Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Flowing on a Hot Summer Night

Sly and the Family Stone is on the box. "Stand". The front door is bungeyed open, and the kitchen door open and screened, and a breeze breezes through. It's been too hot to eat and too sticky to sleep really good. The wine helps smother those first hours, but eventually I wake with a layer of sweat on my brow and sticking me to the sheets.

It's the season for three and four short showers in a day. Thirty seconds, then padding barefoot and dripping through the house until I'm cool and dry...for half an hour.

I've been playing tunes, flipping through and listening to albums I haven't listened to in awhile. And I'm going for summer music. Donald Byrd's "Free Form". Branford Marsalis's "Royal Garden Blues", The Temptations "Wish it Would Rain", and Freddie Hubbard's "The Black Angel", which my buddy Thomps and I listened to daily one blistering summer in Greenfield, Mississippi. The opening of the album with it's plucky bass and plinking keyboard, and Hubbard's syrupy spikes of sound, still drips with sweat for us, these decades later.

I wanted to swim today, but got to the lake with my swim trunks still in my backpack at home, so sat there on the beach anyway, as the sky cooled, watching the hundreds of people. It's a welcome, beautiful sight, reminding me that we humans are a species after all, swarming down to the water, every shape and age and kind of us, drawn there as much as the seagulls, and maybe as alike as them. There's lots of splashing, some swimming, all sorts of watercraft, from boards to sails, a few people standing and wading. But mostly, we come and watch the water, or lie beside it, drawn into thought, or sleep, or back into our childhoods.

It's a good way to end this day.

No comments:

Post a Comment