1.26.00

At least the wind stopped blowing so hard. Earlier the chilly breeze bit through my coat and earlobes. But now the city night is still and alive with the young and the weird walking. Seems more people about than I have had standing moments to recognize. This young man here, that short woman there. Now going by, she west and he east and the cars running parallel to them reflecting the lights in opposing directions. Movement of a city I see and there are people. People. Whose faces draw into mine as one of them. My car is broken and I'm without armor and without hurry. I can breathe ranging air and it leaves me as from a stack. Only a few days on foot and the streets are already more familiar. +++ Sunday before last a man driving an 18 wheeler came to empty out the items in the storage closet. He was carpeted in blonde curly shag over his lip, scalp, and neck. An all-American t-shirt-wearing kind of man from Pittsburgh, his belt gradually castrating him at the waist. Already his legs dangled from him and he had to pull them up from time to time. In a kindly manner he spoke to me about the items in the closet, about myself. Having nothing better to do, I helped him pack, which put us in the delightful place of strangers probing newness with never anything different than the moment and what was held for us in it. It is not a matter of inquiry into who the other person is, but a desultory kind of sharing. I've forgotten how it came up, perhaps he asked me if I liked to eat a particular meat dish, I don't know, but I told him that I'm a vegetarian. He asked about that, like others do: Is it for health or the animals? Wearing Dave's pack, he asked if my husband was a small man and I said no but he runs and he's thin and the man said I can tell 'cause he's got these straps pulled so tight. Then when he was rolling Dave's bike he asked if it was my husband's bike and I said yes and then is my husband vegetarian and of course yes. You moving out there? No. A pause in his speech and his work and he asked so why are you here? It's complicated. Oh, I won't ask; none of my business. (As we walked down the plywood corridor and out the doors toward the gate and the parked truck I thought of all the ways Dave lives his time. He is the biker the hiker the soccer player the thin veggie runner but I never think of him like that. When I think of him he is sitting quietly reading or sitting quietly hunched over a board scattered with cm squares of cardboard, tweezers in his hand. Strange I think I know him as primarily inactive, and yet there is all this material evidence that I also know him differently.) As for my questions, I asked the man if that was his truck and yeah, brand new. Just got it before this trip. Wanna sit in it? Yeah. So we moved to the truck to sign the bill of lading and he showed me pictures of The 14-year-old I bring with me in the summers and a photo of his entire family dressed in wild west garb. His daughters and his wife were indistinguishable from one another and I had to ask which one was the wife. The cab was tall, tall enough for bunks in the sleeper and for the man to stand full-height between the chairs. I could live in that, could sleep cities anew each night. Do you sleep alongside the road? Oh no. Too noisy. I just pull over in the rest areas where a lotta other guys stop. He was going to Eugene next, then on to Virginia and Philadelphia.

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