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001012 Thursday navel gazing |
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On some days I arrive here with nothing to say, but I show up anyway, unable to resist the urge to be here. I don't know what distinguishes the times when I'm able to resist the urge from days such as today, when I'm not. Well, that was the way this entry was unfolding when the date in this hemisphere was October 11. It's the kind of opening waggle that in the past has led me to a discussion of the method of composing here, Notepad or Word, FrontPage or other. I've been back to Notepad for several weeks now, if that information is important. But I've set aside that stunning bit of italicized omphaloskepsis up there for another day. After reading that waggle, I scowled, abandoned writing, and turned to my trusty photo editor. Equipped with the photo editor, some long division, and a disk full of pictures from last night's excursion to a band concert at KSU (Bach and Sousa, as inseparable as peanut butter and lima beans), an outing Owen and I undertook to secure some extra credit for his band grade, I worked on some photos for future entries, taking my own advice from an earlier entry to try to prepare some of the photos in advance, like planting garlic in fall for next summer's sauces.
So, here I sit at home today, between school cycles, having spent these last few days reading little but the thudding, oompah Sousa cadences of student work, when my ear and eye have craved a swelling, soaring, helical fugue. Swathed in burgundy sweats, top and bottom, I am an unshaved, two-hundred pound seedless grape sitting at a keyboard, and all I remember of yesterday that matters here is a cool wind that swept east from the Rockies and crossed I-25 without looking both ways, buffeting a small, colorless Mazda pickup bound for points north � Laramie, Cheyenne, Helena, a name more than a place, but a name redolent of capitalized West � until, releasing the shaken pickup from a touch that was softer than a slap but firmer than a caress, the wind funneled itself along I-70 across the plains of arid, airy eastern Colorado, laughed at a state line and scoffed at a time zone, shooed the western birds from the eastern at the 100th meridian lest the field guides need revision, dusted the western Kansas hardpan that caps a gargling aquifer called Ogalallah, puffed at a stray bronze hair on avuncular Ike's statue in Abilene, and somewhere east of a place where rivers named Smoky Hill and Republican flow together, leaves on cottonwoods shivered. |
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