Green Flash

Studs on the wrong side of the line. Kim and I had been telling war stories. Talked and ate all day Sunday. One of those running conversations, bouncing around between shared history and shared interests. My first set at FSU, fucking Aida for god's sake, and he had worked with me on that (a 32 foot turntable) then came to the Cape Playhouse and we worked together there, then the Opera Company of Boston. I used his visit to motivate a rash of spring cleaning, rebuilt the kitchen drain, cleaned out the shop-vac and made a first pass around the house. Just sat and talked. Kim went for a walk while I caught up on mail, then the fillet dinner. He'd brought a couple of maple flavored whiskeys, and we sampled them generously. Memory and reality, parsing the past. Late night and then Kim up and ready to hit the road, which he does before the rain sets in. I went to town quickly, the library had called, stopped for a cup of soup and a draft, bought a few supplies, since I was there; but leftovers to eat, and got back to the ridge before the rain turned serious. The green jungle. It completely canopies the upper driveway, and most of the lower reach. Mackletree is a tunnel of arching oaks. The large bottoms, on the flood plain of the Ohio are being planted and there's already a flush of green. The banks of the Scioto are in full riot. A wet spring, and the green responds with a thousand shades. Another result of the lushness is that the hair-pin turns on all the back roads become truly blind. I'm impressed that the phone line was restored so quickly, which required inter-agency cooperation and boggling logistics, on a weekend. Probably became a field-test for their emergency response team. There were only four phones affected. Four. And they brought out the troops, Friday night and Saturday morning. Couple of new poles, half a mile of new line, cleaned up the mess, and it looks like nothing happened. A repair that must have cost between five and ten thousand dollars, for a couple of old coots at the end of the line. Makes me proud. I expounded my whole "migration of the Phoenicians from the Indus valley to Easter Island" theory to Kim, which took several hours, and then felt a bit foolish; I'm just a magpie (as Enslin said), after all. We talked about brickwork, he's laying a garden wall now, it's beautiful; and we talked about salvaging useful stuff from the trash. A sidebar on hinges, the various clips that held a building together, bolts, and the hardness scale. I'm fortunate to have friends like this, we talked about it, how there is someone to call if you don't understand something. The network includes engineers and physicians, carpenters and masons, a janitor at the Vatican; bottom line: almost everything is bullshit.