Divination

Never much for tea leaves, but I can tell from the leaf-drifts which way the wind is blowing. Whenever I gut anything I always look closely at the liver, I'm not sure if that counts, since I'm mostly thinking about pate at that point. I ran out of horseradish jam and they actually had some roots at the store, so I bought one, some apple juice and some pectin. This day and age, of course, what you should do is go on line, do a little research, but I remembered my Mom's approach to making jam (she could make jam out of dirty sneakers): equal quantities of whatever ingredient and sugar, pectin, boil until it jells. It's not that I don't like recipes, I read them all the time, occasionally use one. But divination: if I'm really perplexed about something, I get out "The Joy Of Cooking" and randomly put my finger on a sentence. Usually it's something like 'mince the onion' and that's enough to pull me back from whatever edge I was walking. Like up the driveway. Sometimes, I swear, I feel like a Sherpa scaling Everest with a bunch of tourists. It's not too terrible, because I'm alive, moving about in the world, but when I first start walking the driveway, I wonder why I have to live this way. I've grown so used to isolation that I need the walk in to acclimate. Chances are I won't die. Walking in to my unfinished tar-paper shack. I got an MFA in Janitorial Studies, if you can believe that, and did post-doc work with mites. I have problems believing myself, but I suppose we all do. Here's a header. The phone rings and I almost don't answer it. Finally do, and it's my older daughter (consider the comparative) asking me to come visit, party with her friends. Chalk it up to whatever. It may be a kind of destiny, which I say with a certain amount of hesitancy, because I'm a nuts and bolts kind of guy. I do have to go and party with her friends. Besides, new horizons, a different set of ankles.

Tom

I make myself laugh, sometime today, trying to write what happened. It's hard to stay on top of this, the way the rock rolls downhill. Plowing new ground.