4:24 a.m. - 2024-01-07
paracosm vs. umbworld
It turned out to be a slap on the wrist, my PI ticket. $270, payable over 6 mos. ($200 less than the impound fee...) I shook my head and smiled at my dumb luck when the JOP clerk read me the “damage”. It got a little weird though, when I asked the name of the my arresting officer.
“Sure, I have it right here...it was Deputy M_____, do you want a copy of the incident report?”
“No, nothing like that. I'd just like to apologize if I run into him again. In case I was disrespectful when he took me in...that's not who I am really, or how I was raised.”
She didn't say anything, just stared at me and got kinda like, chin-trembly? Like she was about to cry? Maybe it's stressful in her little office behind the plexiglass, maybe the other criminals can be uncivil at times. Maybe she just had to sneeze? I bid her a hasty “Happy New Year” then and left, driving home through a steady drizzle. The hills were draped in mist that morning, taciturn under pallid and noncommittal skies. The car-heater felt good.
~ ~ ~
They would commit later that day, the skies. Darkening around 2PM. I was standing in the kitchen of the creek-house at the time, dispensing w/holiday leftovers. Reducing my mom's sublime garlicky-lemon chicken stock down to gravy w/mushrooms. Farfalle was on-deck, waiting for its cue to boil. The house felt unusually still and quiet.Which was an odd observation to make, really, about a place that's almost-always still and quiet. Because the creek-house, like the big house and the little cabin, sits empty most of the year. They exist and are maintained as getaways for family and friends, “party houses” basically. So what I'd actually noted was the absence of holiday hubbub; something I'd embraced this season.
There's a TV on the premises, one of those modern flat-screened numbers w/the satellite reception and such, but I didn't turn it on. Nor the radio. I stood instead in silence, motionless as the afternoon thickened and the kitchen dimmed in-turn. Watching the steam vent where I'd cracked the pot lid, hands in pockets. Then the sky broke, and with it my reverie.
~ ~ ~
The rain was announced, pronouncedly, on the tin roof. A muted roll in the kitchen, a glorious racket when I stepped out on the back porch. A breezeless, vertical, deluge...cold and heavy. Battering down obstinate vestiges of fall foliage and shattering the surface of the creek. A choir of white noise; from the roof, the creek, the trees...the runoff sluicing from the eaves.A wall of river rock skirts this porch, and it's tucked under a deep gable-roof. It's one of my favorite places on the ranch, and boasts four excellent rocking chairs. I took a seat in one of these, and didn't want to move. Or think. I felt suddenly and simultaneously heavy, exhausted, and completely relaxed. As if, after years of conflict, I'd surrendered some object of contention...but couldn't recall what had made it so precious. That this prize, like the struggle that defined it, was beyond me now. Blurry and incomprehensible, lost in the rain.
~ ~ ~
In Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, the treatment for tubercular patients at the sanatorium where Hans is admitted consists primarily of fresh-air. Bracing, high-altitude lungfuls of the stuff, taken in the lofty cradle of the Swiss Alps. To this end they spend hours daily reclining in “lounge chairs”, swaddled in camel-hair blankets. Our protagonist speaks at great length of these proto-chaises; of both their elegant construction and of the art of “wrapping” oneself properly for the “cold-weather rest cures”. It's an early sign that he's coming to accept his affliction and embrace the feverish, insular society of the ill and dying.This crossed my mind as I sat, for I was grateful to be wearing a thick über-flannel over my more traditional unter-flannel, and appreciative of my ski-cap; fashioned from some unremarkable but warm synthetic. Other than that, my brain was still. (Or was there another fleeting thought? A brief regret? Something dismissed perhaps, in service of this lonely, lonely peace I've made for myself?)
I can't say how long I sat out there. I can attest that the stock was well-reduced when I returned though, and that I had to add a little water and sugar to cut the bitterness of an errant lemon rind.
