Docenting 2

To know, to impart knowledge. Across the board. Those high school kids were a tough sell. Nearing graduation, they're not the most attentive audience. I finally got their attention, though, in the print show, talking about the sensuality of the George Segal etching, the way there was a live body underneath the clothes. Then, touring the Carter galleries, I talked about the artist/model relationship, Serenity, Maidenhood; footloose and fancy-free in Italy, 1927. Pay attention to detail. I finished with them, a churning mass of teen-age angst, and was sitting downstairs, on the new bench, rolling a cigaret, to go out back and smoke. One of the students came downstairs, just then, asked me how I knew all that shit. I told her that I read what was available and looked closely; that you couldn't know a thing that you hadn't stared at for hours. Glenn is the best writer who never wrote that I've ever known, but he leans toward the visual; TR leans toward the soundscape. Meta-themes. I got a wee dram of Ardbeg, to punish myself; this scotch is very much like eating railroad ties. Fucking frogs. This recent rain insures another generation, and they are everywhere. I walk with an old broom to sweep them aside, to clear them out of my way. Stepping on a frog is nasty. Wanted to stay home today, a stomach bug, but Pegi and D were off to the Curator's Meeting in Columbus and I thought I'd best be at the museum. Frightens me a little, Pegi going, because I'm afraid she'll start to think she's a curator, which she isn't. Didn't get much done at work, what with trips to the bathroom, but I did get a second coat of polyurethane on the cherry plywood wall, watched the front desk for a while, and took another group of high school students through the galleries. Locked up and beat it on home, to arrive before a line of squalls. Left-overs for dinner, then half a new Sandford novel, while I waited to turn on Black Dell. Never did lose power, but I kept my trusty reading LED headlamp close at hand. A mouse came out from under the stairs and I beaned it with a copy of Extinct Languages, a nice small hardbound book I picked up at the Goodwill for a buck. It was on top of the stack because I had shown Glenn the amazing similarities between the alphabets of undeciphered languages from the Indus Valley and Easter Island. It all makes sense to me. It was the Phoenicians. Seriously. We know they got their tin from South America, molecules don't lie, and that they came from the Indus valley; it's not a big leap to imagine they kept going west. The mouse is dead, so I get a flashlight and go throw it on top of the outhouse, they crows will eat it. I'm good with a book at ten feet. The cicadas will probably drive me crazy this summer, and the goddamn Whip-O-Wills. One set up, tonight, in the hickory tree right outside my writing window, but I was ready for it: slipped on the headphones for a portable CD player and listened to the Allman Brothers, Sweet Melissa, Killing Floor Blues, and when I came out from under, he was a quarter of a mile away. Starts raining again around eleven, but there's no thunder and lightening; I let the first rain clean the roof of catkins and pollen, then put out a couple of buckets to harvest rainwater. This time of year it's a pain in the ass, I have to filter the water through an old, clean, tee-shirt; unless I bring water from town, which I hate to do, but am forced by circumstance, occasionally, to do. Rainwater is so soft, Glenn assures me my carbon foot-print is very small.