Critical Commentary

Linda is my best critic. The self-deprecation, everything I leave out, she gets it. Close reading is an art form, maybe one in a thousand practice it, most of them actors, who are used to reading scripts. I'm surprised, when someone gets what I'm saying, not that what I consider I'm saying is new or different, which it's not, but merely that I'm understood. I think it's cool, meaning being a papaya on a tree, or a California avocado that only begins to ripen when it's picked. Awakened by hard rain about six in the morning, I let it wash the pollen and litter off the roof for a few minutes before I got up and put a couple of buckets out under the eaves on the back porch. In just thirty minutes I'd harvested enough rain to completely replenished my supply of water, plus filled my stock pot for a bath later in the day. When the rain finally stops, the birds are out in force, dancing in the under-story, eating bugs and worms coming up out of the ground gasping for air. The forest floor is saturated. Watching the birds had gotten me interested in what, exactly was going on, so I pulled on a very funky pair of overalls (I have several sets of very funky clothes, washed one last time, then thrown away after one last muddy adventure), got my foam kneeling pad and my magnifying glass and went outside. It was an amazing scene, a flood relief operation in miniature. I don't know the bug world, to name the varieties, but there were a lot of them, and I'd never noticed this particular feeding habit of birds, though I must have seen it ten thousand times. The salamanders in the driveway puddles (soon, I hope, to be drained and filled with gravel) are excited about the new water. They whip along through the clay silt that lines the bottoms of the puddles, leaving that distinctive reptilian endless 's'. Rattlesnakes in the desert. It strikes me that I'm slow and getting slower. Realized that I'd just spent an hour working on a sentence; that I had started writing this paragraph at six this morning, when I started with the water; had a little outside time, but mostly I'd been writing, and I had maybe twenty lines. Pretty impressive for six hours. Two rounds of golf. I don't actually know how long it takes to play a round of golf. Do you walk or use a cart? Just asking. The day reached a crescendo when a crow landed on a newly formed sumac head right outside the window. The whole sumac fruiting-body thing is extremely interesting, the way the individual seeds cluster. The crow was too heavy for a sumac branch that had sacrificed any strength whatsoever in the dash toward available sunlight, but it hung on, pecked a few seeds, hanging upside down, then squawked over to the outhouse to see if there was a mouse. I had the radio on, Mozart (I'm not a big fan, too many notes), but there was a mouse, that I had thrown up there this morning on my daily visit, and just as the crow realized his good fortune, the Mozart climaxed. Maybe you had to be there, but it was a special moment. Later, eating the last of the stew, I question my principles. Just hanging around to see what happens? What about all those starving people? Where do you stand in all of this? Leads nowhere but to a wee dram, and a not so much considered as an absolutely necessary break. Thank god for thunder. Janus looks both ways.