There are days like this Sunday, when the sky is a gray it should not be in early July, and the morning’s too cold to throw on cut-offs and walk the nine blocks to Starbucks, when I make two more cups of coffee in the ‘Toastmaster’ on the counter here, slip into the “on loan” brown, leather recliner in the basement corner, and read a little bit of one book after another – all things Chinese Zen and George Pelecanos fiction. The last few days, and there’s no real reason why, I’ve pulled the entirely too large and very thick “The Great Deluge” by Douglas Brinkley from one of the shelves and slowly made my way halfway through the nightmare that was Katrina, now nearly 21 years ago.
Twenty-one years ago I was just a 56-year-old, becoming-wrinkled kid still fairly interested in why the world worked the ways it did, and I couldn’t have picked Grand Master Ma or Tung Shan from a line-up of Portland pick-pockets. Now those cats are what you might call my posse, and I read things like, “Simply walking down the street feels large and alive,” which says it way better than I ever do – and without all the yackety yack.
On the Fourth of July, on a very long late afternoon walk (feeling large and alive) I took turns calling both my sons in Idaho and Montana – which may have been quite expensive long distance back when Katrina was murdering the deep south – and in both conversations suggested watching the movie “Independence Day” might be a fun thing to do on its very own holiday. Then when I arrived home I drank lots of sparkly water to fend off dehydration and sat at the Lenovo and watched my own suggestion there.
Amping up something like a trickle of noticeable patriotism. The real stuff abundant, beneath still waters.
from a mountain bench 
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