It was 7:58, Sunday morning, December 10th, 2017, to be exact--twenty-one days and three hours and 32 seconds before we would pull out of the lane at our place just east of Sandstone, Utah and hit the pavement for our new life on the road in our new very rustic ice cream truck.
It was a cold, dry morning. 23 degrees. I had woken up with a cold, dry cough and gunky eyes and thought about taking a shower. I had had a dream where I was making a data table of some sort for a school. I must have been a consultant. It was an Excel sheet, quite pretty, if I remember correctly, with big, bold lines for major divisions, and thin, little lines for minor divisions, and lots of pretty colors, from vibrant brights to ever so subtle pastels, and I was showing it to some colleagues. They weren't really colleagues. I was some outside consultant making twice each of their salaries, because that is the type of thing school districts do, and I have been on both sides of it, the lucky consultant and the overworked teacher, and generally, it all amounts to nothing in the end--oh I won't worry my life away... (It's okay to hum a bar of Jason Maraz's "Remedy" here.)
Anyway, my "peers" had some issues with some of my squares of data. They wondered where they came from. I studied them carefully, thinking back, trying to come up with some reasonable explanation. The terrifying thing that I realized is that these boxes did not contain student achievement scores; no, they didn't even contain student or parent perception data; what they did contain were single words that I'd isolated out of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. Apparently, I'd been up late working on a class for my MFA program while also working on my consultant work, got bored, and started filling in my data sheet with random Murakami-words: Kasahara, occurred, Creta Kano, surrounded by darkness, sleep no border, wakefulness.
The dream went on from there to places I will not follow that involved a close-up of a saltine cracker smashed to pieces on a pristine polished school tiled floor--the old type from the seventies, where each tile, itself, looks sort of like a saltine cracker. I can picture an old heater by the principal's office blowing out hot air. I would sit on it before school and stare at frost on the lawn, watching it slowly melt in the early morning November sunlight. Perhaps that is why it took so long for me to find my true calling. Nobody has a need for someone who sits and watches frost melt in the early morning rays.
Yet, after I dutifully read in my Book of Mormon, that's also exactly what I did on the Sunday morning we speak of. I got up, walked to the glass sliding door in the kitchen, looked out to see if there were any deer. There weren't. Then, I grabbed the laptop out of the living room, which is really the family room--Marci switched them--and I headed to my blue chair in the family room, which is really the living room. The sun slanted hard across the juniper ridge in front of our house, creating long, blobular shadows, sort of like the shapes of hot air balloons, but not quite. There was the beautiful pink and gray twiggy tops of cottonwood along the creek bottom. There was the old, rustic, leaning ranch gate, and of course, frost slowly melting off the rubble of dry wild rye. I was irritated that there was also the red, iron arm of a digger--a snort, like in the book Are You My Mother?--sticking out over the edge of the side canyon, meaning they still hadn't gotten that pipe line laid right across our property. They'd torn up our road more times than Trump had shocked the world.
I decided then and there, that it being a beautiful Sunday morning despite the smog slowly leaking into the valley from Salt Lake and Provo in the north, and the smoke slowly pouring in from the west from the fires in California, and the gunk slowly oozing out of my eyes from my cold... Despite, all this, it being a beautiful Sunday morning (and it truly was), the Lord's day, I would not bring up the ice cream truck idea again until Monday because it had not taken my relationship with Marci in a positive direction when I brought it up the night before. Why do women always have to be so dang practical?
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