Saturday Staff

Got to town early, so I could sit for a spell with Ronnie at the farmers market. He has a guest chair, at his table. His offerings are thinning out, this time of year, but he bakes bread, sells home-made jams, and he had sweet potatoes and butternut squash. The sweet potatoes were selling fast, and everyone loves his raspberry jam. As he's running for office, the idle conversations with customers tended toward the political. It's always interesting sitting there with him, for 30 minutes or an hour, watching people. I know, to speak to, a great many of them, and they all love Ronnie; he's a salt-of-the-earth kind of guy, a good musician, singer / song-writer, built the family house himself, traps beaver, and is the best feller of trees I've ever known. The honey lady was there, and she is a stunning woman; she carries herself like a dancer. Went to the library, and could not find a book I wanted to read, fiction, I mean; I have a ton of non-fiction, but I like to leaven things with a bit of fiction on the weekend, and it just wasn't there. I'll dig something out of my stacks, and reread it, a Dorothy Sayers maybe; and I'm thinking about reading all of Faulkner, in order, next winter, so I could just start now. I have almost everything, because Square Books in Oxford, Mississippi, sold a cube of cheap paperbacks of everything commercially published. So cheaply published, I have to add, that I hold these books together with rubber-bands. But I have them. Lesser Faulkner. TR met me at the bar, in the pub, for lunch, and we watched the end of a soccer match, no sound, Celtic music in the background, talked about the possibility of him getting a free ride from Princeton for a PHD in composition. I have a rather dim view of higher education generally, it being mostly a question of whether you can afford it, on the other hand, a large percentage of the people I've ever held close had advanced degrees of one sort or another (but seriously, a Doctorate of Divinity?) and they are all interesting and engaging people. It's certainly true that you make more money, down the pike, if you have a law degree, or replace hip joints. Right out of high-school I went into professional theater, the consummate back-stage guy; solve problems, make sure the show goes on. Keeping track. See it for what it is. And I was always writing, I've been writing for fifty years, and there's no end in sight. Stylus to the clay. The driveway, perception, I hadn't thought about this, what happens when things change? A nagging tab of plastic, or something, throws you into an alternate universe. String Theory allows this. It could be.