1982

It was just that one day.
I remember the Liberty Bell. Standing on bricks, or maybe it was big tiles of grey and brown cement, and then held on my mother's shoulder while the tour guide talked and talked to the small crowd of us. We wanted to know about the Liberty Bell, to hear what this skinny man could tell us about it. The weather was cool but not cold, and my sister stood down by my mother's feet as we behaved well in public. Everyone was in a good mood, all the strangers in the little crowd felt happy like on the first fall day. It was a big flat space we were standing on, under a roof but with openness around us, maybe just columns holding up the protective ceiling.
Then, later, we were in a glass elevator, but that's not how I remember it. We were touring a building that I thought must be better than most buildings if we were going all through it just to see it, not for any real reason to be there. I don't know what it was. We had a tour guide there, and we all climbed onto a platform with no sides, suddenly outside. I was near the middle, surrounded by knees in suit pants and long skirts. I thought I was in the middle so that the adults could keep me from falling off the sides. We were high, high up in the air with nothing holding us up except some ropes or cables in the corners, and we were going down down. So many people crammed onto the platform, and I wasn't sure where the edges were. No one else seemed worried, and this scared me even more. I started crying out of fear and my mother looked down at me in complete confusion. We might all fall off! nothing was even holding us up!
I stopped crying because I turned around and saw a girl almost right on my eye level appear between the strangerlegs, holding a big red balloon. It might have been yellow. She stood looking at me, perfectly calm and blank, and I looked at her and envied her balloon. Don't let go of it, I thought to her, it will fly away forever.

"I guess we should wash the dishes."
It was out now, in the air between us. We'd both been avoiding saying it, and as I looked at the heaped, stacked pile of food-coated dishes, I was more disheartened than ever. I could see mustard, jelly, crumbs, pieces of old vegetables, and what looked like hard pasta fused to a dinner plate. There were only a few butter knives left in the drawer, three forks, no spoons. It was all in the mound.
"It's your turn." Cheerily he threw out his first defense from the living room. I tried to remember what dishes he could be talking about that he washed. The three new glasses I bought at Goodwill last week? That hardly counted.
"No way! I definitely did them last."
The air now filled with the delicacy of crafting this conversation. It couldn't turn into an argument - who fights over doing the dishes? Nor could it seem like an actual disagreement. It needed to be a clearing up of confusion - whose turn had actually come?
"What day did you do them then? Cuz I did them last week, remember? Don't you remember? What day was that?"
"We weren't here last week. We haven't done them since we got back."
Pause. He moved closer to the kitchen door.
"Well, I wish I could remember what day that was that I did them."
We were getting nowhere.
"I guess if neither one of us cares enough to actually do them, they just won't get done tonight." I threw out the ultimatim. I heard nervous laughter in the air before I realized that it was mine. Now that we were invested in the conversation I was hoping that he would step up, now that we had both finally acknowledged the disaster area.
But there was no answer from the doorway, and I saw him going to get his trombone out of the case. I was losing.
"Well, anyway I just don't want to do them right now." Maybe I could wait him out. We were both aware that his mother was coming over tomorrow for the weekend, and I was pretty sure he would want it clean.
"Yeah, don't do them right now." He seemed satisfied by this chronological displacement of the issue, and I had completely lost. I thought of her showing up tomorrow afternoon and viewing the almost moldy pile of mucky dishes that was the overwhelming centerpiece of the teeny kitchen. She would think I was disgusting. And really, she would be right. I would think I was disgusting too. It was my house after all, and they were my dishes.
I turned on the hot water.

The End.

Today Nate, Dan, Liz and I traversed the long roads to 15th street, to wander through giant fields,



searching for the perfect pumpkin.



While Dan liked the warty ones, Nate seemed not to enjoy having his picture taken.




This one was superb, but alas, quite expensive, so we left it there. Sometimes I still think about it.



The End.

On the road

Nate and I are in Goshen Indiana this weekend. We (mostly I) drove all night Friday night to get here. We're staying with his sister. Currently I sit in a computer lab on Goshen College campus, where Nate got his degree. I can't describe how strange it feels to be on a college campus again.
Next we're going to Chicago for the day/night on Tuesday before heading back to Kansas. All of this brings back threads of stringent memories, road trips from the past, mostly college-era, that make me feel younger and cleaner and freer than usual. This feeling is probably also partly due to the cooler weather and the first little chunks of color in the trees.
It's also really nice to have a break from the Jack Keroac-ian lifestyles of Lawrence, which I honestly have not gotten used to yet.
That's all for now.

More fun to write than to read

Self doubt is the plight of the individual, stemming from the very nature of being individual. People prone to doubt their own actions at every turn are primarily those who have not yet accepted their own existence apart from any other entity.
Also,
Reading and searching another person's philosophy, or, as it follows, theology, for the purpose of absorbing that philosophy in a routinized surrender, masked by the name of education, is completely without worth.

No real point to this one, I just wanted to write something

Here move I from Myspace. We'll see how we all feel about it with time. Chances are good that we'll all feel better here.
This morning I went to a teensy little Mennonite church here in Lawrence, the second week in a row. Nate elected not to come this time, and I pedaled there on my spiffy new bike that I got yesterday for twenty dollars. We had communion in a unique way, which was that little groups of people would voluntarily take turns gathering in the middle of the room, around a round rug, and have communion together whilst the rest of us filled the room with hymn-singing. First a reasonably sized group gathered, and I enjoyed actually being able to hear myself sing as usually I find myself both behind and next to overly confident harmonizers whose piercing voices leave me in the dust. I was enjoying it so much, actually, that I also refrained from gathering around the round round rug until after the over-sized second group had also rejoined their bottoms to their brightly colored plastic chairs. Third group's turn, I thought I'd go. I stood up, and so did the man in front of me, along with no one else. We stood without moving for a little too long, which communicated to each other that we would have rathered that more people stood. So we gathered in the middle, just the two of us, and had our own little communion. This idea seemed to make my curly-haired co-communer feel awkward, especially since at one point the precedent was to join hands in silence after taking part in the sacrament. I think it was all a little too personal for Curly, especially considering that we were being watched by a roomful of people. I was surprised to find that it didn't matter to me at all, except that in observing the situation I forgot to focus in and think about what I was supposed to be thinking about, rendering the entire thing something of a pointless exercise.