Never Easy

From the sound of it another afternoon of thunder storms moving in. So much rain. The big bottoms west of town had all been planted in soybeans which are now completely under water. Missed my connection with TR. I spent a couple of hours, shopping around for a laptop, but need to check with someone about what I should get. Means an extra trip to town. I wanted to just buy the first one I saw, but realized quickly that I knew nothing about them. Stopped at B's to admit my failure. He had a book for me, and I'd been to the library, so I have new reading matter. I took one of the meat guys, the one who had questioned me about what I was going to do with the lamb shanks (Dave) a small container of what I had done with the lamb shanks. He loved it, and promised more lamb shanks in the future if I'd bring him some. His wife won't cook lamb. Rolling thunder and medium rain. Perfect for the ripening blackberries. I had to pick up a two-pound bag of sugar, for canning, because I don't even keep any around. But I'm set now, except for the Death Of Ten Thousand Cuts, which is the dark side of picking wild blackberries. Wear clothes that you can throw away, check carefully for ticks, and keep a quart of super-premium vanilla ice-cream around. The berries are particularly good with shaved dark chocolate. I was talking with Loren, having a smoke out behind the pub, we were talking about cooking pork tenderloins. I cook pork tenderloins in my sleep, don't get me started; I pound tenderloin rounds into wafers that I roll around odd ingredients, sometimes I just grill them, slice them on the bias, and sop up the juice with a piece of bread. I tell Loren to come out and bring a bottle of wine, that we'll cook something. Grill a London Broil and roast some vegetables. B read me a truly great Ed Dorn poem, the ultimate spin-off of Willams' plums in the ice-box. He read the poem very well, like a conductor, little dampening movements with his right hand. The poem is seriously funny, a Dorn trait. More rain, rolling thunder across the river. I listen to some Skip James, Son House, Robert himself, just one cut, "Hell Hound On My Trail"; then Dylan and The Dead covering "All Along The Watchtower". Having a decent sound system, that works, changes things. I slip into an alter ego, the late night DJ, pushing the blues. I just played a great set that featured Greg Brown. I only talked with him once, but we followed each other at, I don't know what to call it, a workshop (not the correct word) or a festival. A frolic or a fantasy. Bullshit encased in layers of bullshit. Nonetheless, when the fog rises from the hollows, what you see, the mountain laurel, is absolutely real. An owl, maybe a couple of crows; there was a sparrow hawk, perched this morning, cleaning its feathers, and I watched for thirty minutes, completely mesmerized. One of the great nature programs ever. She, I believe it was a female, picked a branch under the canopy, not a place she would ever perch, for her grooming. I felt like a room-service guy, trapped in the closet, while the queen went about her toilet. I was very close to that ineffable edge, when something in the natural world reminds you that there are things beyond your nose. Birdsong in the early night, or a grunt from the compost heap. I walked around in a daze all day, thinking about the hawk. I had a sparrow hawk one summer on the Cape. It had fallen out of one of those big pines on the Playhouse grounds. I raised it up and flew it down on the beach, until it could make its own way, then let it go; but I read about falconry that whole summer, and the staff gave me a great book, bought used at Parnassus Book Store in Yarmouthport, now quite valuable, that is my main reference when it comes to hawk-related issues. Michael calls, he's a tech guy, and not only is he a reader of mine, but he reads me to his mother on the phone. She's been bitching to him that I'm not posting, he explained that there was a glitch, and now he's on my case. He's friends with Greg, who's even more of a tech person, builds things in his basement, shoots at a thousand yards, eats only raw vegetables and nuts. Michael laughs, and says they'll have a solution quickly, that I should, in the meantime, buy a laptop tomorrow. I can write at home and send at the pub, but I have eight or ten pieces that I want to recover, that are in limbo. Lost in the transition. They're real, I can read them, and I have them locked in my memory, but they don't exist as hard copy. The simple solution is to get a new printer, print the pages, scan them into the narrative, and then get on with business. I have no idea why everything should prove so difficult.