Sunday, November 13, 2011

a moment in the night: lovejoy skateboarder

It's 12:30 at night, which is also 12:30 in the morning, and I'm just up from a dream to walk Nicholas in the dry icy cold, because after his 8:00 walk and after the movie, it was pouring and he was asleep under the covers, and we thought we might get away with it. I had fallen asleep right after the movie. Stephen had read a while, then turned the light off not long before Nicholas nosed his way up from the covers and stood by my pillow, staring me down in my sleep.

Being blinked out of sleep by the bathroom wishes of a dog is enough to make your walk across the street feel surreal. It's not raining now, but the sky is deep and starless, and streetlamp light shining down on puddles of shiny yellow leaves all across the sidewalk makes everything look like the detail of a painting Stephen might paint. The way he always says he likes to paint trees that don't look like trees but like beautiful paintings of trees.

Skishing by, down Lovejoy, half gold, half silhouette, is a skateboarder in a pair of those long shorts that come down over your knees, a cap backwards on his head.

Strange how you can so love the place you live and the life you have here and still pine so hard for that other home.

2 comments:

  1. A lovely moment. So glad you found it and wrote it down - but you still should have woken me up; you know I don't like you out there late at night...! (And neither would the denizens of that "other home".)

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  2. I have two other homes I pine for. They return to me in dreams. Pine is a perfect word.

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