Yet another sacred object that I'll take with me when I go . . . my
'70s Harley Davidson AMF leather biker jacket. 

“I'm an indisguisable shade of twilight
Any second now I'm gonna turn myself on
In the blue display of the cool cathode ray
I dream a highway back to you.”
            -from “I Dream a Highway” by Gillian Welch

 

A Perfect Morning . . .  

As they say “all good things must come to an end”.  So it is after the prodigious rains of early summer, the Oklahoma prairie earth once again withered, grey and thirsty.  The other morning I drove to work chased by the fire of a sunrise in my rear view mirror, towards deep purple storm clouds in the distance.  I was bathed in the peculiar ecstasy of golden light from sun filtering through storm clouds; a golden light that painters and photographers and even poets value more than just about anything.  Like that old Coors beer commercial I had the thought that “it just doesn’t get any better this”.  But then I saw the giant arch of a rainbow, a passageway of color, and I drove right through, singing one of my favorite rainbow songs:

“Here Comes that Rainbow Again” by Kris Kristofferson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf_De4P48c8

The grass along the highway was the color of California gold, providing quite the contrasting canvas for a scattering of obsidian crows hunting and pecking for remnant road kill.  I often wonder how crows evolved so quickly after the advent of automobiles.  It must have been complete carnage in the nineteen twenties save for the few of whom figured it out and went on a breeding spree.  I can think of no better example to illustrate the theory of evolution.  I also wonder where crows go to die, definitely not along the roadside. 

 . . . Gillian Welch’s hypnotic “I Dream a Highway” finishing up on the radio . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvREUDH2BZ0

Then my dear music-poet goddess Lucinda Williams singing to me in the morning light . . . her lyrics buttered with things I comprehend: darkness and sensuality, grit and pain, beauty and love, yearning and addiction; images of her faded black leather biker jacket, bleached blond hair, ruby lipstick; her lyrics . . . “real live bleeding fingers and broken guitar strings”; “car wheels on a gravel road”; songs about old kitchens with peeling linoleum floors and slamming screen doors. 

There she was . . . telling me to stick my head out the window.  So I did, long enough for a big raindrop to hit me in the nose.  Then she told me to get the hell off the highway and write this all down, on that perfect morning.   So I did.    

“Right in Time” by Lucinda Williams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Ey_IUNiVZQ