Last Minute

Meant an extra trip to town, the one day in twelve that I didn't need to go, but really didn't feel like taking my laundry to work and going to the laundromat after. Besides, I wanted to check on Lily at the museum, last day of submissions for the show, and sure enough, almost as many pieces in four hours as the previous four days. Sara came in, just before closing, and we agreed that we now easily had a show. At the laundromat I helped a young mother fold sheets, she allowed that her husband had never helped her fold sheets, she may have been flirting. I taught her young son (8) to do a cat's cradle. He was amazed. Going into town, stopped at the 2nd Street Dairy Barn and got a footer with sauce, mustard and cheese, ate it below the floodwall, walking the edge of the second terrace above the river. Everything we need to finish the Wrack Show is trapped among the somehow living trees that grow there, Ohio River log jams, down on the first terrace. There's a language to wrack and I'm learning it. You can look at a specific accumulation and figure out why it ended up where and how it is. Wrack Detective. The best pedestal stumps are lined upright at the river's edge, seats for night cat-fishermen, using deep-sea rigs with chicken parts on large hooks, fishing for lunker catfish, 50, 60 pounds, that they either release (bottom feeders in a sewer) or put in a pool in a clear creek or run, to clean out for a week or two, feeding them cornmeal. I love these people, I love their stories, it was a near thing for me, to leave the rivers of my youth, pursuing a different education, I might well have become a kind of Harlan Hubbard of the St. Johns River in north Florida, I loved being on the water. My dad and I would start drinking beer early in the morning, just after breakfast (scrambled eggs in a jar on white bread) he'd say something like -is it time yet?- and I'd crack us a couple. We'd fish all day, whatever the fish of the season, never get quite drunk, and talk about everything. As I got older, after they had bought me a set of encyclopedias, I'd have dad scull me into a pod of lily-pads, so I could look closely at the blossoms. I still remember the smell, heavy and floral, danforth green, frog shit. Being a medic, he was cool on creek-side injuries, removing lures from flesh, cutting out hooks, I can't do it, last time dad and I fished together, in Colorado, he got a hook embedded and I couldn't do it, a guy from up the creek volunteered and I turned my back. Talk about easily distracted. This show is huge and D and I will walk many miles in the coming days. I'm sure you'll hear about it, what I realized today is how much I care. I'm fucking there on the one day I don't have to be there, because I want to see the stuff, SHOW ME THE STUFF, why Sara comes in, to see. Yes, we have a show. Now, the jury is a single judge, we can only slightly influence by position and lighting, what he or she thinks. We agree to meet an hour early, manipulate things. Hey, we don't want to be embarassed. What he thought he saw. Tomorrow, rejects become an issue, I have to tell them something. I'll fall back on Basho, tell them something cryptic. Response, anything, something, what is actually meant. It's difficult for me, trying to talk. Not like it comes natural. To tell then they are rejected: a lizard comes into a bar.