Cascade

Our house is extremely close to the neighbor lady's house (her name's Beverly. She's lived in the same house for over thirty years. Her husband left this realm about ten years ago). And so: Yesterday I was peeing. The bathroom window was open, you see. For the breeze of it, you understand. And Beverly steps out with a plastic bag of garbage in her hand. She looks over at me, and I her. The locked gaze of mutual embarrassment. What can a man do when an elderly woman is watching him pee?

Today I spent twenty minutes talking to a Pulitzer Prize-winning genius in the shade of an old front porch. Just me and him and the cicadas. It was a moment frozen, suspended, outside of time, almost. Some people in this weird world are the real deal. It's not their genius or prizes or appointments that makes them so. They're just real and therefore rarities in the cascade of pretense. James Alan McPherson, I believe, is such a man. He said some things to me I'll be digesting twenty years from now...