Reception

No wonder we don't have a pigeon problem at the museum anymore. I watched the Peregrine Falcon that lives atop a building across the way take one in mid-flight. A stunning piece of work. Hit it like a train, broke its neck, knocked it to the ground; then calmly carried it behind a bush, ate everything but the feathers in about ten minutes. Before I set up for the High School reception I finally had a chance to clean the main gallery floor, should just have to clean the back hallway tomorrow, where snacks and pop were served. This weather is supposed to hold for a couple of days, so I drive in with more supplies this afternoon and make plans to do a major laundry on Saturday. There's a car named for Mississippi John Hurt's home town, Avalon. Bought some banty chickens from one of his relatives. He wrote a great song about the town, a sense of place, with that terrific almost slack Delta Blues guitar. I need a better radio unit, that'll play tapes and CD's. I taped hundreds of hours of blues from the U of Miss NPR station, a once a week show, especially, a couple of hours from the archives. BB King gave his vinyl collection to The Center For Southern Studies there, like 20 thousand records. I love the blues. Big Roy took me to a roadhouse once, in either Sidon or Cruger, black delta towns. In your wildest imagining, really. Abject poverty and tar-paper shacks. There was a pretty good group, four of the them, the singer didn't play an instrument, but he was good, a whiskey baritone with good phrasing. He had a rowdy room well under control. I stayed close to Roy. There was some dancing, in a small space cleared between cobbed together tables, couples that kind of slinked together. Roy didn't drink much, so he always drove us in his old pick-up, and I could have a few. Once or twice, I wanted to dance, but he held me back. One time at a place in Tcuhla, an attractive woman asked me to dance, and Roy ran her off. On the way home I asked him what that was all about. He mentioned diseases that neither of us could pronounce. Melanie had given me a bad case of crabs, she had gotten from John, and I nodded to Roy, before napping, and thanked him.