Airport

I'm at one a them "Internet Cafes," boosting an airport connection. Monday, the day I was accepted into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, I woke up feeling groggy and drugged. My nasal passages felt like they had been injected with Gorilla Glue. My limbs were sore from moving out of the house on Tallassee Road into this 3 bedroom bourgeosie utopia on Hale Lane. I spent that morning wandering around the huge, new house with Eleanor, who only wanted to climb on things and bite at things. Stella alternated from inside the house to out, desperately longing to lick clean a certain frying pan that’d been used to fry bacon the night before. Outside, wild winds howled in from the East, spinning the windmills and rocking the birdfeeders. I walked outside with Eleanor and held her close. She fell into a deep sleep. When she awoke an hour later, I thought we’d drive into town for a Neti pot, but soon discovered that the battery in our Jeep was dead as fried chicken. Just then, though, the Georgia Power guy showed up to read the meter. “Hey, buddy, you got an extra minute? I could sure use a jump.” He was a nice older fella who said, “Shit, I’ll make time to help you out, man.” Nice guy: “I used to have a Camaro that got real bad oxidation on the battery terminals and I’d always hafta take my pocketknife and scrape that stuff off, but you know one day that sonuvabitch just stopped dead in the road – I was going 70 mph one minute but was still as the Statue of Liberty the next.” “Thanks, mayne.” Went to the health food store, where we ran into Coleman Barks, translator of fine Rumi texts. And I thought to myself how odd to see Coleman Barks at the store. I used to see him around a lot, but lately, no, not so much. “Hey, Coleman.” He said, “Uh, hey,” looking lost, cold, and not remembering me from nothing. Had a thin paperback tucked under his left arm and was dressed like an old hungover lumberjack. Back at the new house, Janelle was waiting on the front porch. We walked inside together and about that time the phone rang. When I heard the news that I got accepted to Iowa, my immediate and, in fact, all subsequent reactions have been one of total disbelief, like those guys who win the lottery but end up clinically depressed. Janelle shrieked and pivoted. We went for a drive and a nowhere dog attacked the Jeep at 30 mph. Drove over his paw and he yalped. His owner, a neighbor lady, fortysomething, with the raw face of someone who’d been powerwalking, drinking lemon schnapps, and burning offerings to poor old dead but soon-to-return Jesus all day, stepped out and said, “He’s all right, he’s just a big stupid dog.”

She's rough on the dogs of the world, but Fortuna shimmies a little for me, lifts her hem a bit to expose the creamy thigh. But even now, I’m worried I might wake up from this weird home-bescrambled dream. Janelle and I had spinach, tofu, curry, and rice for dinner. We watched The Wire, Season 4. I kept trying to figure out how much my life is about to change, and then again how much it isn’t. Janelle tended to baby Ella, who is teething hard today. As the moon rose, I thought on my grandmother’s sister, Lucy Merle, who had a heart attack yesterday evening. “This shit is tenuous at best,” I kept thinking and thinking and still continued to think well into the evening. Washed a load of diapers and stepped outside to piss, realizing that the wind had blown down a set of chimes I had hung earlier. “Windy out,” a coyote screamed from several miles away, across pastures and treelines. Wind-wind-windeeeee outttt…” I peed off the back porch and shivered, “Yeah it is,” before retiring and sleeping the deep sleep on our mattress on the floor.