I got my hands on a Palm V today. What an excellent miniature toy!
The sun is shining in moderation. There are moments of especially bright light, and then the clouds move in for a short while. And then again: brightness and clouds.
It is its own kind of beautiful, and I cannot complain.
Amy and I love to walk through the streets of Portland with no particular destination. It teaches us patience. And it gives us time to talk about the things you talk about when you walk.
We spent eight hours of Sunday night walking and talking.
Here in Kentucky, surrounded by Amy's abundant family, I miss my own.
Love to you, dearest ones.
Today was my second day in Kentucky.
We drove from Lexington to Lee County to visit Amy's brother John Paul at a camp where he is working for the summer.
He took us through a cave that must have been half a mile long. It was open on both ends. In the last room, a group of bats huddled together on the ceiling. We turned off all of the lights but one and never shined a light on the bats themselves.
In the cave, it was 58 degrees. Outside, it was in the high eighties and about 98 percent humid. I wanted to stay in the cave.
Kentucky is everything I thought it would be and nothing I expected. There are nothing of the pine forests of Oregon. But there are lightning bugs. And beautiful rivers. And old railroad bridges.
I am going to Kentucky.
Tomorrow night, Amy and I are flying to Kentucky for five days to visit her family.
I have never been to Kentucky. I hear it's hot. I hear there are lightning bugs. I hope there will be a thunderstorm.
Amy and I will be busy looking at churches and chapels at Fort Knox. (For what? you ask. Well, ask me and I'll tell you.) I will meet Amy's maternal grandparents, her aunts and uncles, her cousins.
And apparently we will bring back a suitcase full of kitchen supplies.
The story goes like this: Amy's aunt knows someone who is moving from a huge house to a small apartment. She also knows someone who lost everything they own to a fire of some kind. So she pulled a little switcheroo thing whereby the victims of the fire were blessed by the extras from the move from large to small.
And there are pots and pans and other various implements of culinary destruction left over.
Yesterday, one of the university art majors displayed his sculpture thesis: he created a wall of cardboard boxes three high and six blocks long.
The boxes spread from one end of the park blocks to the other.
By this morning it was obvious that the boxes wouldn't last a week. They were stacked into pyramids, arches, columns. They were broken.
But this evening the boxes are stacked nicely again.
At five-thirty on a Wednesday I don't often have much to say.
It is grey out. Yesterday right about this time, we were hit with another one of those monsoon rains. I walked home in a hard rain.
It seems like everyone around me is either a) struggling with the question, "what does it mean to be me," or b) ignoring the same. I wonder if this is true for most of the United States, the West, and the world.
Give me your thoughts. Is this introspective glare a product of idealized American individuality, or is it part of the basic human condition? What do you think?
I have been meaning to write a story or two. I haven't.
