Epistle. To: Elisabeth Bardo

  Here's something else I remember from the past year. Christmas Day. Just a little snow in the air. Flurries and a gray cold morning lifted around the trees in the window. Glad to be here etc. But what's the catch?                
   Pancakes and bacon and coffee - what could be simple. James Brown's Funky Christmas on the stereo before daylight even!  And the kind of ritual that having a meal on an appointed day becomes as a year follows a year follows a year. I'm prone to wide angle thoughts on a holiday anyway. Maybe it's because the pancakes have a beautiful lazy feel to them after you're done eating. Maybe it's because bacon makes everything taste better like some wild enzyme running loose in your head. Maybe it's simply the end game of the year and so you sit back at the table and survey the past and wonder might there be a different plan?
  Ah. Another piece of bacon left!
  Later I went for a walk in the park. Even if we're on a short leash and considering a relative point of view to the world at large, and that means you have to die all the time when you think about it, it's better to go out that way than trying to conjure up a method where all the years seemed equal. I mean you can still have those doubts about what trips you up or how clumsy you were. The flurries persisted and the sky remained steely cold. Snow globe weather shaken around me... a brilliant e-card I received the other day on the computer with animated reindeer singing etc and how that makes the heart feel cheap and wonderful... the sound of my boots stepping along the dirt path and crunching on the frozen ground in the morning's silence like a hymn being sung by a choir. The evergreens sagging with long boughs falling around in tier after tier of needle green. The views out onto the lake thieved with a gray green light almost painted from the sky and so meeting the foggy condensed moisture boosted off the waves hitting the rocky icy shoreline in winter...
   Born to walk. And so in kind walk to be born.
   In answer to your question no I don't have a family. Maybe it's stupid and all that. But I'm digging in the earth for rare elements.