orangeheart

i have a vanilla coke, the world is okay. it is cold outside but i am inside, i am constantly checking through the window for more snow.

today is my granddaddy's birthday. he is losing his mind & this christmas is probably the last one he will come down to elizabethtown to have brunch with my family. the summer i took a class at the university of louisville (it was a survey, ancient euro/mediterranean art, & i took it with one mental arm tied behind my mental back, but there was a girl who looked like winona ryder who sat behind me & wore a beret to class every day, but not always the same beret every day), i stayed at his apartment with him a couple days a week. we watched larry king every night & did the crossword every morning. he fed me a lot of canteloupe because i ate some the first day i stayed with him & you know how those things are. i don't care for canteloupe that much, & now every time i eat it i get all misty & tell everyone who'll stop to listen about that summer i stayed at my granddaddy's, the canteloupe i didn't like & ate. i will possibly also tell about how i would stay up very late at night sitting up in what was my grandmother's bed &, ultimately, her deathbed, reading novels & eating food i'd found in the pantry. how i would sneak the phone into the deathbed with me & call bean, back in the very early days of bean-&-me.

also that summer i spent a lot of time on the interstate in my dad's truck with him, listening to morning edition on the ride north, listening to local news shows on the ride south. when i am blind i will still remember all the little landmarks, all the billboards that never change, all the creeks & willow trees along that stretch of I-65. when i am blind, or when i am in some strange exile, like victor hugo writing obsessively about the streets of paris in les misï¿½rables, which i read when i was maybe fourteen, skipping over all the obsessive street-naming parts, although recently i've been considering going back to read them. it is the kind of thing i like, now.

i had no idea all these things were going to spill out. the vanilla coke is over & so is this, i guess.

here's andy: