Short Folk #3: Idea of Order in a Best Buy Parking Lot

Note for the weak eared: she's full of swears.

 Spindles of light in the brown water off the edge of the dock. Paddleboats. Boys and girls leaping off, then turning and holding the edge with one hand as they tread water to splash their friends.  Off the floor of the pond the reedy grasses rise, same color and shape as the wheaty lines of sunlight arcing down to feed them. A dry group of children in mother purchased gaudy swimsuits looks straight down from the dock and can’t tell where sun ends and grass begins. And they’re afraid to test the depth of the sunlight’s safe water—afraid to feel the mannequin hands of the grass oscillate against their ankles—afraid to breach that safe margin. A simple enough fear.

       But if you are one of those dry children you should know you will probably end up, in your late middle age, sitting in your beat-up idling pickup in a Best Buy parking lot (nothing better to do on a Tuesday evening) watching the future corpses of America waddle by with their grocery bags.

     Then you’ll probably look up at the huge American flag lolling in a tiny breeze. You’ll be desperate to find a rhythm in it, a known cadence, anything. But you won’t and you’ll start to curse the inconsistency of its undulations—the completely random and irredeemable chance with which the wind sails and billows it.   “Stand straight out, damn you!” you’ll say as you watch it. “Stand straight out, Goddamn you, so I can count your stars!”

But it won’t. These twilight gusts are nowhere near strong enough. And child you won’t either. Unless you jump.

Composition Notes:

Trigger: remembering the way the sunlight looked off of a dock when I was 10 or so. Then waiting in a Best Buy parking lot, grumpy, and looking at the big flag.

Influence (anxiety of): Yesterday I read the first 40 pages of C. McCarthy’s Suttree, and then watching Inception (holy crap) right afterwards. Big time double whammy for introspection. I measure out how much I allow myself to read McCarthy, because I think he’s the bees knees and I know there’s only so much left that I haven’t read. I’m in awe of his vocabulary and how he describes things. My attempt at the sunlight and the reeds is a shadow of a shadow of what he does in describing the Tennessee river in Suttree. Inception was absolutely amazing. I love creative things that force you to think on a different plane.

Music: I was listening to “The National” station on last.fm (again, major introspection J )while I did some of the early paragraph, but then I needed to read out loud to test some of the sentences, so I turned it down and forgot to turn it up again.

Timeframe: Yesterday I jotted down some notes while looking at that flag, then last night there was the long drive back from the movie where I mused on it, then today, about 45 minutes actually writing it out. Had no idea it was headed where it was until I wrote the last line.