Monday, August 4th

I've read many books. When I lived in downtown Portland I would commute to work on the city bus. One of the highlights of my day was quiet time with a book on the way home. The soft thud of the wheels rolling over steel grates on a bridge. Rain drifting around in the night and vanishing into the body of the blackened Willamette river outside. The bus exhales at stops, breathes in more passengers, and continues on course. Sometimes I would stop at a coffee house. Coffee - black. I would unroll my paperback from my back pocket and continue to read. The authors were larger than life and their stories, heavy with wisdom, were a meal unto themselves. However, sometimes the most important words written are those less concealed by craft and cleverness.

My family drifts in between where we were and where we want to be. In this place, nothing has gone wrong with the birth of Emma and everything that is good is possible. Sometimes the place in between is really quite a place to be:

There is a place where the sidewalk ends

And before the street begins,

And there the grass grows soft and white,

And there the sun burns crimson bright,

And there the moon-bird rests from his flight

To cool in the peppermint wind.

Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black

And the dark street winds and bends.

Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow

We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And watch the chalk-white arrows go

To the place where the sidewalk ends.

Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,

And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,

For the children, they mark, and the children, they know

The place where the sidewalk ends.

- Shel Silverstein, Where The Sidewalk Ends

14 days until the induction.