There are some days where I notice things more, feel things more, where the trees are a little greener, where everything turns to pattern, where I can�t shut off the powers of observation. On these days, if I do manage to escape the constant noticing of things, it is only to escape so deeply into something else as to be almost unrousable. Today, while waiting for the bus, I was so tired of all the cloud-flecked sunlight, the traffic, the patients going in and out of the hospital parading all their stories in front of me, that I retreated into the June Atlantic monthly, newly purchased for my husband, to such a degree that the person behind me in line had to shake me to tell me the bus had arrived while I was still in a factory in China. Lucky for me I work at an institution where to be lost in the clouds is to be part of the crowd.

At some point a number of years ago I talked to a shrink about days like this. Although I�d experienced them since I was a child, I had, for some reason, started to worry that they were a sign of something sinister, some undiagnosed mania for counting things and weaving the world together. They have such a different quality from other days. On days like this I think I can write novels or compose operas or draw a map of the city from my head, marking all the streets I�ve walked on. But no, said the shrink, it is likely just your brain needing a creative outlet after working. Perhaps. Today it is also a curious mixture of over-stimulation and exhaustion that reduces my recall to a jumble of impressions, my day as collage.

The morning news reporting from in front of a rocket � the kind astronauts fly to space�somewhere on my campus. I told AJ I�d look for it, but I wandered all around the campus and was unable to find it. A huge rocket! Attended by three astronauts in safety orange jump suits! And I can�t find it. Was I dreaming the news?

An elderly woman falling, spread-eagled, on her face on the Madison street bridge and passersby leaping toward her to help her up, cellphones drawn from hidden holsters in case medical assistance was required.

The scent of the block-long lilac hedge just before the playground with the breast-shaped fountain which, in honor of approaching summer, was lactating once more.

A student encountered chalking drawings on the path of a labyrinth with signs "LABYRINTH TODAY!"

The barefoot students wandering slowly, meditatively through the painted labyrinth in the grass of the quad outside my office like dancers in an invisible ballet.

The man with the salt and pepper beard and the Santa Claus belly wearing a sandwichboard reading "CIRCUMCISION IS NOT A BIRTH DEFECT" who was pacing in front of the college bookstore.

Conversations overheard on the bus: "The republicans don�t know what they're talking about." "They have shrimp as big as your head!" "The ex was a truck driver, so he knew all the good restaurants. That�s about the only good thing I got from that relationship."

And images of last Wednesday when, driving through the southwest side of Chicago, a young boy yelled invisibly outside the thick green windows of the bus as it paused at a stoplight outside a busy McDonald�s and, with a look of pure hate on his face, hurled a brick at the window. It made a loud pop, like a gun being fired, like a champagne cork exploding from a bottle, but did no physical damage. But we shuddered to think of the boy � no more than twelve � who hurled the brick, and of the brick that clattered back to the street, back to the boy�s hand, still warm and dusty from the street. He was young enough that he shouldn�t know that kind of hate. Old enough to know better, to know that bricks do not belong in the space between boys and bus windows. I looked for the brick when we drove by today. It, like the boy, was gone. Disappeared, maybe, on the missing rocket, seduced by the promise of space travel and a new world.

[Second entry today. Click back for random admiration of Martha Graham]

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