Monday, June 05, 2006

Mundania, And Then Some 

Read two Neil Gaiman books (American Gods and Nancy Boys) in 48 hours. Wrote half a poem -- fragments, mostly -- but it never fell together. Tried several times over the past few days to log in, but the world kept getting in the way.

The countdown to the school year's end seeps into everything we do at work. Students stream raucous and uncouth through the hallways on their way in and out each day like salmon on their last few runs. In my rare free periods there are budget numbers to clean up, year-end reports to word and weave. Grading looms on the horizon, and after that, summer.

The sky peered blue around the clouds this morning for the first time in a week or more. This evening while my wife prepped tomorrow's birthday supper -- my father turns 60, and there will surely be more to say about that as the week progresses -- elderkid Willow and I sat hand in hand on the porch steps and watched the last technicolor fade from the very tops of the candlestick trees, the oaks and pines that line our yard.

I sang her to sleep tonight with the old school song, and thought while I sang of how much I miss those few fleeting things which made the boarding school existence so overwhelming, so whole: singing, suits, the pomp and ceremony.

A year ago the schoolyear would be over, and the great release would be upon us. Thirty years, and there I was her age, furtive after lights out, reading books in the hallway light while my parents murmured upstairs. My voice is slipping away, I think, but it is not lost. This new halflife takes some getting used to, but there will always be another year.

posted by boyhowdy | 10:23 PM |

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Comments:

"The sky peered blue around the clouds this morning for the first time in a week or more"

Sounds like you had your head in the clouds today...

*rim shot*

# posted by  Shaw Israel Izikson : 11:13 PM, June 05, 2006

 

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