Christopher Donahue

Zipping along in my car on a perfect summer day. The sky is an inexpressible blue. Windows down, the smell of pine is invigorating as I drive through the forest. The road is shadow-dappled by the verdant green leaves, and runs like a winding ribbon through the woods, or perhaps like a black-racer snake and the trees are the grass.

The car breaks into the open as the road parallels a small pond. Then it’s back into the forest. A dark, large shadow flashes over the car and is gone in an instant. I smile because I know. Sticking my head out the window into the rush of I look up and just glimpse through the trees an airliner flying low and perpendicular to the road, lining up for final approach.

With perfect synchronicity we race into the open again at a look-out area,  just as the big jet, flying perpendicular to the road, puts gear down and drops below us to land at the airport in the valley.

Eyes back on the road, we again race into the forest.

If only summer could last longer.

copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito

In the Vacation of My Mind…

I am a small boy on the beach at Cape Cod. My whole world is the sun and the sand and ocean. Everything is important, exciting  and fun – running to get back in the water, swimming with fins on, scanning the sea for ships, collecting shells, examining washed up fish…

I’m hiking in a Vermont woods. Glimpses of the valley start appearing through the trees and I’m excited to know I am getting higher up mountain. I stop and catch my breath, anticipating the view from the top and what a beautiful day it is…

I’m walking along the narrow cobblestone streets of a Tuscan hill town, searching for the cool interior of a church were I can view an obscure fresco by a Renaissance master…

I’m in a de Havilland Beaver float plane flying around Seattle with my wife, and marveling at the beauty of the Great Northwest on a rare, for there, sunny day…

In the vacation of my mind, I sure as heck ain’t at work!

copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito

Travel therapy has done me wonders.

A few weeks ago I was at the end of the road.  That same familiar, old road that goes around my neighborhood and takes me to work and back home again.  It’s startling to think our lives are spent in the same local places, going to work, coming home, going about your neighborhood, living the routine over and over again. Despite how interesting and fulfilling, or not, life might be, we all shuffle around on the same bit of turf doing our thing day after day. Even getaways out of town have become commonplace. The drive from Boston to Vermont has become as familiar as the back of my hand. Perhaps that’s why the seasons are important. They make the familiar new again, at least for a while and until that novelty wears off.

As for work, you can love what you do, but after a while that too becomes the same thing over and over again: New day, new people, new crisis, same old same old.

Then there is travel therapy.

Traveling reminds me that I still need to go down new roads, that I need everything to be different,  exciting , surprising…again.  It reacquaints me with my youth, when everything in the world was new and exciting and full of possibilities. The simple fun of just living life comes back as I go down new roads to new places. It doesn’t matter if the locals are all bored out of their minds going through their routines, from my perspective their world is exotic and intriguing.

Yes indeed, travel therapy reinvigorates me and helps me embrace my humdrum routine with new enthusiasm…until its effects wear off …again.

copyright Magnus Incognito 2015

Friday morning. I just wanted to get through a day of work and get the weekend started.

I got off the subway and started up the stairs to the street.   Suddenly, I noticed a really bad, disgusting smell.  The stink enveloped me. I looked around and noticed a  street person about five or six stairs ahead of me, making his way up to the street too.  The poor guy smelled horribly. The reek enveloped me, and was literally breathtaking. I couldn’t deal with the funk, or escape it, so  I turned around and went  back down the stairs to find another way out of the station.

Later that morning, I decided to treat myself to a simple pleasure to celebrate the end of the week— a whoopee-pie!  The snack-shop in the court house sells  delicious, freshly baked whoopee-pies so I  stopped in and bought one. I felt strongly about it.

I couldn’t wait to  bite in immediately.  Getting off the elevator I walked down the long hallway, greedily unwrapping that delicious pie on the fly. The tasty treat  was in my hand ready to be devoured .

I looked at the delicious whoopee pie when again I noticed a terrible smell.  I couldn’t take a bite with another foul cloud  enveloping me. I looked around and saw another poor, homeless soul shuffling along in the halls of justice.  I stuffed the pie im my raincoat pocket and went down a couple of floors to chow down.

This all got me to thinking: It had been a tough week, but my week was nothing compared to a week being homeless on the streets.

Maybe the next time I have a tough week, I’ll give a homeless person one of those whoopee-pies.

I’m sure they could use a Whoopee-Pie Friday!

copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito

April is drawing to a close. It’s been a busy month. Spring is finally getting underway, Orion the hunter is beginning to dip below the horizon, the buds are finally coming out and the grass is turning green. The cold weather is almost forgotten.

Yet just the other day, I ran into Winter.  I was at the doctor’s for a checkup. Walking back to my car, I looked up and there he was.  At first, I didn’t even recognize him . He didn’t look to well. After  tormenting the Northeast with record setting snow falls and gale-force winds for three months,  he didn’t look like the fearsome force of nature  he used to be.

He was reduced to a dirty pile of snow, tucked in a corner near a parking garage. A forlorn shadowy spot upon which the sun rarely, if ever shone. Getting smaller by the day but still hanging on in mid-April.

I felt sorry for him and, for good luck or some other reason unclear even to me, I went over and touched that forlorn, harmless pile of snow.

With spring just starting, it was hard to believe that in six-months Old Man Winter would be back and we’d commence our yearly struggle yet again.

Best to forget all about that, he’ll be back soon enough.

copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito

In observance of April being National Poetry Month, I present this humble poem I composed this morning:

My Two Cats

My two cats

One kind of skinny

One kind of fat

I look quick and don’t know where they’re at!

My two cats

Happy National Poetry Month!

Copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito

It is bad enough complaining about winter during winter, but complaining about winter during spring should be illegal. Talk about March Madness. There should be a time-out called and the last week and a half gets a do-over.  We should be able to file a complaint. But alas, there is no recourse , no authority to appeal to remedy this meteorological injustice. The calendar says spring is ten days old here in New England, but winter lingers on.

But so do the lava-lamps!

Each year on the first day of winter, we put our lava-lamps in the front windows to light the way wayward travelers. Nothing defies the winter chill quite like glowing, slow-pulsing lava lamps.  Three months later, on the first day of spring, we take them down. But this year, the year of the winter that just won’t quit, we are breaking with tradition and leaving them up until spring finally does get here.

And that’s no April Fool’s!

copyright 2015 Magnus Incognito