Paperback

"I'm a-tell you baby,

We gonna move away from town...

I'm a-buy myself a Frigidaire

When I move, yeah, out on the outskirts of town.

That's why I don't want nobody--

Hoo, baby!--always hangin' around..."

-- Big Bill Broonzy, "I'm Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town"

--

Driving north from my apartment, passed a U-Haul truck on my right. Back was open, inside were large picture frames and bed frames, lots of furniture piled and stacked like files in a cabinet, all crammed in there, immovable. There was space between where the furniture pile ended and the truck ended, and in that three feet or so was a rocking chair, and in that rocking chair--ancient, graying brown wood, straw webbing for the back--sat a girl of about twelve, wearing overalls and Skechers whose toes tapped the floor of the truck and pushed with metronomic regularity so that the girl in the rocking chair, well, rocked, but with too much weight forward (and too little total) to get that satisfying depth of rocking that old women with weak backs seem to enjoy on autumn afternoons. She looked like a much younger, backwards-turned version of Granny from "The Beverly Hillbillies." The girl read a paperback in her lap while a young boy--I assumed it was her brother--aimed the spine of a large dark-colored book (Bible? dictionary? Stephen King's The Stand?) as if it were a machine gun. She ignored him.

And this I saw in a flash as I passed, and I was driving to work.

--

My little sister visits in nine days. Gotta clean the carpet, scrub the sinks, wipe down shower and toilet, wash the extra bedsheets, fluff the extra pillows, and--latest addition to the list of preparations--buy some ground beef and Hamburger Helper (no stroganoff or lasagna, please). I'm terribly excited for her visit (he said, sounding accidentally like the heroine of an Austen novel).

--

To have found a church (maybe) and a volunteering outlet (definitely) and to start walking and running in the mornings...it's all stuff I feel like I should have done a long time ago, and it feels so completely good to be doing those things again. But it's not the doing so much as the change I feel as a result. Simple energies. Little moments.

With the early morning activity, I now have more time in the day. More productive time. Been reading a lot more (almost 100 pages, just today) for leisure, and feeling the benefits. With a full day of things done, the evenings are reserved for films. Films for leisure.

And things are just looking up in general. That's all, I guess. (Or something like that.)