Curtain Closes

The bright innards of an orange, the pulp between one’s teeth when they bite into an orange that’s been in the fridge all day, a respite on a hot day, reading to one’s content, read all day if you want to.

Hop on your bike, and ride, go back and forth to Tacoma, look forward to reading what’s written on a billboard with Uncle Sam’s Picture on it patriotic diatribes on the highway, reminding me of the rhetoric of the bald eagle on the Muppets. Health Provider Funded bike rides. Walking home from a bar on a hot summer night, the air cool and sweet and leading you through another morning of coffee and writing and reading from a bright computer screen. Clean shiny and new.

Seeing local bands for five bucks, bands who you’ve never heard before, never had the time recently until now.

The idea that summer lives on forever somewhere inside of us. Stay a little longer on the patio, look out at the beach, a different locale in each place you go, but always the beach.

Caliban, a scullery of crab, a man covered in barnacles clings to his bottle of booze, precious companion, and crawls up and out of the trap door in the stage, Shakespeare, modeled after the original theater, for this is The Tempest, in Ashland, and its hot, but never in the outdoor theater.

So the curtain begins its descent on Summer, and the regimented schedules of school return, the dank smell of Fall, and the rains that follow it, the burnt dust school smells, the pencil shaving and leather smell of the first day of school, strange fashions, new angular haircuts, picture day.

And somewhere in summer the idea that one doesn’t have to grow old necessarily, get old and boring, never hop in and swim on a hot fourth of July in a river that’s almost too polluted to swim in, treading water and staying afloat, the brown green water a dipping moving horizontal, to not be too old and serious that we cant run out to a freezing cold Pacific coast, feel numb in the toes, lift up your shorts so you don’t get too wet. No too old to pick shells all day in the sunshine.