Ahead

Dog Days. My troubles grow. They are not all external. I need an event, something to photograph to take my mind off things. A Big State Fair. A Beauty Pageant. The Phyllis Diller Look Alike Contest. Something. Tell me if you know of anything. It seems I always find out about things the day after they happen.

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Big days, sad, close nights. On the one hand, it was exciting to be moving to another town. I had lived in my town since I was five. This would be an adventure. Everything looked different now, though. I was seeing things I hadn't seen before. I walked as if in a dream as if seeing the town for the very first time.

At night, Sherri and I drew ourselves together with warm tenderness.

I moved on a Sunday night. I loaded a little rented trailer with my few belongings and drove up the highway in a literal sunset. I thought about my father, divorced and living alone. We would not be watching football games together now, not on Sunday afternoons, not on Monday nights. I thought about eating dinners with him in the hot evenings at the lake and sitting with him when the weather changed, cool evenings with the gas heater hissing. I could see all that country that surrounded him, could feel it. I could see him at his little table at night smoking a cigarette, reading a book. It was that I thought about as the sun went down.

Driving through the dark into the distance, everything was new. I rolled the windows down and let the warm air bathe me. The flat land began to rise and fall with low rolling hills. I was flying. It's crazy, I thought, to drive this fast with a trailer hitched on, but it felt good to go that fast. It felt good to fly into the unknown darkness, rising and falling, rising and falling.

There was only this for now, the hills, the darkness, the distance. Everything else lay ahead.