One Saturday I took a walk to Zipperhead.
I can't clock this day. Time stretched and strained. The middle part was nothing but compression. I went very high on the swings. So high that I got a little sand in one of my shoes when I jumped off. There are things you can do in the nighttime that you can only do in the nighttime. And sometimes it's just a question of courage. I'm never embarrassed when I know no one's looking.
Somewhere between the beginning and the end, I saw Spider-Man 2 and talked about Holocaust documentaries with my father and thought about going swimming but didn't. Somewhere in there, I liked the way I looked. At some point, I got the itch to make memories out of blankness. And for a moment, I was glad to have given in to the inclination to take pictures.

The moon was full tonight. I could feel it in my throat.
Flip Side
My mother went to an estate sale today and brought back a small stack of very old books for me. Mostly poetry. Some Shakespeare. A small red volume has a binding that reads Master Pieces of Humor Volume II, and inside, the title plate says, "Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor." My mother said, "It says humor, but I tried to read it and nothing in it was funny." It's copyrighted 1904 and bears a photo of an unsmiling man who looks like a Victorian version of Captain Kangaroo. I'm not surprised there was nothing funny in it by my mother's standards. Her hope that something in it would be funny was the most amusing part to me. Especially given the things I know are prone to tickle her. But there is something to be said for her enthusiasm for wit. My mother is the only person I know who has a special folder to save the email humor she gets from friends and colleagues. And it isn't the SPAM folder. She LIKES it. That being said, she is much funnier than anything that goes out over the Internet, I can assure you.