strike that

put it in your pocket

Meteors are falling down upon us right now and I’ve only had one good look at them, last Thursday from a sleeping bag on a corn field next to a middle school outside Corvallis. Farm country, no lights, new moon. That’s about the best you can ask for, for a meteor shower.

Since then it’s been one thing after another and I haven’t had a second chance to sit under falling stars, and that right there is inexcusable. There was the warehouse party under the Burnside Bridge, my first dancing since the ankle incident. There was a stamp show with my father, moving table to table around a huge convention center room learning about hinges and perforations and stalking the four dollar Columbian. There was the Bridge Pedal - a bike ride I have been anticipating since the weekend I moved to Portland, in which the ten bridges across the Willamette are open to bikers – which was so jammed with twenty thousand participants that we ended up improvising a three-bridge route followed by waffles and the Times.

There was dinner at Jake’s, during which my parents met Operaman over a huge pot of crawfish. They talked about music for approximately nineteen hours, after which they took the divorced-with-kids thing in stride. They liked him so much I could vomit. I count on my parents loathing the people I date, or at least disrespecting their three day stubble and desire to live with me in Greenland for a while. I don’t know how this is going to work.

There were more meals, because meals are such an event with my parents that there’s hardly time for other things between them. There was The Bite of Oregon food festival, where I “sampled” approximately twenty wines in order to handle with better humor my mother’s thoughtful paranoia about the dangers of bicycling. There was a trip to Crowne Vista overlooking the Columbia Gorge, which went well despite my father’s initial reaction to the proposal: Are we going to drive there and it’s just a big canyon in the ground that we look at?

There was this morning, finally, the trip to the clinic out in Beaverton, Debbie and I eavesdropping on a waiting room full of Stories, me getting samples taken from places I prefer to keep in tact, and things looked not so bad, said the doctor, but we’ll really know in two weeks.

And meanwhile we’ve been busily hurtling through the remnants of a comet named for the man who slew Medusa, a comet that’s far, far away at the moment but that left behind a sky full of shooting stars that we’ve looked up at once a year for the past two thousand years at least.

posted by tortaluga @ 11:34 PM