As Their Midnight Approaches

The morning call at 2:00AM.  Sure.  Count me in.  I’m in.  And fortunately, all I really need to do is listen.  There’s another call at 5:30AM that I need to drive.  More calls follow. 

China, Asia, most of the working world that I know sends its last email, responds to its last wechat message, somewhere around my 11:30AM or so, as their midnight approaches.  All morning long, I have been starring at my new bird feeder.  My father and I set it up yesterday.  No birds have visited.  But the cloudy morning looks beautiful in a moody way, and after a tuna salad I suit-up and bike north towards Rosendale on the rail trail.

Heading this direction, there is a shelf of slate we pass through, not far from my entrance to the trail.  These must have been blown apart with dynamite one-hundred-and-fifty years ago, to allow the rail line to pass through at an even gradient.  Couldn’t tell you what it looked like then, but today, covered in liken they seem like a paw from the earth’s bowels clutching at the surface. 

I’d really enjoyed listening to the piano concertos of Schumann and Ravel earlier this month, on my rides along this path.  And I’ve searching for a follow-up, something to evoke the next such gesture, with my every ride since.  Today I have stumbled upon Schoenberg’s “Suite for Piano, Op.25” which provides an atonal accompaniment, the to this moody ride through the shadows of the clouds and the trees.  It isn’t raining yet, but it might.  I went further than I usually do this morning up to where the rough hills meet the fields.

The wife’s back home.  Everyone wants Chinese food.  She wants to make noodles and though I might have wished there was more besides the noodles and the pork and the cucumber and the broth, it is different from anything I would have made and my daughter and I slurp.  We are glad to have our matron home.   

Tuesday, 10/22/19