Bossy

You get a notion and run, or as the case may be, ride with it--which could explain why you’re convinced that the headwind you’d been fighting all the way from work would place its outstretched hand on the small of your back and propel you up the oldest and fanciest of our seven hills and that wasn’t wrong, at least for that one moment when it felt like it, ignoring half a block earlier when the wind was right in your face, but oh well, a person did get to be outside almost all of an early evening on a fall night where, most of the time, rain pants were suspenders and a belt, and even though numbers were small, commitment was large, if not, on my part, anyway, really all that long-lasting.

A fellow’s got preferences, after all, and even though nobody, except maybe everybody sometimes, wants to be the one who’s least flexible, who doesn’t want what they want?

The problem is, it’s hard to admit—or even recognize—mistakes in the instant, and that’s part of the reason why babies are bottled and crises averted.

One thing, not necessarily the main thing, is to get home safe in more or less one piece.  Whatever that means after all.

And if that means late outdoor fires are missed, so be it; at least, for a time, there was the incendiary pleasure of circumnavigating a mysterious mansion more or less.

In her 1944 Seattle novel, Great Son, set among homes perched like miniature medieval castles on Queen Anne Hill, (hence the original interest in an evening’s ascent), Edna Ferber says of our fair city: “There was too much of everything.”  Two lakes, two canals, two mountain ranges, two rivers, “a colossal feat of Nature,” a “godlike production,” “too much for the average man.”

Of course, that’s obvious out and up on Thursday two wheels; where time and again, even not enough is too much.