Took a long bike ride out to the country, the first one of the summer. I’m amused by my reaction to seeing a corn field again, amused that after six months it can almost fill a need, as if it's on Maslow’s hierarchy. So I crossed that one off. One can certainly live without seeing green, living things and we do all winter, but we’re richer during the summer. As John Denver once sang, “I know he’d be a poorer man if he never saw an eagle fly.”
I see a groundhog disappear on invisible legs into the brush line and later three bunny “hoppits”, as my wife calls them, their noses and ears twitching nervously. A perfect golden-hue’d field lies to my right, contrasted pleasingly by the emerald of young soy. The farmhouse and out buildings are fantastically kept up, the rural equivalent of not having a “hair out of place”. I long to rest in that order, in the short-clipped grass resting against the straight edge of the green crops. After watching the movie “Field of Dreams” back in the late ‘90s I wanted to plant a corn field in my backyard. Of course the work involved would be daunting (we have about 3/4ths of an acre) and my wife would never stand for it. But it’s always been a dream to have my own corn field and to disappear among the tall stalks.
Apropos of nothing an old song comes to mind
Living on Tulsa Time.I always wanted to go to Tulsa. I love the name; it rolls off the tongue. Going to a town because you like the name is probably not the best reason to go but I figured that a city no one purposely goes to might be worth going to. Oklahoma isn’t exactly a hot destination but just as on the political curve the extreme right-wing is actually left-wing, I imagined Tulsa to be so uncharismatic as to make it charismatic.
Living on Tulsa Time.
Gonna set my watch back to it
'Cause you know that I've been through it.
Living on Tulsa Time.
I think of my favorite aunt. And I think that maybe I understand something she had in her cellar better. When she was young she contracted a disease that resulted in not having body hair for the rest of her life. She wore a wig and painted on eyebrows and in my youth and sweet obliviousness to appearances, I had not a clue. But I remember that she had a picture in her basement of a woman with long, beautiful hair and admiring herself in a mirror. If you looked at the picture from farther away it appeared to be a skull, and at the bottom there was a caption warning agaist vanity. It occurred to me for the first time that she must've keenly felt her lack of hair and so that picture must've been somewhat consolatory, in knowing that all things pass.
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