introspective periscope : peeking inside since Y2K ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the wheel makes another turn after the walk - second of may, 2005 the earth is our mother. she will take care of us.~libana
i feel my wheels turning. the weather is cold like mid october today, but the air doesn't have the smell of autumn on it. it's brisk and crisp and neighbors are mowing lawns in flannel jackets and knit caps, getting in the last wear or two before retiring them until football season. i feel like my wheel begins in this month, an inclination i cannot shake. my memories begin in may and i revisit them frequently, learning from my mistakes and applying them to my present. last week it rained all week and i had so many things to do. i rushed from work to some other destination, running through freezing cold raindrops to the car...my windshield wipers splashing the rain from the glass, headlights blurring in the watery view. i didn't spend too much time here at my house at all, and i missed it. one night, driving home after picking up laundry from my parent's house, a fresh wave of april storm rolled north up the highway as i drove south....there was a woman standing under an overpass and i hesitated, half stopping to pick her up as her thumb stuck out at the traffic. i slowed but resumed the flow and drove on, the thoughts in the back of my head flashing warnings and insisting i keep driving. a mile or so south, i saw the car that must have been hers pulled over on the road and considered turning around to take her to get her gas or whatever help she required...but i kept driving. i've been thinking about her ever since then, i suppose. i mean, i know you're not supposed to pick up hitchhikers and my friend Lelma won't stop nagging me about a man i let ride a few miles in my new car with us....he'd been waiting for someone to come and pick him up at the diner where Lel and I had just enjoyed our post-hike lunch. the diner is in the middle of no where and it's just the kind of greasy spoon i love to frequent. we were heading back to the car and this man, long hair and beareded and wearing old jeans came out of the old long-broken down phone booth. "are you heading to portersville?" he asked me, averting his eyes and taking a drag on his cigarette. lelma looked at me, his eyes begging me to say no, widening further when i continued the conversation.... "i suppose we could be. where do you need to go?" i politely asked him if he was planning to kill us or not and he said no. i introduced myself to him and then i introduced an unhappy lelma. the man's name was kevin. and where was the harm in that? kevin didn't kill us and it was a semi-adventure. what kind of world do we live in where giving a man a ride a few miles in the direction you were headed anyway becomes an adventure? there is all of this risk implied with spending some time with a stranger. i suppose i'm born in the wrong times. i can easily imagine myself and my friends driving along highways with no particular destination other than that where the roads might take us, picking up angel-bums along the road and talking with them and learning from each other. it's utopic and ridiculous, but there was the feeling in the april sunshine when the weather'd broken a bit on the first weekend of trout fishing that we were invincable and that people were genuinely good at heart and really wanted nothing more than a ride. in the rainy week to come, that slant for humanity dissolved a bit and i slid back into the vein of adult acceptability. i left the woman standing under the overpass as the storm approached, the wind breaking the rain free from it's cloudy confines. i watched her in my rearview mirror, the rain seeking it's lowest point and sliding across the back window...the back window wiper sloshing across occasionally, pushing the blur from my view. she got smaller and smaller and i drove home. she's been on my mind. it's may, finally, and things are so different than they've been for the past few years. i have nobody close to my age to speak with on a daily basis. my best friends are in other cities or half way around the world. my new old friends are involved in their own lives and i limit my pestering of them to a few days a week. mostly, my days are simple. i wake, i drive to work, i work, i leave work and run errands...i cook a small dinner, prepare a lunch for the next day. my activities vary from walking the dog around our small town to cleaning ( i have become a compulsive cleaner). i watch a little television, maybe. i go to bed. my circadians are in tune with the sunrise and sunset and i can never sleep much later than ten on the weekends. my time sprawls before me and there are endless capable ways to fill it. so lelma can make fun of me for my wanting to take classes and maybe start a new book club with new books, and for wanting to get on the road to anywhere. it's may and my wheel is beginning to turn again. my seasons are filled with so many promises and i intend to hold to every one of them. be well, ya'll. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- .what came before. - .what happened next. a diamond at the bottom of the drain - 20 october 2017 |
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