It is probably the sheer fabulousness of the light touching my skin every day--despite lack of disability culture infrastructure, joblessness and a knee that's chosen now to go out
Meme is having her renaissance. Here she is, cruising the porch like a calico land shark. In her dotage, she now has more to do than ever before. Hunting lizards and looking all alert and sinuous. I sing to her, "I am bringing Meme back, those other kitties don't know how to act."
She does loops around me while I lie on my belly on the pool deck--the pavers giving me belly chaff and my skin stitched together now by biting midges (minute aquatic flies). I approach action, eloquent interior action in a way that I have not in many years. Just writing several tiny lyrics in my notebook on an afternoon. Inger Christensen's Letter in April helps me with this.
Also, the instinct to achieve a white-gold base coat, so that my skin is really assimilated and has achieved balance with the sun. So that the fry-able parts are protected under a light outer tan. This is not so easy. I am pale with a true olive potential, but it only gets activated in my forearms and cheeks. There is my "lobster claw" right arm, as Jovan calls it. The arm that began to return to Rimbaud-in-the-desert nature as soon as we started our road trip toward FL 2 months ago. And there is my Dairy Queen. A red splotch on my lower back in the shape of the DQ sign. It is browning now, but the inflamed route to that tone was not the desired path. In the end, I may always resemble my cat in FL. Calico--with patches of pink-white, yellow-white, red, light brown, and red-brown. Maybe at best, my skin will take on a kind of creme broulee coloring.
Some other things: drugstore white wine or sweet tea and Tennessee whiskey; that Mom and I are the only Tampa-born natives in a room full of New York/New Jersey people at the Creative Loafing magazine's birthday event; men's shoe store in Arena Plaza--boat shoes and loafers from Miami on a spectrum between Papa Suave and Papi Chulo; that the Franks soles got busted out on the brick streets in Ybor at the festival some weeks ago and his feet yawned like old and leathery alligators--not a good scene for a man who likes to dress; something something a peli-can/his beak can hold more than his belly can.
