Gimel reappears!
At first I saw him a shadow, movement, an eddy in spacetime. Then, form: it looked for all the world like Gimel, grown, spectral, familiar. Son of Aleph and Bet who, when I first saw him was a gangly adolescent, trailing his mother uncertainly as she watchfully crossed the intersection at Bay and Larkin that midnight, years ago now.
Alone this time, he stopped to consider me, who had also stopped to watch. Turned to face me warily, curious, wondering what the movement meant as I slowly lifted my iPhone hands to render a capture, natural as breathing. Still lanky, the night creature bore all the features of an urban survivor: compact, sinuous, sharply intelligent, eyes like arrows on a taut bow, alive.
Gimel photograph 1 of 4
It was less than a minute all told, but it was a lifetime of a reconnection, there at the cusp of Van Ness and Francisco, on the southwestern corner of the Galileo Academy of Science & Technology at 11:38 PM towards the end of my late-night constitutional, as I headed home. It was also a recollection, the memory of the coyote's parents fresh again in my imagination after all this time, even as I wondered about their respective fates.
First he was a moving blur, like a piece of trivium faltering in the chill foggy current of night air, then it resolved into him — a face in front of the syntax of school sidewalk architecture, an elf-wolf, a scimitar like the dark new moon turning back round to form, a trickster with an infinity of stories to tell and not-tell, a reification of evolution itself. My heart was made glad to see Gimel again.
[ And, like the first time I saw him, there was a Witness hanging about an intersection away... ]
