Something’s in the air. Not birds.
I’m talking about the cosmos. The coyotes have stopped howling in my part of Travis County. Someone took a picture of a gator in the Guadalupe River down by San Marcos. Lady Bird Lake has whitewater rapids. Something is in retrograde. Like a planet. I don’t know what that means but I heard someone say it the other day. Like “sheeeew, man, I’m so glad Mercury is out of retrograde. That was a close one.” I generally nod approval at times like this and look up as if to show my understanding that the planets are indeed “up” in direction.
But then something else odd happened. Automatic sliding doors stopped opening for me. Do you know how embarrassing it is when an automatic door that doesn’t open for you? You’re trying to get out the door and nearly walk into it when you realize the guy who works there is looking at you, grinning. You try walking back up to the door waving your arms and puffing your chest up to be bigger. It happens that way sometimes. It happened to me this week. Similarly, my mom can’t wear watches because they stop working on her wrist. I’m that way with automatic doors. But only now and then. It seems they know when I’m vulnerable. They know when something’s in retrograde.
I was in two places this month where the music suddenly stopped and everything went weird. At a Mexican restaurant the loud mariachi music went silent. All you could hear were utensils on plates. People looked around like they might be having a medical emergency, sticking their fingers in their ears.
I was at the X Games at the Circuit of the Americas with my son, Harlan, when the music stopped too. In a crowd of thousands. Dead quiet. No one happened to be talking at the moment the music stopped. We just stood there looking at each other. Then we went back to the only part of the X Games that seemed to captivate my son — Twiggy the waterskiing squirrel.
I don’t know what this has to do with anything but I do know that it’s weird. And what else is weird is how we communicate sometimes. Someone told me his son was 17 months old the other day. So about a year and a half. I told him my son was 1 foot 29 inches tall.
My daughter, Cerys, was talking a lot the other day as she tends to do when she is not sleeping.
“Bink, stop talking please.”
“But making sounds is how we hug.”
“Bink, please stop kicking me.”
“But kicking is how we say thank you in Spanish.”
See? Even something is off with my three-year-old daughter.
A few weeks ago, Harlan said “These are too sour, they make my eyes shake!” I looked at him just to make sure they weren’t shaking because I forgot and gave him Skittles with red food coloring again. They weren’t.
That same night I had a dream that I was in a crowd and people were pelting me with baseballs. Coincidentally, the next morning I walked out to my car and my neighbor across the street yelled “heads up” and threw a baseball at me.
And all the things happening are not negative. We decided to sell our house and move back to North Carolina. Days later we had two full price offers without ever listing it. The fact that we are leaving Austin due to my wife’s health could have been a disaster in many ways. But something’s in the air. It’s all working out splendidly. Obviously something’s gone out of retrograde. So onward we go into the vibes.
I just looked up when I wrote that, by the way.
jbrettdavis 