though he hasn’t put together a successful invention since his application for the Jenga copyright in 1986; but like the man in Takaradi’s wife, we are holding our breath).

The carpenter in Takaradi is, as far as we know, working in the tobacco industry (it’s the city’s largest, after timber exploirtation and shipbuilding). According to statistics, Takaradi’s major imports are conditional foreign aid and AIDS.

Speaking of which, my playmates and I had to get to work too. We started to put the pieces away and realized we had been playing three blocks short of 54.

We figured we hadn’t noticed the omission because a whole level was absent: had we been missing one, or two, or four or five blocks, we would have figured this out earlier; but since they were three, there was nothing to suggest that anything should be there at all. We hadn’t counted or questioned what we saw; in fact, it didn’t occur to anyone to do so. We took it for granted that the tower was complete, and the eighteenth level was forgotten. And the game went on.

And so it goes. Humans will grasp pieces of a person and move them around. It may be with with, or without, their consent. But you have all the pieces, all the time. They move around, yet it’s rare for them to move away.

But: the blocks at the bottom are different. You can’t rearrange them, because they’re the ones that support everything else. Through the pushing and pulling, the poking and piling, the blocks on the lowest level sustain ones’ Tower of tremendous preciousness. If, and when those are removed – even if just for a second – everything collapses. It may happen that a tower is damaged when a middle block is removed; perhaps as many as the top ten levels will tumble. But when the bottom goes, it all falls down. It implodes, and all that was precious, becomes debris. It is not rock bottom; it’s ground zero.

When you begin to rebuild, hopefully you’ve kept track since the debuild, and remember which three blocks were undependable at the bottom. You hope you’ve been reasonable while considering whether one of them deserves a second chance there. You hope there are other blocks you can trust, blocks that are worthy of the position. You hope everything didn’t get so messed up in the crash that you can’t figure out which blocks were at the bottom to begin with. You hope you will see – or at least feel – your way through the mess, and don’t need to waste time speculating or crying amid the chaos.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds: sometimes players ignore architectural concerns and rush to rebuild a tower – any tower – in order to avoid sorting out the complications of the previous one. They’ll toss the blocks in a jumble before restacking them, without paying mind to which is which and why and what make fall. This frantic strategy is so common that Jenga blocks come with a plastic loading tray.

Other times, though, players have to take a while – sometimes a very long while – to ascertain if they even still have all the pieces. After all that, they have to figure out where everything goes, because with 54 pieces to deal with, you’ll never remember where everything was; though you’ll remember where you hid the three, or six or nine blocks you might wish to be rid of. And at the end of the day, the blocks all look the same – although, if you pay attention, they feel different. But as Leslie Scott and everyone with whom you went to middle school established: unpainted, lusterless things have never been instinctive attention-getters; that’s why Hasbro impresses so much color and shine on the box.

My choice to include real characters is centered in my own judgment, which considers such inclusions paramount to my story.

In order to protect the sanctuary of what is here called, “Honteora,” I have altered the names of people and place.

The Red Barn

In the 17th century the Dutch called it The Catskills. Americans unacquainted with the place may today call it Upstate New York. But the folks who named it Honteora Park left a legacy in 1887: to the people they touched, Honteora Park is an historic community in the Hills of the Sky.

It began in 1887 as an artist’s respite, this place in the mountains, and hosted the likes of Mark Twain, who left a plaque with his name on the house where he stayed in the summer. There were other, lesser known artists, too. They’re the ones who created the great paintings that still hang in the old houses. For generations, these paintings have watched over their homes after leaves have turned brown and families have turned back to the city.

As is each painting, Honteora’s antique houses are named: Spruce Knoll, 1842; Penny Royal, 1828; The Yellow Farmhouse, 1832; The Gray Stable, 1835; The Red Barn, 1836. The names are never forgotten, but in 2009 their nicknames are: the Parkers, the Dowleys, the Lacaglias, the Hynes, the Rubeys, respectively. Although Mr. Twain slept in Penny Royal long before a Dowley ever did, and even Mr. Navis beat the Parkers by at least a decade. By the time Navis sold them the place, dozens of renters had dried their ski socks on the mantle of Spruce Knoll.

A hundred and sixty years before, perhaps after the artists but certainly before the snowboarders, Mr. Sonvery slept in the Farmhouse. His horses snorted in the gray stable, the pigs mucked about the Red Barn, and this trinity was worth more than the little stone church ever collected at offering.

When the 19th century turned 20, Honteora hired a staff and collected member dues. The farmhouse gave way to a field house, the grassy cropland became a golf course, and a pool popped up where the ponies once were.  And still the paintings hung: in the field house, in the golf shack, and anywhere else there were walls.

When Mr. Sonvery died someone bought his yellow house, but we’ve forgotten his name as thoroughly as he’s forgotten the dilapidated farmhouse.  Marie Hynes bought the Sonvery barn and stable in the 1960s. She cleared out the hay, put in some beds, and installed a bathroom. Every summer at Honteora’s annual art show, the Hynes’ admired the paintings their neighbors had completed that winter and wondered who would bid each piece into their home this year.

In those summers, Charlotte Hynes slept in her bed at the Red Barn. Her father died in a hunting accident one year, and she stopped going to Honteora after that. Her mother, Mary, started renting whichever barn or stable anyone wanted to stay in, and spent her summers alone in the other. Some years neither house rented. The Red Barn sank and the weeds rose up over the steps. The planks started falling, the pipes froze, and the bread got moldy. When it smelled like pigs again, a man from the city bought the Red Barn.

Some saw his investment as crazy. Others viewed his purchase with admiration, for this man was endowed with the same unique spirit that Honteorans so loved in Mark Twain: the spirit that finds beauty, and seeks meaning, in idiosyncrasies.

The house was cold by the time he bought it in 1993, but not just because it wasn’t winterized. It was furnished with beds that hadn’t been slept in; the floorboards had not been danced on; and no one had taken a bath in the spotty tub since Char was a child, except the spiders. Even the mice had moved.

But the man was undaunted when he moved in with his family: his wife, three kids, and a dog, who were also crazy in love with this small, smelly old red barn. Every weekend, they all piled into a rental car for a family outing at the Home Depot. The idiosyncratic man, and his equally exceptional wife, looked at light switches in the front, the children made forts with empty refrigerator boxes in the back, and the dog drooled on the car seat, which was perfect for complaining on the ride back to their apartment in the city. Everyone loved to hate Home Depot. Through this love, the small barn became cozy; the smelly barn adopted the fresh scent of lumber; and an old barn became their new home.

There was a fireplace, and a wood-burning stove. The windows were dressed with off-white ruffled curtains. The bathtub looked like it could be bathed in. Bread came and went without getting moldy. The mice moved in, and then finally the family lived there, when they could live and not work: weekends, summers, winters, rainy days. The rainiest days were spent in a rocking chair beside the fire in the mans’ wives’ arms. And though it was raining, it was warm. And the man, whose love for this home no longer seemed crazy, patched up the holes in the roof.

In 1995, when the roof was patched and the heaters were lit, the family would pile into the wood-paneled 1976 Chevy station wagon given to them by the formerly crazy man’s father-in-law, and drive to the local antique shops an hour away. Broken chairs, faded postcards, bent spoons, rusty measuring cups, mason jars, and handkerchiefs, became wall hangings, water glasses, napkins, and centerpieces. The Red Barn didn’t need many of the great paintings from Honteora’s less known artists; who would after discovering a pair of ancient snowshoes and a nail?

After spending years in the lighting department at Home Depot, the man made a chandelier out of a wagon wheel he put on its side, using bronze candleholders he’d shaped to fit the circumference and a pulley he roped through the center. His wife found three soap stones at Hildy’s Antiques; she left them to warm on the wood-burning stove, and when they were hot, the man would wrap the soap stones in towels and put them inside his children’s beds when they returned from the slopes, which they loved.

The smell of fresh lumber mixed with burnt logs and, it seemed, the family was happy. Their apartment in the city was where they hung their hats five, sometimes seven days a week; but the Red Barn was the place that held their hearts, always. When her mother smiled, the girl thought they held one another in their hearts, always.

The man was an architect and he carved a secret door between the two boys’ closet and the girls’ closet. At night, the boys snuck to their sisters room. In the big closet under the stairs, where someone had mysteriously written (you could see if you looked up), “John was here” in sharpie in the olden days, the children built a hotel room by converting a trunk to a bed. The girl snuck in cookies and, once, grape soda from the pantry for room service. Henry slept in the trunk since he was the smallest. When he wouldn’t, the trunk became a table, and the closet was a restaurant. When the trunk went to camp with the oldest boy for a week one summer, the closet was a sweets store that sold cookies for free. The children were always caught and never reprimanded for their late-night sneakiness; the man had built the secret door, after all.

When the girl was old enough to count how many cookies she ate in one sitting, the children, who were no longer children, snuck out her window to meet the objects of their flirtation at the lake below the golf course. They always covered for each other, and each was caught but once; although the distinct marks on her window box betray that they did this from the time the girl wore sneakers to the time she wore heels, and didn’t have a curfew.

When one of the objects of her flirtation became the object of her love, she spent weekends at the Red Barn with him alone, and slept in his arms on the faux bearskin blanket in front of the fire. And when the object of her flirtation that had become the object of her love became the object of her devastation and her heart fell to pieces, the Red Barn still stood, protecting the piece she had let it hold on to for safekeeping. And the man who was an architect designed the vestry in the stone church just for her, for the day she would be married to a man who deserved her. Other brides would use it before, but she would always know it was hers because the crazy man who loved her madly told her so. And the girl believed in love.

And then one day when the girl was a woman, her mother told the particular man that she no longer wanted to be his particular woman. Her heart sank deeper than the Red Barn ever had, and the girl who was a woman struggled to believe. She cried as she had in the days of the secret door. She cried for the loss of the secret door, for the space below the staircase, for the soap stones, for the mice. To hide her childish tears she crept quietly, as she had many times before, into the closet beneath the stairs that had been converted to a hotel room, a restaurant, a store. She sat on the trunk that, in that moment, was nothing more than a trunk. Ahead, now at eye level, scrawled in sharpie, she saw, “John was here.” And the note from the olden days was no longer mysterious.

Others had used the closet before her, and others would use it still. But she would always knew it was hers, because the crazy man who was an architect who loved her madly had built it for her, and her brothers, and the crazy woman who made sure the bread was never moldy, in the barn that had housed pigs and renters and widows and spiders and mice. The crazy man loved them so madly that out of the broken planks, frozen pipes, shoddy shingles and weeds, he’d built their home. And all the while, John was here. Like the paintings that hung in the field house beside the newer ones, he’d never left.

“I was here,” she told the walls. “We were, here.”

And she believed.

Back in Philly, the birds are on holiday in Florida and the leaves flew away. Snow sticks to my brown coat. I consider the possibility that the world has gone mad when snow embraces processed wool instead of the fluff of its kin; and then the possibility that I have gone mad in thinking that snow could mistake a sheep for a charlatan.

Maybe the snow sees it for what it is and lovingly embraces it anyway. Maybe it’s hiding this quack of a coat in the closet at a party to which it wasn’t invited but for countless reasons cannot leave. One of them is the blizzard outside. “Lovely cut!” yells a passerby. The coat falls out of the closet; I almost keel over with it, suddenly exposed, terrified, self-conscious of my visibility, of the absurdity of this aimless meander to somewhere. I’ve been walking in circles on a single square of sidewalk. I halt.

Which way to the woods?

Where aren’t the humans? All around the snow is covered in their trudge prints. I spin around, slowly, awkwardly scouring the rumpled sheet of white for a smooth part to trudge myself. When I spot someone looking at me, I wave at an invisible person behind her to justify my spastic loitering. I have no sense of direction; I’m not directionless.

Yet here, if one isn’t going somewhere quickly, she isn’t going anywhere at all, except maybe out of her mind.

I could go to Starbucks, the mall, the gas station: destinations unworthy of a drive, or a walk through traffic or empty roads, no. On this walk, no edifice of grandeur or deplorability will move my independent heart or hamstrings – “Love the coat!” – which stretch and contract before my feet find the pavement again.

It is clear that the sidewalk was a hopeless place to start.

So I take to the unpaved path, scuttling around the corner and down the block, make a left, under the arch, down the lane and fifteen feet to the left of the sidewalk, where there are no buildings for meters.

Finally among the trees, feet facing nature (“Great coat!”) I admire the mathematical capacities of man:

Alice wants to position 20 trees in two lines that run parallel to the length of a 200’ boa constrictor, rigor mortim. If she spaces the trees evenly along the two lines, how many feet of Astro Turf must she buy to place between each tree? If each foot of AstroTurf costs one dollar on sale this week only, does anything else matter?

I was always awful at math. Even now I don’t understand why the multiple choices are nowhere near the answer I arrive at:

Choice (#@%it!&*(?):
These trees were born, and died in the place I cannot seem to find.

In times like these I almost wish I could understand directions; but the sense would be arbitrary in this case, since dead trees can’t talk.

I cannot ask any human for directions; “Can you help me find my own non-path that leads to the woods that only I am destined to discover?”

Exactly.

I’m tempted to blame Alice and AstroTurf – and why not math, while we’re at it – for this dilemma; how frustrating to know where I am going, and nothing of how to get there!

Looking on the footprints that surround, weaving through the replanted (but never truly revived) trees, I know only that these paths are not mine. I am tempted to submit to the standstill.

Instead, I take a step northward, or perhaps southward (and possibly neither), and hear the unmistakable silence of an infinitesimal snow ridge underfoot.

I fit in this space of unruffled white, the untouched crease between two footprints, which is as wide as a whisker. I discover, in fact, that there is room for a hundred more of me to march there: one-by-one or ten-by-ten, hurrah, hurrah; or six-by-negative-fourteen or so, hurrah, hurrah! And then reason bursts into a dialogical song without meter:

Here! Here it is, the starting point! Now! Walk to the woods!

How can I, if I see the snow ahead and behind, is trodden?

Walk to the woods! Choose a direction!

I have no sense of direction!

And directions never made sense!

Now you’re talkin’!

I agree with myself and march in the direction of around. I dance on the footprints that do or don’t lead to my woods. I lay, stretch and spread, impressing the snow with my angelic form.

Dancing, I cannot avoid gliding atop footprints. I swish, and swoop, and am impressed by the exhibits of angelic formidableness I discover in the snow along the sashay.

There are snow angels everywhere today; maybe more angels than footprints. In my surprise, I make a divinely spontaneous resolution: I shall embrace both man and mountebank and never be hungry again! I shall never mistake the one for the other, despite their indistinguishable outward appearances, and similarly invisible apparitions. I will not be fooled by their mutually manufactured exteriors (which pose as strong, as bark, as if there is nowhere to grow but up), and feel their weakness; their softness; their sense that there is everywhere to go but who knowhere, hoping only not to be sheared down before…

I don’t only feel it; I recognize it: the terror that the final tribute could be, “Timber!”

I stiffen. If a tree is cut down and no one, save the soul holding the ax, is there, and he isn’t listening, does it make a sound? Or is it forgotten?

Where the heck is Alice? Won’t she come recreate the tree? If not into the same as it was before, perhaps as a cabin, or a tepee?

What if Alice published a math problem because she is actually bad at math? What if she builds this log cabin ill-advisedly on a lot the size of a fireplace, and spaces the forgotten tree unevenly among the others?

Will the tree who fell unheard burn out beneath the weight of the other trees, who stifle her luminescence until only her ashes remain?

Just then, I see Alice on the ground a few yards in front of me, thrashing about in the snow. Before I can approach her, she is gone off to Home Depot for the AstroTurf.

I see the outline she’s left impressed in the midst of this field of slush. Despite the messy footprints, despite the AstroTurf, despite the negligent man with an ax, despite math, and the weather: here is another admirable exhibit of man and mountebank’s angelic mould. I jump up, and spin, dancing with a wild recklessness that I won’t let wither despite inklings of future rottenness. This is my direction.

The woods are everywhere; I’ll find mine eventually as I dance, whirling like a dervish: dizzily, drunkenly, deliberately discovering, other’s woods, other’s paths that do not stand in my way, but are on the way. I’ll swivel and gambol, here and there, and up and down and in and out and rounding and bounding; sometimes frowning, but always crowning, the wonders of this world.

I’ve no sense of direction; I am not directionless. I was a dancer all along.