(Next ink? We shall see. I am not thinking about it. Photo of graffiti found in Iraq with ambiguous message. Derived photo Socotra).
Not thinking. That is the goal. I am going to concentrate on the matter this long weekend. No thinking. No Iranian nuclear thoughts, no conventions. No thinking.
It is time. If I was French, I would be starting to pack to go back north from the Cote D’Azure and the lost long month. Being a Yank, we compress a European experience into a few days, and when we start thinking again, it will be the 4th of September, and the pool will be closed on weekdays, the Polish lifeguards will be gone on their way.
Konrad is going to be in San Francisco, since he is afraid of the hurricanes hitting Cancun, his original destination of choice. Lukas will be back in middle Europe along with Johanna, the schools will have been open long enough that it is no longer a novelty, and the idiots who govern us will be back on Capital Hill. That is so unpleasant a thought that I will put that in the non-thinking basket I have near the door to take down to the Panzerwagen to deliver to the farm.
I have a list- I know you do, too- and it increasingly seems to be something I will have to deal with in the Fall, which intellectually I know is looming three days from now, but which still seems on an emotional level to be impossible.
I glanced at the napkin in front of me on the Willow bar and the little notes: get a haircut from Ben-the-Tunisian with whom I converse in pigeon French, the Class Six store to shore up the emergency vodka supply in the event of early snow, the unsettling stop at the AAFES gas station where the storms and refinery fires have driven up the prices for hi-test, visit the little family jewelers to fix my old-fashioned watch on Zuni silver band, getting a quote to fix the rear bumper of the Bluesmoble by the Vietnamese body shop, collect the business wardrobe at the dry cleaners, visit the Commissary, etc etc.
I ran out of napkin and decided not to think further of the list.
As of midnight, it is going to be September already, I sighed, the season having fled while I concentrated on getting upright and mobile again, a process that robbed me of participation in the months of March through August.
Tracy O’Grady does a Buffalo, NY, comfort food special on the last Friday of the month, and I that is why I was there. I decided not to cook in honor of the long weekend. Old Jim is continuing his boycott on principled grounds, and the gang at the Amen Corner was limited to me.
(Willow Newbies Alex and Raquel. Photo Socotra)
I thought I should have brought the iPad to help kill time with Jim elsewhere, but wound up in an animated discussion with a nice young couple from the condo across the street. They had just moved here, it developed, and Raquel is an attorney at the Department of Health and Human Services, and Alex is a graduate student at George Washington University doing something wonky. As it turns out, we had a lot to talk about. I flagged down Liz-with-an-S to make the introduction, since Raquel has cracked the code on how to get into the government, and any useful connection is a good thing. They exchanged contact information while Tinkerbelle kept my glass of white wine filled.
(Tink’s ink. She is ready for her next one, once Nola moves out. Photo Socotra).
She is hugely and delightfully pregnant and finally into the glow phase of gestation with the morning (and afternoon) sickness behind her. We were talking about the next tattoos we were going to get, and the hurricane that pasted her home of New Orleans. She is still devoted to the place, and I have toyed with the idea of wintering in Metarie, just across the bridge from the city proper. She supports the idea- and her commitment to home is conveyed by her unborn daughter’s name: Nola.
She totally approved, and is looking forward to the day Nola is outside her, and she can get more ink. We decided we like the Kool Aid man with Kalashnikov I found in a compilation of graffiti from the Iraq, and then we dug into some Buffalo Pommes Frites, Willow-style.
(Willow’s Buffalo Pommes Frites. OMG. Photo Socotra).
Metarie, LA, I thought. For January through March. Hold the storm season.
Liz-S stopped briefly in the midst of serving the thirsty threshold of early revelers: the Bills were just down the bar, proud law enforcement members of the DHS faily of dysfunctional government. She presented me, officially, with the last pebble of summer from her trip to Up North Michigan. The little eyeball looked up at me from the bar.
(Liz-S’s pebble of summer. It is staring at me now. Pebble courtesy of the last glacier. Photo Socotra).
Jim’s wife Mary appeared along with Jon-no-H. They got along just fine with alex and Raquel, and the food was good and the wine was crisp and cool.
(The lovely Mary. File photo courtesy Socotra House LLC.)
This was much more fun than thinking, I thought. Maybe I will circle back to that this coming Tuesday. Not now.
(I am not thinking about how dumb Vic looks this evening. Photo Socotra).
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com