Sunshine

"You try to reach the sun, you're laughed at
It doesn't mean that we can't try
Waking up to a brand new day
The sun is shining the rain has gone away
Waking up to a brand new day
The night is gone and the sun's come out today
I can see the sun, I can see the moon, I can see the stars and sun."

-- The Sunshine Fix, "Everything is Waking"

--

It's fall and it feels like it.

The storm lasted a week and a half and the worst of it was last night. A series of shattering thunder hits popped open the window above my head when I slept. It's a flat--wide and long, sort of oblong--window, held shut by a simple catch, and in front of it is a small ledge where I keep my baseball glove. When the window popped open (it swings up on top hinges, like a flap) it knocked the glove, wrapped around an old, worn ball to keep the fingers' shape, off the ledge and onto my pillow, and I flinched out of sleep. It was like machinery outside, fearsome, powerful, storm machinery. I looked out the window and felt the pressure, cold humidity blowing into my room, saw the tree outside, and thought it had lost an entire branch. It turns out only the leaves had disappeared, and as my eyes adjusted I could see the black fingers of the tree grabbing at air. I shut the window and went back to sleep. I didn't discover that my baseball glove had fallen until the next day.

The day after a storm, I always have to check the floor under the passenger seat of my car. Water comes in from somewhere and in the worst cases forms a substantial puddle. I have to use my towels to soak it up, just to get the standing water out of there, but the moisture remains in the carpet. It smells for a week and I have to drive with the windows open and run the foot heater and sometimes at night the water evaporates and fogs up my windows.

But today, there was no puddle. The day is awash with the strongest, purest blue and green, usually the one on top of the other. That photo above, the view from the office I share, hardly does it justice, but you get the idea.

--

I'm two weeks ahead of work. Well, I was two weeks ahead about three days ago...making me only about a week and a half ahead of work. It's still good.

My after-school classes at the Covedale begin in exactly one week. We had hoped for upwards of twenty kids, but we only have about a dozen, last I heard. That may be best: smaller groups mean more progress, generally, more individualized attention and more chances to take part. My biggest question at this point is, What kind of show do we plan for?

It's not that I haven't planned already. I have created three calendars to choose from, three ways to steer the class: towards an improv show, towards an evening of scenes, towards a performance of an edited version of an existing (royalty-free) script. It's really a matter of seeing what talent already naturally exists in each child and finding the best avenue for its training and expression. Do we have singers? dancers? actors? acrobats? puppeteers?

Once I know, I can work on a script...or work on finding one...or several... In preparation, I've cleaned out the local library's supply of free plays for children, trying to figure out what works and what doesn't.

--

And did I mention I get paid on Thursday? For both part-time work at TCTC and for acting in Beauty and the Beast (essentially doubling my income, at least for a month)? Yeah.

I can't wait to have money again.