Preemptive Strike

Stayed in town for a couple of beers with D and Liz, haven't done that in almost a year, but Liz worked at the museum years ago and comes back to visit. Serious laughter. I told a couple of dog stories. Liz howled at my fixing roadkill with polenta for the dog. We talked about floods, graduate school, working in Chicago, the museum dynamic, everyone's health, everyone's children, The Wrack Show. A couple of beers and I had to go, fairly heavy rain so I knew I was going to park at the bottom of the hill and avoid the sleigh-ride tomorrow morning. Going in to do laundry, check with D about the membership brochure and various other things, resupply liquids. Yard work in the evening. I dream of a yard that is concrete, painted green, or, if I lived near Kim, would be completely bricked. This rain will accelerate the leafing, and is good for the morels. Excellent timing. Bonus at the grocery store, an 8 ounce smoked brie for just $2.99, remaindered, 'old', but hey, old cheese is good. I invent a finger-food that is to die for: cook sliced morels in butter, let them set, so that the butter re-solidifies, a spoonful on the cracker of your choice (I use saltines for everything), top with a spread of smoked brie that is out of date, run under the broiler. These will have you weeping. It's spring, excess sap, everything is leaking. I'm labile in the spring because I made it through another winter. And besides, it's beautiful, the return of color. Late February is so black-and-white. Stark. Then this, where everything explodes in a fucking rampage of color. D posits an interesting question about dying. Graduate students. He's taking a course in Buddhism, I hold my tongue, but the idea is enough to get me wondering. If there is no mind, and no body, what comes back? It's a shell game, and that's why fakirs run the show. Promises. Ass-holes doing their 'we pay too much taxes' are full of it; what we have is what we're given. Everything else is chaff. If I make some money, I pay taxes. I think we should all be taxed the same. No pork-barrel. Wrong phrase, but you know what I mean. There's so much we need to deconstruct. I did park at the bottom of the hill, popped an umbrella, did my Mary Poppins imitation, a little song-and-dance. Swirling spring rain in gusting wind, leaf litter caught in dust devils, all the pliable new growth bending to the cause. Liz called us, this place, the museum, laid-back, compared to Chicago, and I had to think about that, what it meant. Priorities, smell the roses. I move more slowly because I broke a toe, it only becomes a philosophical stand in hindsight. I tend toward slowing down because I'm older, an added benefit is that I notice things. It's not rocket science. The aging janitor, stooped from his years of service, moving slowly, notices a particular, very small, purple flower. The flower has always been there, but the haste of youth, and the speed of the world has always precluded looking down and walking slowly in the rain. It's not too awful, arriving home damp, a dog bouncing for its feed. Alone at last, I dismiss Little Sister with a sizable chunk of squirrel and polenta; an aspect, no, an aspic, from the real, no, the natural world. D intimates to Liz that I sleep with the dog, but that's not true. She has fleas. I never did a dog with fleas, after that one time with a lady bull-dog, I'd been drinking and I thought you said frog. Later, in the Emergency Room, I made up a story about a bear. I'm not sure they believed me. It doesn't matter.