breaking the habit

I have a bad habit.

Well, I have a lot of bad habits, but for the protection of my fragile ego, we will deal with only one this morning. And that habit is quoting myself. Not to others. To me.

I concluded yesterday's essay (stop and smell the violet) with what I thought was one of those toss-off lines whose life would end up in the folds of a Hallmark card. Speaking of the beauty that surrounds us here, I wrote: "They whisper in our ear that all pain is fleeting and that the beautiful things in life are just waiting for us to enjoy them."

On my evening walk past the treatment center where Oz is now living, I was barreling by a house when something caught my attention. The place appeared to be abandoned.

Grass and weeds had grown out to the middle of the street. The hot water heater looked as if it had suffered a calamitous fire. Nothing showed the recent loving hands of an owner. Boo Radley could have lived there. Long ago.

But it was not the abandoned soul of the house that caught my attention. Bamboo had grown up to the edge of the house. The border between the house and the vegetation was almost invisible.

I have long been fascinated by bamboo. There were several stands of bamboo in our neighborhood outside of Portland where I was growing up.

The largest was near my classmate Patsy Moffett's house. I do not know if it had escaped its landscaping job (as bamboo is wont to do) or if someone had planted it. But it thrived on the banks of a little stream that cut through the Moffett property. The type of delicate, but resilient, bamboo that boys would cut to make impromptu fishing rods.

My early morning paper route took me past that grove each day. I often stopped on my bicycle, like some mounted circuit-riding preacher, to listen to the birds and sundry furry creatures, who made their homes in the grove, start their idiosyncratic days.

But I think one incident has forever seared that place in my memory. While peeping in on the private lives of muskrats and finches, I heard a whooshing sound. When I glanced up, a line of fire arced across the sky and ended just over the top of the grove.

It was the first time I had experienced a meteor that close. It had been large enough to survive entry through Earth's atmosphere, but small enough to be consumed by friction.

Being the good junior citizen that I was, I contacted the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI). They sent out a staff member -- probably to humor the fantasies of a thirteen-year old boy. He did a cursory inspection of the property, and, as he expected from my description, found nothing.

He did tell me, though, that similar meteors burn up close to the Earth's surface frequently. Most go unnoticed because the daylight obscures them and most people are asleep during the night.

The chances are that what I saw was a meteor made solely of stone. Had it been a meteorite containing metals, a portion of it would have made it to the ground.

That made sense to me. If I had not had one of those jobs that require roaming about in the dark like a burglar, I would have been home in bed being attacked by our psychotic tomcat Rajah.

But there was no meteor to catch my attention yesterday. No muskrats. No finches. Just the memory-clotted bamboo. And it made me smile.

I started walking away when I remembered I had forgotten to take a photograph. What I saw when I turned around was what you see at the top of this essay. The house was not being taken over by just bamboo; it was being taken over by a tree.

Or so I thought. It took me a moment to realize that my first impression was correct. It is not a tree. It is guadua -- the green bamboo I appreciated in Colombia. And here is a prime example of it 2500 miles north of where I saw my first example. It turns out guadua grows as far north as northern Mexico.

I have probably walked by that grove hundreds of times on my daily walk, and I have never noticed that what I found so impressive in Colombia was right here in my neighborhood.

Maybe there is a reason I have not fully regained my energy. God sometimes sends us messages that we ignore. Until they are repeated and repeated and repeated again.

I think I have it now.

But there is no need for me to repeat the moral of yesterday's essay. It is for me today. And once again I repeat my quotations. To myself.