Naming

Got up to pee and checked the phone. I had a dial tone. Wow, I thought, someone is getting good overtime. Turned the AC off, it's 75 degrees outside. Sent some mail. That sense of shift in tense. Back to the present. I keep a large glass in the fridge, I wash it once a week, in which I keep a mixture of juices. It's a great glass, 16 ounce, Anchor-Hocking, heavy, thick-walled bar glass. What I might call a straight-sided flare. To give it a name, this glass in my fridge, call it a 'Connie' for no particular reason, but then you can refer to it, you know, a 'connie' and then it becomes vernacular. I was thinking about something else. Oh, right, Hopper's watercolors. Not a very large leap. One 'H' as good as another. I was looking at those Homer watercolors, and then these Burchfield (there's an 'h' in there too) paintings came to my attention. I don't think I'm an idiot, but I wonder sometimes. Emily is a mystery. We've reached the dew-point. I have no idea what we do with that. I speak a broken English. I learned it on the fly. Patois. (I surprise myself, roll with the punches.) One thing I like about my current life is that I'm not answerable to anyone. I defer to Sara, and several other people, the reasons are myriad, but the result is the same, and they make only small demands of my time. I like the pub and the people there, so a spend a few hours a week in there. The rest of the time I spend alone, thinking about such things as that Carter's middle name was Holbrook. The Brooklyn show in 1921 was spectacular, I've tracked down images of many of the paintings, I'd love to have hung that show. My Dad was born in 1920. Wyatt Earp died, Honorary Sheriff of San Francisco, in 1925. Just saying. The docents ask me how I had ended up here. A legitimate question. The long version takes several hours and a bottle of whiskey, the short version I can do in ten minutes with a cup of coffee. I don't think I'm unusual at all, until someone starts asking me questions, and then I realize how different we are, our concerns. Most people want to be engaged and entertained from the outside. Some few of us choose the opposite path. It's not a deliberate choice, it's a mandate; listen, I have a very early watercolor of Carter's hanging over my desk, 1920, he was sixteen, it's not very good, the mounded hills are merely breasts. I get it. But he was already working on his technique. 25 years later he was doing incredible work. Absolute control of a medium is not something it's easy to achieve. 25 years seems about right, all things considered, how long it would take. These watercolors from the late 40's blow me away. Like reading Dorn for the first time.