For a little while anyway, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays I drive south to click and stack images and text into machines for foreign bookstores. This morning I drove through a tunnel of Oregon fog while listening to Brian Jonestown Massacre. On repeat.
A drive
It's Sunday morning at 11:13 am. We are on our way back to Portland from Seattle in a pickup truck carrying a stack if Michael's paintings. Last night he showed his work to The Linda Hodges Gallery and they (unsurprisingly - because his work is exceptional) asked him to do a show this coming February.
Beckett is in the back seat watching an episode of the incessantly smiling Barney on the iPad. The sun is settled in warm pools on Michael's denimed lap. Windows are down and the hair that flies into my eyes, nose and mouth, is an aggravating reminder that I've just started shedding my uterine lining.
There are bright red cars, colbalt blue cars, taxi cab yellow cars driven by people who pick their noses, who passively listen (or not) to their passengers, who glance too much at their phones. Like us, they have left somewhere to go somewhere else, flanked on a highway between what was and will be. They are coming from fishing trips, great uncles' funerals, Rifle handling workshops, teenage sleepovers, baby shower brunches, grocery store shopping-sprees, drive-throughs, red-tail hawk-watching, binge drinking, Zumba and Starbucks. They are headed home, to the rodeo, to Kinkos, to a toddler's birthday party, to Taco Bell, to cousin Fred's annual BBQ, to sleep with Anthony's wife, to put their last 100 dollars into a slot machine.
I smell horses and coffee, dust and stale panties. I hear the wild combat of tires and wind. I'm thinking about what I should make for dinner this week - chickpea crepes and tarragon tomato soup. I picture the overflowing laundry basket in my closet and the crusty sheets on our bed.
I think about not having any time and whether it's even possible to possess such a thing. I think about the pleasure and privilege of time and the time involved in thinking about time. Time spent in cars, in waiting rooms, the few seconds between taking steps. Time spent flanking between what was and will be.
