A Visit

Too early for anyone I know, and I could tell by the laboring engine it was front wheel drive. It's the Highway Patrol investigator, wanting what information I might have about my neighbors. It's pretty funny, because I don't know a damned thing, except that the people 2 miles west must have raised children because the area around their trailer is strewn with plastic toys. Something is going on, and I don't know what it is, a meth lab maybe, and I get the idea that I'm not a suspect. I had Dan in, for a cup of coffee, we talked about life in the boonies, and I explained that I just wanted quiet, didn't pay much attention to what happened off the ridge. I hear the occasional log truck, a train across the river in Kentucky, a medi-vac chopper flying to a Cincy trauma center. Some days I hear nothing at all, other than natural sounds. In cadence, it seems to make sense: a few bugs and song-bird. Dan had difficulty understanding why I live the way I do. I wanted to rap him on the knuckles with a ruler. If only he'd had the Jesuit teacher I wish I'd had. I ran him off, politely, when I realized he was taking up my time. I'd rather be reading a bad novel. Or just sitting on the back porch, listening to Bach, watching the leaves swirl. How many orange days are you allowed? My older daughter seems concerned for my well-being and I can't assuage her sense of loosing control. I have skimpy dreadlocks, a friend told me recently that I looked like shit. I don't know wether to take that as a compliment or not. What opens out, Olson, Creely, Dorn, is different from the inward spiral of all those suicides.