jumpingfish

There were dogs in Michigan when we put the dock in — two white dogs and one black one.

Izzy would have run circles around them (in the literal sense, not in the my-dog-is-better-than-yours sense), and then she would have run straight into the woods which would have been the last we saw of her, because within seconds she would have been on a bee-line off to … Kalamazoo.

And this, alas, is why there was only one black dog and two white ones up there in the woods.

Trudy objects to this characterization of Miss Izzy.

“She would come back…,” she says, but I know no such thing.

Besides, Izzy would never sit quietly for hours in a carrier under a seat in an airplane. But don’t tell Trudy about this opinion of mine, because there is no doubt that she’d love to put the hypothesis to the test when fall comes around and the dock needs to come out.

With a bright sun shining and Pomp and Circumstance playing, the graduates streamed into the stadium, walking to their seats on the field.

We saw them come in. We saw the radiant smiles. The relief. The joy. We all saw it. We all shared it.

Tomorrow they would finally be able to sleep in without guilt. If that’s not joy, what is?

1. Flying Over

We left Austin on a Thursday afternoon. And as we flew over fly-over country, we saw the red monuments of  Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park.

source: maplogs

And we saw the winding water of Lake Powell up to where in the distance the water abruptly stopped at Glen Canyon Dam.

source: Lake Powell Tours

We saw these things looking straight down from 30,000 feet.

2. Chowing Down

We arrived in Berkeley around dinner time. And seeing how Trudy and I are all about dinner at dinner time, we texted my brother and told him we were headed to Razan’s Organic Kitchen.

source: The Fair and Industrious Trudy

We met at sea level, and we all chowed down.

It was chilly this morning — by Central Texas standards. At lunchtime in the park, we sat in the sun to warm our bones. It will be blisteringly hot soon enough. So the cool air blowing against our faces as we walked thru the woods was medicine for the soul and inoculation for the coming summer.

As the sun went down in the evening, as the shadows of the trees across the street stretched over to where the dogs and I were sitting, as the cool air got cooler, as the yellow Texas Star began to glow in the late afternoon light, I sat down and leaned against the stump of the old Ash tree and crossed my legs and let the last rays of sun hit my face as the breeze blew thru my hair.

Don’t tell Trudy. She was inside being industrious. I was sitting outside being not.

It was lunch time. We were eating barbecue. We do that a lot, he and I.

He was telling me something about a friend he has back home. She’s a woman roughly his mother’s age, if I got the gist. He stopped for a moment and looked at me. (It was just the two of us at the table.)

“I have this habit of making friends with old people.”

Yep. That’s me — I don’t deny it: I am an old people.