When Custer left, he said, "Don't change a thing.
I'll be right back."
We have added Chinese food and minivans,
but other than that...

Compass points. I don't know where this is going. It's a freeform ramble. No true north today. Just a need to spin some words out.

I've spent my adult life in New Orleans, Houston, Austin, and here, Kansas. I include in the era I term 'adult life' those places where I spent the college years, even though I didn't often behave like an adult.

I haven't traveled much. A few trips back east to visit the relatives in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and rural northeast Pennsylvania -- in spring the greenest place on the planet. The usual side trips to the usual monuments within a morning's drive of those places.

Some trips to Wyoming, Colorado, New and Old Mexico (another place to savor light), Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Iowa too, I guess, a state like Kansas that for many folks lies on the way to some other place. Kansans don't mind that others just pass through, and I suspect that Iowans don't either.

For a time years ago, I might have spent enough time in O'Hare to become eligible to vote in Chicago, but I understand they're pretty lax about that anyway, and in recent years, I haven't flown much.

When my parents lived in Milan for a few years, I was grown, had a life and career of my own to tend, and couldn't take the time to travel there.

Most of my life has unfolded here, in the town and state that I live in now. I was married here, my children were born here. Maybe I'll die here, a provincial goober. Not soon, I hope.

When I first moved here, the place seemed comfortable, and it still does. It was the first rural (rural-suburban, really I suppose) area I'd ever spent any time in. A slamming screen door kind of place in summer. One mile to the the river. Six miles to the reservoir. A few blocks to the Dairy Queen. Two miles to the pond. Five minutes on bicycle to the park or the pool. A good public library a mile away.

The state university down the street helps to civilize us, providing library resources, occasional theatrical, operatic and symphonic entertainments, athletic events, and acquaintances we might presume (wrongly, I've found) to be uncommon in towns as scant as this one. These were the windows before Windows and they still serve us well.

The town is small enough that not having been born here, and not having attended high school here, I remain an outsider, despite being fairly widely known in the area. But that's not a concern, and even if it were a concern it wouldn't really nudge this ramble in a new direction.

This [What 'this'?] has a place it wants to go, I think, about standing overlooking the Flint Hills one day, admiring at a distance their apparent softness, and chuckling at the outlanders who believe in the flatness of prairies, of Kansas in particular, without allowing for the variety that time creates. Compared to some other places in my geographic memory -- most of Long Island, the coastal plain of Texas and the near-deserts west of the Balcones Divide in Texas -- this land is positively, okay, not mountainous, but lumpy anyway.

And grander than I admit, as I just pulled that punch.

After the admiring, and the chuckling, and the comparing, another wisp of a thought insinuates itself into my day-to-day observation of a known landscape, a thought out of who-knows-where, a thought too wistful to be taken seriously, but dangerous nonetheless, because it might betray an ancient yearning. The wisp, perhaps an instinct, tells me that I'm not far enough West. Capitalized. The capitalized West that goes beyond a compass point, beyond even a region, all the way to a dream.

I don't know what I can make of this. Homo sapiens gazing over the savannah and wondering what's under that rock, what's across that river, what's beyond those hills. More than that though.

It's a dangerous and wonderful restlessness that tells me there's something to the west, there's something to the West, that doesn't exist here as I type these words while eating microwaved Chinese leftovers, while the breadmaker exhales the odor of home, the faith in yeast and wheat requited once again.

I could be grateful and satisfied. Instead, while the bread's aroma winds through the house, I think it's time to sell.

Westering. I don't know whose word that is. Not going to take the time to look it up. West though. Forty-niners, Joads. Going off into the sunset. The image suggests the particle nature of light. A light that bathes human cells in a way that is amniotic, nourishing, that make us flesh and light.

Hope.

An illusion of course, a trick of light and myth. The light of the West shines with the same flat midday anomie that appears elsewhere.

Hope persists anyway.

A few weeks ago, I forgot the name of a site that I had registered for. They sent no welcome letter, and I had cleaned out the cache that evening, so I had no way to recover the address. Yesterday they finally sent some mail. The site provides a way to create an online bookmarks page. I haven't investigated it, but I want to record the address of Blink before I forget it again, by crackey.

Now where'd I put my glasses?