Day

The library here is so small they keep back issues of National Geographic, Mother Earth, Alaska, in the bathroom.  The bathroom is spotless.  I am charmed.

I'm sharing a kitchen with a lot of foreigners who are not Mexican.  My experience with foreigners who are not Mexican is limited.  When I awake at 1pm (remember, I'm Night Audit, so this isn't laziness but necessity), it seems someone is always preparing stewing beef in a baking pan with chunks of I Can't Believe It's Not Butter, while grilling onions.  It puts me off my coffee and oatmeal.  If it were real butter...?  If Fabio didn't star in those commercials...?  If it was a better cut of meat...? maybe my stomach wouldn't turn.

On the way back from town I'm in the shuttle with some tourists from England.  The husband tells me the origin of the word posh: In the old days, on boats to India, the preferred way to travel was port on the way there, starboard home.  Because of the view, or the sun, or both.  Only the richest people in England travelled this way: Port Out, Starboard Home.  POSH.

I walk to the end of town, to the river, and sit on some rocks.  Birds fly around low, little delicate chirps, twitters.  I read once that birds chirp for only two reasons: to announce a food source, or to advertise willingness to mate.  I didn't like that.  It doesn't allow for the purely ornamental.

Once I asked my mom what would grow if you planted birdseed in the ground, and she answered immediately, "Little birds."

I stare at the water.  It's a deep, rich grey, a color itself, not the absence of it.  Black, white; hell, heaven; God, not-God... this grey is the wide, rich boundary between absolutes.  A rock that ripples.

In my head, Van Morrison sings, "Oh the water - oh oh the water - oh the water..."  I have my iPod in my pocket, could listen to the song now if I wanted to, but I don't.  It would be too loud and exact.  The Van Morrison in my head is the perfect volume and clarity, sun filtered through grey clouds.

I walk slow, back home, kicking my feet against the insides of my ankles, which are mosquito bitten.