A Life

Today I Saw Two Pink Flamingos, 2012

It was dark and silent when I realized I was awake. I was holding two socks in my right hand, beneath my pillow. Wearing socks to bed on a cold night always seems a good idea, until it isn't. I inevitably wake with my socks removed.

I wrote this down in the library, the branch that inspired Richard Brautigan's fictional library of unpublishable books.

There was an old Mason jar filled with paperwhites placed atop a shelf neatly stacked with various newspapers and Chinese magazines. I couldn't stop looking at the flowers, and the jar. I'd never seen fresh flowers in a library. They changed the space in the most positive of ways.

I was also surprised by the number of people without keyboards before them, and the library quiet of the past.

A hardcover titled Paris Trout seemed to scream from the shelf across from my table. The title font was enormous and slanted to the right, as if in action. Freedom sat on a shelf to my left. I guessed its days of having a queue were over.

Still holding my socks I thought of a sentence Annie Dillard had written. I'd found it the night before, in the form of a note in one of my old journals.

I hear the river outside the window, if I remember to listen.

My river was the moan of the distant foghorn. It was dependable, except on those days that decided to turn blue.

Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard