Saturday, September 12, 2009

A tree, a rock, a cloud

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Image and video hosting by TinyPic

Image and video hosting by TinyPic

I'm thinking in fragments lately. Because I'm teaching the kids not to use them and I'm perverse? Because I'm scatterbrained? I don't know. I'm trying to write lately about my daddy, and the only way I can is in fragments. I fancy them up and call them "vignettes," but I know what they really are.

He's kind of like Ozymandias in the Shelley poem--"two vast and trunkless legs of stone" are all that's left. Anyway, I have four or five little Daddy fragments, not enough to say I'm working on a book yet, and all my eye notices is a bit of a landscape here and there. So there they are, little pieces of my town.

I'm thinking Carson McCullers was right; to love, you have to start with little things--a tree, a rock, a cloud, and go from there. Or a meter, a paintball building, a fence. Daddy would have no idea what I'm talking about.