Monday, September 23, 2002

 

Drive down any of the back roads with corn on either side 'a ya on a heatful dog day of summer near the harvest moon's fullness and bound for the fog. There are maybe twenty feet you can see in front of you, and the noises make you walk slower. As if the fog held stranger creatures than what we could see outside of it. Richie would ask his poppa where the fog went as the car floated through it like in a cloud. His poppa would say its all around us, but we are a part of it right now, so it seems as though there is no difference between us. And then Poppa would laugh loud and hard for a long time. Poppa never told Richie that these philosophical answers to his very serious and rightly so as the young boy was at an age when each and every occurrence is a new and astounding event.

Questions were the nonsense of an aging man and his habit of smoking joints on his lunch breaks and on his coffee breaks and in the evening after dinner. Poppa would sit underneath the willows along the river and entertain the many questions his son could pitch at him. Can you eat a crawdad? yup. Where do winds come from? the west. What is a butterfly made of? same as you and me, just a bit smaller. If you were a robot what would you do? I'd get all my laundry done with a snap of my fingers.

Driving down the back roads, the moon rising above the tree line and the bats whipping from pines to barn windows. Cicadaes beat out rythyms in a chorus with crickets, each round becoming more furious than the last. The ranchero they drove was a speedy car with a booming loud stereo system. Poppa would blare ,jazz and hindi chants during the week, and on sundays nothing but the blues. That's when Richie's pop would take him down to Rupp's donut shop near the edge of town. Sure kids aint supposed to have no coffee at that age, but it was a special day...
"Sunday is God's day," Poppa would tell Richie, "and we aint got to go to work on God's day."

So, instead of going to work, on God's day, they'd get pretty hopped up on coffee and donuts, take the Ranchero out to Mason Road and haul ass to the end of it, kicking dust up and fishtailing around like hell on wheels. Built along the riverbed, Mason swerved along four miles of the dog-legged Klamath River. The dust would settle and the fellas would flip the bitch and hightail down Mason Road one last time,

posted by Hog 5:51 PM