I am knee deep in work and, somewhere nearby, someone is firing off big crazy fireworks.
Under my window a couple walking their daschund has stopped to listen to the show and they are talking about hiking equipment and about how they would like to go to Yellowstone. The man keeps saying "the Rolex of hiking boots".
It makes me think of the story Eli told us years ago about how his high school presented a Rolex watch to him for being valedictorian and how, on that very same graduation night he accidentally left it on the roof of his car and drove off, never having once taken it out of the box. He told us this without a single ounce of ruefulness.
The new Calexico album is playing and it makes me all swoony. It both fans up and tampers down my ruefulness. While I work I'm trying to find advice for a friend who has asked for my opinion even though I have no good counsel to give. My thoughts vacillate too quick and wild between the most minute detail and the biggest sweeping picture to see anything for what it truly is. But I'll prattle endlessly to try and hide this. I talk a lot; maybe I should go back to listening.
Sometimes that's the only advice: keep listening. Joey Burns is singing about "ships drifting out of tune" and there is Eli's remembered voice. In the flower beds outside the sprinklers are turning on and the couple is rushing off, wet and laughing and taken aback, and above everything there is the incessant booming thunder of fireworks.
