OUTSIDE THE AQUARIUM

Before electricity propagated and evolved quite as much as it has today, there was a simpler time. In my own life I refer to it as the Age of Books. This was before the Age of Marriage where I journey today. This was before the Age of the Army whose dark wisdom I learned and scarredly escaped. This was even before the Age of College, Cristine, and Wandering (which took up a very long time indeed).

In the Age of Books, everywhere was come to by foot or AC Transit and the count of places to be, they ended shortly past school, home, friends' houses and stores.

Among these few destinations stood the library at Claremont. It lighthoused solid and ancient, the most important bits of which were made of stone. As was its purpose, the inside existed larger than the outside. And I but a snapshot intersection to it, I had my steps memorized: Right, up the six steps, pull open the left doorside, two steps in and right 'til the end of the streetside wall. Crouch down I would and, never noticing that the city sounds had once again diminished fully from within the great vault, as always, there they were, the four books on salamanders, the same four books on frogs.
Some colored illustrations habited there of course. Quiet, stately behavior descriptions spoke from their paper trays as well, those as had been noticed by that time in society's' relations to and observations of the environments.

I read them.

I read them again; I read them again, and I read them again. For long moments I could exist so quietly and so in tune. Exist thinking of the Small Things, the beautiful things, creeping about in safe places: shadowed streams, mossy places under leaf boughs and stony undersides that hadn't any peerings by eyes but mine. Safe places. Safe places to rhyme with a separate peace, with the boundaries of ones' expanding and personal universe when all is good and stable. Words alone could take me there; Inspiration being what it is.

So once in this elevated state of mind, this state of mine alone, transcendental with a lower case t, I would leave the books akimbo on their great table slab and fix gaze on the glass cased birds. There were two of them. Maybe three of them. Each one pressed out vacant air that would have cycled there. Each one elegantly stood, a glassed off, single brick of somewhere else's' reality. Bricks of clay you see, these stand stoically, stoning out shapes of places and forcing gazes to what is without them rather than within. But these, these were open to the gaze, entrancing, pulling eyes in deeper than to what is just there. Their glass edgings left off the quiet of the room and jeweler set the within. Beautiful. Still. Quiet moments of birds doing what birds must do in their hidden roosts and nests.

I could focus my mind to it, the owl's full piercing stare from its frozen moment perch. I could see it, see everything around it and understand it, just for that one slice of time, as a small thing in its place. The connection of what to where becoming momentarily clear and forever meaningful.

A final note. There at the bottom of the owls' case, beneath the creatures' nest, was a small little space where a mouse was tending her nest. She was as motionless as the owl above and all was so still that I in my youth, in the Age of Books, was the only one to spot her. The only one to see her as I stood outside the glass feeling the mystery, felling the wondrousness of it all.