June 13 2008, 10:31 PM Ready

The walk home was soupy, thick. I took trail to a local market, then rambled back home on back alleys, bag over my shoulder with five pounds sugar in. There is an ancient device, refined and made modern because it is still useful, set up and used to measure an angle across both the vertical and horizontal, and with many of them (along with a bit of geometry, perhaps on the back of a drum) one can make useful triangles. I spent most of the walk back on an alleyway named after one of those, stopping from time to time to admire back gardens, tucked into hillsides by houses, otherwise utterly hidden except from the surprisingly thin and twisting roadway. I waved to people on back porches, and they waved back to me.

It is nice to be able to live like that. This is an urban setting, to be sure, but up on these hill tops we do that, here. Earlier I rambled back out, to post a letter (borrowing a pen along the way to fill in the neglected return address portion of the envelope). On the return from the post box, I joined the eager, loose queue of people at the window of the ice cream shop. The walk back up the hill was a sweet one. I'm glad I went when I did; storms come for us now, grinding up the valley.

There are empty places on the dial of the shortwave radio, spaces filled up with the busy crackle of our world, our skies, our sun. There is utility in this, even in this. I have the radio so tuned now, and even though the bright bolts are not so near, I can hear them there in the speaker, sharp cracks of static, sometimes in sync with a gentle flash, still yonder yet.

In the darkness of the porch, we sat side by side. We watched as the ambulance drove down the hill from the firehouse in the distance, siren ringing in the night, red and white light stabbing at trees, in somber haste, an important errand. I pointed: "They are off to do their good work." She was leaned forward in her chair, arms and legs pulled tightly in, eyes ahead and still. "Someone is already dead," she said. I did not find comfort in that. I did not understand it at all.

I have picked up the phone twice tonight to answer it, but only for a bad connection, an incorrect dial. One of the nicer things about learning a new language is using it, and I answer the phone with words used by people a third of a world away. The words make little sense without the story of how they came to be, even after translation. I never have had anyone interested enough to ask. They beg their pardons. They go.

I hear low, loud sounds in the distance. Pronto.