By this time the house was quiet with sleep sounds (can a sound be quiet?) and the feel of the veil on my face was hot, then cold and comfortable--the tears--the childhood & higher educational despairs had dried and in their place a new tiny-step optimism, some kind of faith was emerging blended with the positive--I guess you could say I was starting to like the light in lightning...it was seeing light through darkness, running along a thin but traceable cliff edge towards a pool of blue compassion...never before had I been able to stop in my grief and by my good self smile for the folly of it all...funny but after so many knockdowns the whole thing starts to get a little funny, ain’t that funny? Even if I was erring towards the wily and impetuous, it was a relief to know that at the slim least I was going to be right back where I started, a wing-nutted bachelor in the tropics who was bent on figuring out just how long one could lsst on California unemployment living with his mother, nourishing, defecating, freelancing on uncertainty and striving evermore towards Miller’s cathartic discovery that his “...life itself became a work of art.”
So I tried hard to send out as much sophomore passion & throw off as much ballast as possible to the girl with the silver eyes, Ramona, somewheres off in the mainland with Lionel, only sure she was alone and eye squeezing out her own mantra of devotion to her new American novel hero... In the morning I rose before the other principals and made my way to the sand bar, where I looked across that early blue air to the far horizon southward towards the place I knew Ramona to be...I silently turned away and stared at the ocean...how long I stood there I do not know... how could a man possibly want the lukewarm promise of a romance? To be lukewarm is the worst thing to be...you stand in ankle deep liquid with half your happiness held -- you want to seal something, some promise, some legacy, some tenure...the water laps at your shins, the breeze blows midly… Having never stopped in the moment I decide to harness, yoke, prepare, equip, and fasten myself to the end, however far off or near it was, but the end of Ramona and the end of the ken of my five senses...
Seaward I could sense the faraway flattery of the three foxes, my spirit animal so deemed on flagstaff when racing upward in the Impala top back night black across the road ran the red-tail blocking any further damage from my just having witnessed the woman I loved in two times with her old beau at Tom’s Tavern...three ghost white faces mine his hers and off I went not knowing this triggered the introduction to matters ethereal, and I said to myself in that moment when the fox had runneth across my light and reckless path to give me an idea of the invisible order of the ether, unexplainable, robust, simple because up to that point I had only been completely tethered to misery, constantly suspicious and needy and calling forty times a day, unsure, guilty & just plain awful...under the usual reaction I would have gone to a bar and gotten angry and hurt and we would have ended nowhere instead I drove to Sugarloaf and took the dog out for a full-moon hour walk with presence and allowable mystery...since that time I’ve seen the fox, and the fox has seen me...and my wildlife friend lois, sister of June, told me about a black fox with a wisp of white on its tail, a genetic anomaly seen around Chautauqua where I’m in current convalescence and breaking the news herein...like peace and grace something has taken hold in my mind regarding that black-gened fox and the feeling that I’ll see her before the task at hand is done...
--Michael Price
