“Live in a perpetual great astonishment.”
The morning is ugly: breezy, damp and cloudy. Sporadic rain is predicted. The weather lends itself to laziness.
When I was a kid, rainy summer days never stopped me. I loved running in the rain, kicking up the water in the gutter beside the sidewalk and even riding my bike through big puddles to make waves of water shoot into the air. I’d raise my feet off the pedals as the water sprayed on each side of my bike. It was a bicycle parting of water, on the small side of the Red Sea. I got wet, but I never minded. My clothes dried quickly, my sneakers not so quickly.
When I was in Ghana, during my live-in, I used to walk to the compound where my host father’s wives and their babies and small children lived. The compound was enclosed but had an open space in the middle and small connected rooms with curtained doors all around the open space. We’d greet each other, our only conversation. I’d sit and watch meals being made, fufu being pounded and toddlers stumbling around the center concrete yard. If they got near me, they’d cry because I was white, the first white person they’d ever seen. What astonished me was that often a vulture would fly into the compound and walk around as if it owned the place. Nobody but me noticed. I loved seeing a vulture so up-close instead of in a movie circling a dead body. They were big ugly birds. I always thought of our sort of meeting as a strange encounter, one I’d never have imagined.
On a trip to Scotland, I traveled to Inverness and went to see Loch Ness. I wandered around. It was a huge loch. As I wondered, I kept my eyes on the water hoping to see Nessie, the Loch Ness monster, a crypdid. I wanted Nessie to be real.
My dance card this week has few entries, just uke. My social events are sparse, but I hope to add a few Saturday movie nights on the deck, but the nights need to be warmer. I’m hankering to entertain.
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