s u m m e r
nap
I swear I think a half bottle of gin disappeared that first night. A Sunday night. Still bearably cool, the sun sat low over Aycock auditorium, just glancing off the corner of the Witherspoon gallery.
We started drinking beer and ate very little, the noise of Tate just outside the iron gates where we sat. 24 hours before I'd been in the nose of a B-25 and now I was across from the other side of the world drinking a drink that had been over two years coming.
Two years of typing and thinking and dreaming had materialized into reality and there really are no words for that. I've played with distance and can't quite work it out that way. I work in feet and miles and visual distance. Do I have VFR? How many miles from A to B? But this was more than the closing of a geographic gap. It was the first of many sunsets, brilliant and orange.
It would not rain but once. Only once would I struggle under an overpass to put up the top so we could laugh at the fact the sun was breaking by the time I was finished. Only once would it smell vaguely musty like soft moss and old dignity.
That night we ended up over past Irving Park at a dying party with a ridiculous keg and a drunk man named Bob. Every time Bob and I get together I spill it and that night was no different. Surrounded by high bushes and brick I felt safe and chain smoked out of pleasure. Damn Australian cigarettes. Only thing I can say about Stuyvesants is don't smoke a whole pack in a night, and don't light one on the wrong end, other than that they're great. In fact, I just about need some more...
The birds were the last sound I heard that night. Well, the birds and This Mortal Coil. The early morning chirping of the birds and the faint gray sky were to be familiar sights and sounds in the coming days. We could never beat them to bed and never really wanted to.
Instead we napped.
The pier was hot and the fish weren't really biting and I was more hungover than I let on. By mid-afternoon it was all I could do to crawl into the rolling recliners on the front porch and sleep by the screens while the light played off the ripples on the lake in front of me.
I didn't want to waste the hours napping but I couldn't stay awake.
Today I'd pay a fortune for those very same hours again, but time's a bitch isn't it?
We woke at supper time and ate black-eyed peas and ham and rolls with relish from last years garden. We toured the lake refreshed and poked around in various coves before beaching at Goat Island. Already the sun was lowering in the sky again and there was an early flight the next morning. Already one day had passed.
Passed under the pecan trees that don't fruit. Passed under the blue southern sky of Little Crane Cove. Passed in partial dream and in company of the gentle waves of High Rock. Passed on the rocks above Goat Island and at the formica dinner table at my grandparent's house. Passed with the fish and the scales and the barbs in their backs and the collins glasses at home that once more held gin and tonic water with just a little bit of lime, sweating late into the early morning.
Phyllis drove us to the airport the next morning and the gear lifted up on the plane just after 9:00 am.
We were in New Orleans by lunch time, eating brisket.
goodnight 6.8.99