Travels home

4/08/10

Ending a show…

Ten weeks, plus four or five days on either end for setting up and tearing down. That would be 78+/- work days in a row – ok, ok, once in while there’s a morning off to do laundry, go to the grocery store, maybe get a haircut. So, when we are finished, what do we do?

Spend some time with the grandkids at the beach watching the seals give birth, take a ride up to watch the paragliders jumping off the cliffs at Torrey Pines, and wander around some cool neighborhoods finding poetic jewels in the midst of a teeming city…..

Anybody know where this is?......                                                                            

Then our little interlude is over and we are wending our way back to NC, and with all due respect to those living in the west of NM or the panhandle of Texas, it is less than a visually stimulating ride. The miles of flat bone colored grass with only very occasionally something remarkably beautiful (like the wind turbines stretching across the prairie spied along I-40 in the panhandle), or joyfully unexpected (the old car sculpture farther east on the same road) which, apologetically, I did not get to photograph…Syed says “next time” as I’m hollering, “STOP”.

I know that there is poetry in this bareness, but it’s a poetry I haven’t learned to appreciate except in a very ….OH STOP! This truck is carrying an ENTIRE load of BEES! Where are you going and why? The grasses are sage green, pavement various shades of dust, palest of blue skies punctuated by telephone pole sticks. Cadmium yellow road signs keep me awake. Black dots of Angus and a fence line wandering away into the far distance. No NPR. But a thrash of black birds executes a rush of sharp angles in front of us, and gone.