G

G is for a lot of things but for today let's say G is for Gravity.

Because when I was oh let's say 12 I must have learned about Gravity, probably there was an inset on a corner of a page of a brown-paper-bag-dust-jacketed book. It must have been from some source less reputable, though, that there was, there in my 12 year old mind, the strangely potent word Vortex, that fascinating kind of scientific word with both a V and an X, its definition vaguely trailing behind.

The two ideas were there in my 12 year old mind, in my 12 year old brain inside my 12 year old body, inside a blue dodge van that hurtled what I imagined to be tens of thousands of miles from Akron to let's say Utah. They must have been there still beneath that tree, where on a family hike I found it slightly harder to stand from a crouch than it ought to have been.

This is the place, my 12 year old self thought. This is the Vortex, this is a glitch in the structure of Gravity and it has only this subtle effect: that it is slightly harder to stand from a crouch than it ought to be.

G is for Gravity but F is for Fishing pole, and as I recall it now, I guess I had one in segments in my backpack, the longest and most elastic of which arched like a Bow-flex between backpack and tree limb as I rose and fell, flush with the sense of the Momentous.