Night Moves

A couple of degrees, one way or the other. might make a difference, it's surprising, what we notice. I wake, in a sweat, and it's 80 degrees, not bad, really, but I close the windows and turn on the AC. I'm not, and I want to be, more comfortable, 78 would be good, 76 better, tossing and turning. Maybe it's not the temperature, per say, but a state of mind: I sweat, therefore I'm alive. A philosophical point. I don't pretend anything, I merely am. Blackbirds singing in the dead of night. My lighter gives out and I resort to kitchen matches that flare and burn my nose. Finally do get back to sleep for a couple of hours. D is out of pocket again, the last pick-up of dolls, in Athens. I finish the patch and repair, then touch-up paint the entire gallery. Another very hot day, 98 degrees, and there's the yearly street fair called River Days, and the yearly Rotary Club fish sandwich feed at the end or our street. Hundreds of people out in the hot sun. I lunch at the pub with the owners and John says he has a couple of sample bottles of a new Guinness product, a black lager, and asks me to join him after work. It's a good beer, but not as good as I'd expected, it being a Guinness and all. Friendly conversation down at the servers end of the bar, nice group of people. Hate to leave, but I need to get and cool the place enough to be able to write. Turning on to Mackletree, at least the wind is no longer hot. When I get to the State Forest, I slow to a crawl, looking at things. Where the hiking trail (40 miles, Mackletree is about mile 5) crosses the road there are two guys with big packs plopped on the verge. They look badly used. Wave me down. Long story short, they were going to do the whole trail, four days. They made it to Mackletree and no further. It's a tough trail and it was over 100 degrees in the sun. They were suffering heat prostration; nauseous, head-aches. I drove them back to their car. Gabriel and John. When we got to their Subaru we all rolled a smoke and talked. They asked me what I did and I told them that tomorrow I was going to be installing fully articulated eight foot tall dolls in the museum where I worked.That got their attention, but I really needed to get home, and I left it at that. What I do. It's after 9 before I get the house cool enough to turn on the computer, by then I've forgotten most of what I remembered. I start remembering on the drive home, usually; I don't see, or talk to anyone. I get to the house, I eat something, I read until I can fire up my black Dell, then I write until I go to sleep. Sometimes I listen to a Cello Suite, sometimes just a part of one, tonight it was the Allemande from Suite 5, I couldn't make sense of it, Casal's version was tentative, and clearly something was missing. I love Yo Yo Ma, but his recordings of the Suites don't excite the way others do, over all, but in this passage he's sublime. Makes sense. It's all about making sense, ultimately.