Bull Headed

*



Is there a good kind of stubborn?




*



I'm going out to the deck with an ice cold martini and I'm gonna sit my ass down in the dadairondack chair and I refuse to get up except to refresh my drink or exchange Gilbert for Dugan or maybe Simic. I will be toasting to Rebecca Loudon's birthday a day late. I will be thinking of each of you and wishing you as good an afternoon as the one I am headed for.




*

Wild Greens

*

It is times when there is little happiness to be found. It is times when I move through the rooms of my house like a caged animal, pacing. Seeking what. Seeking to dispel what. When the people I love have shuttered the windows of their souls against some bad weather and sought the comfort of their own solitude and show some intention to remain there.

I am better off left outside at any rate. I am a poor host at times.

Standing at the back of the yard in the fading light, I flex my useless hands and bite my lip and wish for something like rain.



*

I am going to learn how to inhabit this place without wishing for it to be something other than what it is, without trying to numb it or fight it. Any of the numberless gimmicks I have long resorted to in my efforts not to face my own dark reflection in the glass.

I'll just sit with it.

Breathe.


What do I got to lose?




*

We got a bitterness in us that grows like a weed.


We got a glory, too.



*

Ten-Ninety seven

*

Say there was a thing that happened. When it did, you were there and in all of its particulars the thing unfolded before you. Maybe it was a certain time of day or night. If the moon was out and in its orangey color from being low over the hills to the east. Maybe a coolness to the night air but still tinged with warmth and still heat coming up from the asphalt roadway and the sidewalks and the sides of the buildings. Music coming from a upstairs window where a woman's shadow could be seen behind the blinds. Walking back and forth.

Also the murmur and squelch of the radio. The way the belt bit into your hips. The sore spot in your low back from the cuffcase pressing in. The shift of your shoulders to set the bulletproof vest right. How you rubbed the back of your neck before stepping out into it.

And then the thing. It happens or it has just happened and there is the evidence of its birth into the world hanging in the air all around you. The taste of it on your tongue. Objects registering in your eyes and your body moving through space to interact with the thing. It its incarnation. In its newborn bawling.

What is it that you take from such a thing.


*

What has happened there in the night is the first unfolding of it. Where it is born into the world and there it has its existence. But you take away a seed of it which then blossoms inside of you.


On the nights, the first nights, you are restless in your bed and your flesh is hot and there is nothing for it but to watch the flower burning in there behind your eyes. While you stare at the ceiling. While you press your fingers into your eyesockets hard.

There it is and there it burns in its second incarnation.


*
After some days and nights the thing is burnt out and lifeless and you might nudge it with your toe or turn it over a time or two but it's got no more life in it and maybe it dries up and blows away or maybe there is like a grease spot left behind.

The thing is not yet finished with you.




*

What I mean to say is that it puts out a kind of tendril that reaches all through you and jerks your head around when the wind is right or the moon or the sound of that music or the smell of smoke. That sends a chill bucking down your spine when you was thinking of nothing in particular.


How it will get a life of its own. How it will grab hold of whatever nerve endings and yank and borther until you can't always be sure your hand will be steady when it goes for the coffeecup.


*

What you do is you collect them one after the other day after day. Not every day. Not even every month. But sometimes two a week or three and maybe a month or two goes by or even one whole winter one year but still you go on and you pick them up and maybe it can be likened to the way you pick up burrs walking through the flatlands and come out the other side of a long draw and they've gone and worked themselves in tight.

Not wanting to leave go of you.


*


I always did like the quiet nights when you could drive up the coast to the county line and park and watch the moon out high and lonely over the water and the hills falling off directly from the roadway into the blackness of the sea far below you and no noise at all rising from the lowlands and not a speck of manmade light to be seen but for the glow off of the radio and the dashclock and not a body saying word one.

Field Notes

*

The body is what brings everything into sharp relief. It's just any lot full of weeds and junk until you find her. Once you do, every blade of grass, every wadded up McDonald's wrapper, every cigarette butt comes alive. When you look, they vibrate. They glow a little bit around the edges.

You look up at the sky and if it's threatening you dare it to rain. You beg or you threaten.

I don't know if everyone does, but I walk around her first. I stand over her a long while and don't move or speak. I squat down and take it in from ground level. I close my eyes. I feel the wind on my cheek. I listen. To traffic sounds. To neighbors talking. Sometimes it matters, mostly it doesn't. A thousand, thousand things you'll do for the next seven or eight hours won't be important at all, won't ever see the light of day again.

Except that you have done them, and know it.

But maybe three or four things you got no idea are important will rise up a week or a day later and you will love them with a fierceness that can't be known outside of the work. You guard them and you are tender and attentive and you think about them last thing at night before you sleep.

Slowly, the obvious things will come to you. She wasn't killed here, or she was. The bindings were here, or he brought them with him. She never knew what hit her. She struggled.


She struggled.


Maybe it is like seeing the future is for fortune tellers. Not everything is clear, but there are moments of vividness, of hyper-clarity. Then there is some fog, some blurry hints, and then another clear moment. She put her hand against the door to keep him out. She left bloody marks all over her drawer. What was she going for there while he was slashing at her?


*

The words come slowly and they are spare if you are good. If the others are good they will put in a piece or two or turn around one you've put down wrong and then you'll all just stand there and quietly someone will say a thing and then maybe one or two will nod and someone writes it down or someone says no and explains why.

If you are not concerned with getting it exactly then you'll take off running at the first open door. You'll be barking orders and you'll be seemingly fast and efficient and in command. When one of those shows up I shut my mouth unless I can't stand it and then pretty soon I'll be doing a neighborhood canvas or checking with the weather station about the humidity last two weeks.

The ones I know are good are maybe confused a little bit longer. They wander down a path a few feet then stop and take its measure.

They go back a good ways.

They seem to start over.


Sometimes there are a handful of them at the same scene and then it is a thing of beauty. If the killer could watch them work he would feel the first taste of gas in the back of his throat before they even got all the way out of their cars. One thing a predator knows and that is the way another predator moves, and if he was to see the good ones work well he'd just about know it was all in.



*


You are slow because you can never get that moment back. You are all the time pulling back on the reins, imploring the horses to cease their mad galloping but what use is it? So you do what you can and you try not to make the big mistakes, only the small ones, the ones you can live with, and then in a small handful of hours its over and you won't get another shot at it.


So you go slowly, slowly.







*

Halfway House

*

I am obsessed. I need a goddamn beer.


*

Do you see things that make your bones ache? You want to possess them. You want to have done that thing, the thing that made them come alive.

I am in love with my own creations. I shouldn't say it, but there it is. Like a fever in me, the restlessness, the tremors...I take a breath and dive as deep as I can and hold it as long as is possible and then I keep going down...


*

Am I alone in my madness?


*




No. I know that you are with me....



*

Look, things aren't going to be getting better anytime soon.

We're all for the sausagemaker.



Let's make hay while the sun shines.


*


*



if i had the first idea of what I'm up against....




*

I Am The Master of My Own Undoing

*

Maybe the man has to gut a fish. Maybe
that's why he's got a knife. If he likes
the heft of it in his hand, what's that matter?

I mean, he's got to eat.

*

Gilbert's guy was talking to God as he gutted,
as he fried onions in hot olive oil,
tossed in peppers.

As a bird flew between him and the sun.


*

God being all buddy-buddy.

Gilbert petulant, a little bit
greedy.


*


Well, the big guy's never
spoken to me. His kid showed up
once in the backyard at a crab boil
with Lineberger, but that was
a long time ago.


*

I've been drinking a gin infused
with cucumber and rose. A woman's
drink if ever I've tasted one.

I crave a cigar.


*

The other thing is I'll fight you
sonsabitches.

My trainer says I got no
defense but I won't
stop coming.

Eventually you'll get wore down
from punching my melon and then
we'll see what's what.


*

Inside of my body I carry
all the bodies of the awful
dead whose faces I can't
shut out.


*

That's a lie.


That's a goddamn lie.






*

Crack Head

Yesterday I got a call from the Chief Deputy at the Sheriff's Department.

"Hey, Scott. Have you talked to your brother this morning?"

"No..."

"Well, he's been hurt in a pretty good fight. He's got a torn tendon in his hand. He'll be fine but he's going to have to have surgery on it. He's at the hospital right now."


*

So, my partner and I went to the hospital.


Like, two hundred miles an hour...


*

He's fine, his partner's fine, but it was an eight minute fight before their backup arrived. They had to hit the guy with beanbag rounds from a shotgun, but all that did was make him mad. He was a little fireplug of a guy, a crazy drifter.
Strong.

*

Said he thought they were indians come down from the hills for him. Thought they were going to scalp him.

He was fighting for his life.


*

I love my little brother.




*

Had a note on the table this morning from our daughter:

"Dear Mom and Dad-

I just saw the saddest commercial ever. omg! And I decided
that as a family, who has so much to give, we have to
sponsor a starving kid in Africa. It's only like $18 and
they look all sad and hungry.

I want to save people, man!

This is the number, you can call and get a free info kit.
1-800-237-5256
www.children.org"


*


Well, well.


*


On my run this morning I passed a roadkill raccoon. It was lying on its side, curled up. Weeds and road trash had accumulated against it, blown by the wind and passing traffic. Ants were massed over the belly and face, and a couple of wasps were feeding around one of the eyes. There were some tears in the flesh where birds had fed.

A little roadside diner for scavengers.


Open twenty-four hours.



*

I remember when Nate died on Six feet under and they buried him in a plain shroud. Unenbalmed. Dropped in a dirt hole.
That's the way I'd like to go.


I hope somebody remembers that.


(Either that, or the Viking funeral thing, which would be even better. And I mean that, too.)


*

Man, I can't believe I'm gonna be dead.


*

Have you been watching that string theory thing on Nova? Now they're theorizing that on the most infintesimally small level that each point in space has this little everlasting gobstopper shape into which six or more extra dimensions are twisted and packed, and that the impossibly small strings wrap around these dimensions as they pulse and flex and depending on how they do that they manifest into electrons or protons or quarks with left, right, up, down spin, etc.

Okay, and here's how small those strings are:

Take a single atom. Expand it to the size of the entire universe.

done?

Now here's your string:


about as big as a tree.


*


Man, everything is made out of an idea of something.....


*


Yesterday somebody found my blog while searching for vibrating dicks!

*

Scottie's Tires

*

So I've been working out a little bit with my little brother at this mixed martial arts dojo. He's a lot more serious about it than I am, been doing it a lot longer, but he invited me to work in with him and the other guys and for the past few months I've been hitting the bag and working the mits and sparring once a week.

I'm a total spaz in there, but the guys we train with are the real deal and very cool. They don't have any ego at all, they're just very straightforward and businesslike. The only thing they ask is that you never quit and that you don't lose your cool and go apeshit. They have a very direct way of letting you know if you've broken etiquette.

Today I'm in the ring with this guy who is on the fight team and he's showing me the ropes, just working real light with me cuz I'm such a bonehead. He's tagging me with snappy stuff when I leave my punches hanging out there, when I drop my head or my hands, when my head's not in the game, but he's only hitting me hard enough to keep me really focused. Halfway through the round I start noticing that he's got blood spatters on his torso, on his shoulders and stomach.

I'm pretty sure he's not the one bleeding.

When we finish the round he's like "You're leaking a little bit there." So take off my head gear and take a peek in a mirror. My nose is bleeding, not bad, but I took so many shots after it started that it's kinda smeared all over my face.

I'm all "Cool!"

I felt like a man, man.

*

Now I've got a big, red nose and a shiner and I can't stop grinning. My ears are ringing and I'm limping and I've never felt better.

*

My wife says it's the gayest thing she's ever seen.


*

Hear Us, O Thou Mighty

*

One thing is last night I was having this dream and in it I was standing in front of myself, like a gameshow host, and I was comparing my dream life with my real life and I had to guess which was which.

"Okay, Scott, here you are in an elevator in Japan. The elevator is rocketing toward the basement at a hundred miles an hour. Dream? Or your real life?"

"I dunno."

"Here you are standing in front of a shipwreck with monkeys swinging in the rigging. You've got your hands on your package and you're squinting into the sun. Dream life or real life?"

"Yeah."

"You are in a helicopter being flown by your father and you are scared shitless that he'll crash and you'll both be killed. You are coming in for a landing in a park filled with kids and families having picnics and throwing frisbees."

"Uh, lemme see..."

"Now you are standing over a dead body. You take a pen from your pocket and you lift up the dead guy's hand and under it is a little stuffed mouse. There is blood on its fur and it is laying on its side."

"Dream?"

"Or what?"


*


I can't tell the difference.





*


Right now my wife is cooking some bitter greens and roasting potatoes and slicing up some tofurkey sausages and pretty soon we are going to eat. Earlier we were lounging side by side, her in the chaise lounge and me in the dadarondack chair, rereading old New Yorkers and listening to the chimes gong in the breeze. Before that we'd been doing something else...


*


I love these goddamn photographs.


Playing with dolls.




Like a dog with a bone, I can't give it no rest.





*

Where're those damn limes???





*

Using The Tools God Gave Us

*

Obsession.



*


It's probably good for you, right?






*

Yesterday we got a knock on our door from Mary, who "met" my wife through her blog. Mary lives up in Washington and she'd warned us that she was going to be down in our neck of the woods, so it wasn't a huge shock to see her; I mean, when I opened the door I knew it had to be her and it was great to see her.

Here's a snippet:

"How'd you know where to find us?"

"Oh, I just got in the car and drove around. I figured I'd know it when I saw it. So when I saw this house,
I said to myself 'this must be the place' and I knocked on the door."


*

Later we had dinner with her and her two daughters and her husband and brother in law and the brother-in-law's girlfriend. We ate at this little Italian joint by the post office and yammered at each other over beer and wine and pizza and scampi and seafood ravioli.


It was about the sweetest thing ever.


*

After dinner we all walked back to our house and hung out for a little bit. The dogs jumped all over everyone and were generally spastic and ill-mannered (like their owners?). Mary's youngest ran all around the garden squealing and saying "Mom, lookit this garden! Poppa, poppa, look!"

I'd never seen a little girl smitten with a garden before.


*

Each one of them was like a wonderful present to open. They were so open and kind and easy-going and odd and interesting and sweet that I just about couldn't stand it. It was like being in a museum of masterpieces of the human being. Everybody shining with this tender, ethereal light.

It was coming out of their pores, glowing like honey.


*


I am glad to be alive, right here, right now.


It's some kind of miracle.



*

I am glad you are here, too, reading this. I hope you get a little jolt right in your heart from being here, a wide-openness that invades your insides and washes over you.

Now get up and go to the window and look out and look out and look out.


Can you see me?



I'm waving.



Hello or goodbye, it doesn't matter.





*

In The Woods

*

I'm gonna get all romantical with my wife.

*

Again.


*

The Crossing

*

Nothing's getting better anytime soon.
Nothing's wrong with how it is right now.

It's just you.

You can't sit still, you got no peace in you.
You got no stillness available to you. You got
no way to soothe yourself.

You always lookin' after someone to give you what you want
but you the only one can give it.


You the onliest one.


*

I like to see how other folks do it.
How they contend with the rawness in life,
get mired in the muck and the shit and how
when they rest from their struggles how they
turn their faces toward the sun.

How they shade their eyes with their one hand
and squint into the warmth of it.


*


I sometimes ache with a tenderness for all life. Even the lowliest creature can stir in me the fullness of the most singular compassion. Spend five minutes coaxing an ant onto my finger so I can walk it outside and set it on a leaf. In the shade.

It's other days I'll just mash 'em under my thumb.

I got no compunction.


*

One thing I am is a sucker for the whole contraption. I'm a grade A mark wandering past the hucksters and carny freaks, money poking out of my pockets, cotton candy in my hand and wide-eyed, empty looking face. They spot me comin a mile off.

You think I don't stand a chance, but I keep comin home with a goldfish in a bowl,
a doll or a stuffed rabbit.


*




Lookit all them pretty lights!


*

Family Outing

*

In string theory everything is made up of impossibly small rings of vibrating energy.

So tiny you can never measure them.


*

I was thinking today about suffering. I have a small experience of it. Others have their doctorate degrees.


Are we all going to get that much pain? I can hardly bear the thought of all the pain that is floating around in the universe, like those tiny strings, vibrating, filling the void with the music of it all: the cries of the dying, the moans of the wounded, the crippled, the starving. The old struggle, trying to reconcile the beauty with the horror. I know it is intrinsic, I know that it must be embedded in each note, and that every speck and every corner of the whole vast multiverse is filled with horror, is actually made up of horror.

Whose other face is beauty.


Peace.

Surrender.

Joy.

Love.

*


Love.



*


Today I really want to get drunk. I want my brain fuzzed out. I want to knock out the little dictator driving the bus and let it drift down the road and watch the scenery go by in a verdant green blur. But there's nothing to drink in the house and I don't want to go out and besides, I need to ride this feeling out.

All my meditation and yoga teachings would tell me to stop resisting the present moment and to abandon my preconceived notions of how the moment should be and open up all of my senses to how it actually is.

How it actually is.


Right now.


*



Yeah.


I still want an ice-cold vodka martini really, really, bad.


*

Or a vicodan.


*


Okay, both.



***


Also, I want to go to the Sea Chest and down a big pot of mussels.




*




I am in a mood.











*

Bully

*

I'm learning Algebra.


*

Em needs help this summer, so I've been cramming, taking her on-line Algebra class with her. I sneak in a couple of hours a day while I'm at work, doing the lessons and homework and then going home and she and I go over it all again. We compare our answers and then she takes the quiz with me there to help out if she needs it.

It's been a trip. Forced to communicate, we are like two alien species whose ships have both crash-landed on an asteriod somewhere in deep space. We need each other to survive, but we have no language in common, nor do we understand the mathematical language we need very well.

Throw in mutual distrust and teenage angst and paternal anger and frustration and you have a pretty volatile mixture.


*

I told Yolie I feel like I'm trying to land a six pound trout on half-pound test while I'm standing on a floating basketball in choppy waters.

*


But something magical is happening.


*

A couple of days ago Em says to me:

"I put a CD on your laptop."

"What'd you do that for?"

"It's a mix I made." Shrugs. "So you could listen to it."

"Oh." Dad nods. "Okay."

*


Holy SHIT!


*

Now we even have a few words in common, a couple of gestures. We can nod at each other over the dinner table, and as long as I don't actually say anything, it's all cool. She can stand to be there. And she's getting the Algebra. Her grade is pulling up steadily.


*


I could just bust.




*

The Dishwasher's New Look

*

Here's looking at you, kid.


*

Revisiting Helen and Stanley

*

They're still at it.


*


They don't have triple A.



It's been a long day as it is.


They was supposed to be in Albequerque three hours ago
and Miriam's gonna have a royal shit-fit if they miss
her big jubilee.


*


Sun's going down.



It's nothing for it now.



*

Quartering Seas

*
Still at sea.

The fog has rolled in and obscured the sun.

Things sound strange, too far away or too close. Hear something
approaching from starboard and it bangs against the hull to port.

You get turned around.

You can't gage your speed, and tend to go too fast
rather than too slowly.


*

What was hidden before remains hidden.


*


What you crave is the shallows, the fake safety of land,
but what you really need to do is make for the deep waters.



The place where you can find no bottom...







*

Spinning My Wheels

Its times when I seem to lose my grip on my own happiness. I am suddenly gnawing on all the small problems that are part of the fabric of daily life, and I can no longer gain access to the juicy bits, the good stuff, that is lying all around me just waiting for me to notice it.

I'm in the dumps.

*

I came home and was trying to decide all the way if I was going to just start drinking ice-cold vodka martini's or if I would maybe go for a walk or a run instead. I hadn't made up my mind and I couldn't, either. Vodka, run, vodka, run....

Yolie told me to go out on the deck and meditate.

*


So I did.


*

The sun was going down behind the tall pines to the north, behind the house, and the sky above the deck was flawless blue.
Every once and a while a bird flew over me. The magnolia shivered and its wooden, waxy leaves clattered like a million marionettes applauding the breeze. Trucks rumbled by on Main street and kids screamed and laughed and got called in for dinner.


*

I am a maniac to find a small unhappiness.


*


I am undone by my own abundant blessings.


Cursed by my wiring.


*


I love it all.



*

Happy Birthday To You, 'Merica.

1. Corn on the cob, grilled.
2. Tri-tip, grilled.
3. Roasted potatoes.
4. Vegan Chili.
5. Soy chorizo, grilled.
6. Tofu dogs, grilled.
7. Greek Salad w/kalamata olives and cucumbers and feta.
8. Mixed baby greens salad.
9. Peach pie with vanilla ice cream.
10. Jepson 02 syrah.
11. Pomegranate Cosmopolitans.
12. India Pale Ale.
13. Paper plates.
14. Fireworks on the beach.



*


The weather is here, wish you were beautiful.


*

Against The Wall

*

When it's good then the two of you don't even need to talk to each other or even look at each other you just let it flow.
Maybe the guy likes your partner and so you turn into a goon and you hammer him and hammer him at every lie and your partner can be there to pick up the pieces and hold the guys hand until he spills or maybe, and this is good too, maybe he doesn't like either one of you and you can both be dicks. Or off and on. But what matters is that when its right your guy turns from one of you to the other and you reach out to him and offer him a towel or a smile and then you knock him back with something that hurts. You watch his eyes rattle around in his head. You wait for him to sigh. You wait for his denials to slow down and to lose their emphatic power. You listen and you listen and you listen and you mirror. You mirror defeat. You mirror hopelessness. You give him your heart and then you take it away from him. You give him your love, you give him your understanding and then you pull away. You love him like a woman would. You flatter and cajole. You bully and threaten. You cry and plead. You go silent and let the room fill with silence until he can no longer breathe.

You pull your chair up in between his knees and you lean in and whisper or you listen to him whisper and you do not breathe and you slowly pull your chair up closer.

If you are an artist you can touch him.

*

I have lost them right there. Too eager, too full of myself and my own hunger I have closed in too soon and turned it all to ashes. You can back off, circle around, but once you use your mojo and it fails you are only waiting around for him to invoke or for the light to die in your own eyes.


*

What is best I think is when you are always honest and you are telling a story that has no other ending. And you are really there and really listening to what he has to say. Everyone wants to tell you their own version, and it is sometimes only a matter of finding a way to make your story and his story come out the same.

*

What I have done I have done always and always with a fearless heart. With open eyes. My job is to bring you to the place you have been striving for all this long time. To take away your lies and your denials and your fear and to help you come to it all with something approaching grace.


*

Everybody is the same. We all do wrong. We all want to cheat the man we owe. The hammer's coming, all you can do is decide if you want your eyes open and your head up or if you curl up in a ball and cry like something less than a man at the end.


*

I opened up this door and I will shut it soon.


*

The Story of Our Lives

*

I don't know.

I would hold out my hands to you, cupped, spilling golden nectar through my fingers, begging you to drink. I would. If you were here now I'd grab you by the hand and take you out to the junction of Highway 46 and Highway 101, to a low bridge over a creek where thousands upon thousands of starlings nest and near dusk I'd push you into the tall weeds by the creek and have you close your eyes as they burst out into the darkening sky to feast on gnats and mosquitos and the thrill in your blood would show in the pulse at the side of your neck and in the color that rushed to your face and in your breathing and in your voice as you cried out into the murmur of those unfolding wings and the cutting of the cooling air and you would know something then about the way of love, of the weight of your own bones on the crust on the earth.

I am a bitter ruin. I am a cornered, dying man. I'll go downstream like a cherry blossom. I'll give what I've got to you.

Once again, the world has got me utterly undone.


*


Don't mistake this overblown, narcissictic rambling for anything approaching meaning. I know what the limits are. I'm not trying to push them. I just get overwhelmed at times.

This beauty.

This terror.

One and the same.


*

One and the same.



*




If there has been a happier man than me I'd like to meet him. I guess Whitman would beat me there, no question, really. And by happy I mean what exactly. Who's to say. The laundry list of those I've disappointed would spill out from here to Schenectedy. However you spell it. But in my heart beats a stone furnace. Throwing off heat and sparks. Warming the void with its small and ephemeral love.

When I get this silly I am a little bit ashamed.

*

There's a seriousness that can be overstated. I'd like to think that Hemmingway and Jack Gilbert didn't (or don't, in Gilbert's case) take themselves as seriously as they seem to have done. One of the difficulties of manhood, of being a male man, is in answering that question for yourself in an acceptable manner. I think the best men know that they may need to put everything on the line for what may appear to be a trivial matter, and that they may need to walk away from what seems to be the most important thing of all, and that those two positions are not in conflict but instead are manifestations of the same imperative.

I'll leave that to you to name.

*



What's easiest is that you must let love act through you. No matter the cost. Okay, not easiest. But, perhaps, most clear.


That and rushing into the void with arms and eyes and mouth wide open.



Undone with love for this world.


*




Okay, to all my friends:

I have missed you very badly. I have also loved you badly I fear. Now that the sun has gone down and the stars are blazing above our heads, I would like very much to join you all by the fire and lean against you and listen to the stories of where you have been.


It would be a balm to my soul.




*