a Saturday fairy tale

I do not tell you these things with exaggeration. Or comedy. I’m not in search of a cheap laugh.

My Morning Pages Saturday laid it out there. I knew something was going on but I didn’t know what. And then my Morning Pages, like John Lennon said of ‘Sexy Sadie,’ “Laid it out for all to see.” There was something like a little pinch. An emotional pinch. A blowsy whisper of “Aha.” Maybe it was a shout.

“I contain multitudes,” Walt Whitman said in his ‘Song of Myself,’ and this is the “all’ Sexy Sadie laid it out to. In my case, these very multitudes – Winston, Buddy, Milky. Eight-year-old me. Sixty-five-year-old me. Mom’s funeral service me. Friday morning wedding me. Hawaii vacation me. Suicidal me and wild-with-life me. Father me. Class President me, mountain hermit me. Doo wop and punk rock and church choir me. Multitudes.

Saturday morning, Whole Foods/Starbucks plaza, the world was filled with mutants. They mostly looked like people, but I knew way down deep they were mutants. Just pay attention, I reminded myself. Check the behaviors. I drove up listening to Springsteen – “Barefoot girl sitting on the hood of a Dodge drinking warm beer in the soft summer rain.” Do they write ’em like that anymore?

Sometimes. Even amidst “this god almighty gloom.”

I can’t seem but help to write this stuff.

Broccoli, peanut butter, yellow squash, Cannellini Beans. Still I shopped, among the mutants.

The painting – ‘My Hawaiian Vacation With Dragons’