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Today: hot and humid. Mostly sunny. Haze through the day. Highs in the mid 90s. Southwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Heat index readings 100 to 105.
Tomorrow: hot and humid. Mostly sunny. Haze through the day. Highs in the mid 90s. Southwest winds 5 to 15 mph. Heat index readings 100 to 105.
The next day: Your guess is as good as mine, but there seems to be a pattern here.

You know it’s really humid when you take the dog outdoors and immediately your glasses fog up.

Hey, Owen, wait up.  Owen, I can’t see where I’m going. 

…Owen?

It has been raining now, not that long, but about a day or so. Off and on rain, the kind of rain that pours down for about half an hour, then vanishes entirely to allow the sun to venture out.  You look outside.  Is it clear yet? Um, maybe.  There’s some blue sky.  A sort of puffy white cloud.  You walk out to get the mail, dog on the leash, blithely leaving the umbrella behind.  And, you guessed it, just as you pull the mail out of the mailbox: downpour.  Run for shelter. Swear a lot.  Explain to the very wet dog that, no, this is not your fault, and no, we are not going to play fetch today.  Sorry.

Then, you go into the basement, the basement that has little rivers of water running through it.  The basement that smells like a wet dog.  You pick up the layers of towels soaking up the rivers of water, run the towels through the spin cycle, put them back on the floor, go back upstairs.  It’s stopped raining again.  You want nothing more than to go outside, open the windows, take a walk.  Anything.  The sky is looking hopeful again.  Maybe soon.

But for now, you wait.  Indoors.  You and the damp dog and the wet basement. 

The harvest is coming in now, the best time of year in Indiana: sweet corn, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, cucumbers, garlic, green onions (known to those of us from the east as “scallions”), green tomatoes, and the first red tomatoes in a very late crop, latest in thirty years.  Our refrigerator is crammed with vegetables.  We eat vegetables at every meal.  Tomatoes and eggs for breakfast.  Zucchini and green onions and more tomatoes for lunch.  Eggplant and garlic with tomato garnish for dinner.  At my favorite farm stand in the county, the gardener leaves notes about the crops coming up:  The green beans are two and three inches long now, coming soon. The watermelon crop crapped out; not enough rain, then too much all at once.  More tomatoes soon.

The croplands have weathered the drought and subsequent deluge; the corn is high, five and six feet, starting to tassle.  Fields of soybeans are lush and richly green.  It’s almost time for the second cutting of alfalfa hay. 

Yet even as summer peaks, signs of fall are in the air.  Last night, we sat outside in the cooling evening and listened to a racket of birds chattering in the trees.  We watched a swirl of birds take off over the neighborhood, tracing a looping flight pattern up over houses and streets and then swooping back down to settle once again in the trees.  Dick wondered aloud: “Are they flocking already?” I dredged up from memory that some birds do in fact begin to begin migration as early as July.  Dick shook his head.  It’s too soon.  Summer has just begun.

I suppose so.  But I have always thought that late July is the equivalent of late January.  A midpoint in the year when things begin to change.  In late July, the days get noticably shorter; in late January, longer.  In late July, while it is still hot and still summer, the shortening days mean a gradual and perceptible cooling, day by day, until by the end of August but for a few steaming days here and there, we are out of the worst of the heat of summer.  In late January, the reverse; at either time of year you can feel the changes happening, slowly to be sure, but there they are.  The seasons are changing.  If you doubt it, watch the birds.  They’ll tell you.

***** 

Note to EWR: a post a day as you recover.  Watch this space…

I almost forgot. Our local cable channel, WCTV, will air a piece of me reading from Rose City tonight (Friday) and tomorrow (Saturday).  Here’s the listing: Channel 21.   WCTV Reading Service. Fri. 6PM, Sat. 2AM, 10AM, 2PM. 

I did a WCTV spot a couple of months ago, and after it aired a student told me she was in a bar and saw me on TV.  She said, “I told everyone at the bar: That’s my teacher!”  Now that’s a quote you don’t hear every day.  So, literature fans.  Go to your favorite bar at 6 p.m. tonight, or 2 a.m. for you night owls, demand that the bartender turn the channel to 21, and then tell everyone at the bar:  “That’s my teacher!”  I dare ya…

4:00 p.m. It is too hot to think straight.  One hundred degrees at four p.m.  Even Owen, irrepressible one year old Owen the wonder dog, is horizontal, sound asleep, dreaming little dog dreams of chasing tennis balls.  Way too hot to do the real thing.  Dreaming will suffice.

The forecast for the rest of the week is more of the same, getting gradually hotter through Thursday, with finally a break by Friday.  It’s officially and profoundly summer.

*****

5:00 p.m. I can’t stand being indoors even though it is incredibly hot, so I get out my bike and ride around the neighborhood, making my own breeze.  It’s still 100 or somewhere very near 100.  But people are out.  A large woman very slowly walking her tiny pug dog.  A couple of guys leaning over the hood of a red truck, peering into the dark engine.  A guy in a lawn chair on the sidewalk, bottle of Coors light at his feet.  I wave.  He raises his bottle.  There are teenagers out cruising in a blue convertible, top down. An old man mowing his lawn on a red riding mower.  Sprinklers churning.  I can feel the heat rise off the pavement.  I head up a little hill, shift down, pedal harder.  For a brief moment I’m Lance Armstrong, heading into a field of sunflowers, somewhere in France.  Then I’m me again, wheeling slowly through suburbia, here in Indiana. 

Yesterday, a road trip.  Three hours each way, an easy drive down route 1, 52, and 75 from Richmond, Indiana, to Versailles, Kentucky, a little town just outside Lexington.  We took the trip, my friend K. and I, to visit another friend, Ali, a college senior working at a summer internship for a horse publication.  Because it is summer, fractured glimpses of things seem to be the only writing I’m capable of these days.  So, here are some snapshots along the way:

Driving moment
I’m the passenger.  We’re cruising along at 70, 75 miles per hour in the fast lane.  A huge gleaming semi pulls up on the right, even with the car.  Hubcaps the size of platters, shiny as mirrors, miniature images of our car reflected in each one.  The semi pulls away from us.  We disappear.

Horses - I
We meet up with Ali at a stable where she is keeping two of her own horses, and caring for a third.  The stable is a huge sprawling affair, nearly 50 horses on the property, a half dozen barns, a half dozen riding arenas indoor and out, surrounded by acres and acres of rolling pastures.  We spot Ali immediately, riding toward us on a dark bay thoroughbred.  She waves and we follow her into a wide indoor arena to watch her ride.  For a half hour or so, we watch.  The horse is a little stiff, out of work for awhile, but he is a sweet animal; you can see him trying, paying attention to Ali, who rides him lightly and patiently.  They trot for a long time, and K., as seasoned riders do, speaks aloud her impressions of the horse’s movement.  At first, the horse is not “tracking up” (his hind legs are a bit lazy, not moving up under him); his back is stiff, his trot too slow, making Ali have to work too hard.  But K. approves of Ali’s approach — not pushing the horse too fast; then he’ll just “rush” forward.  After twenty minutes or so of Ali gently encouraging the horse to move forward, we watch as his back begins to swing, his hindquarters moving easily and fluidly.  He’s tracking up nicely now.  Ears up.  Moving forward.  Very nice, K. says.   Very nice.

Food - I
After nearly two weeks of sticking fairly closely to the South Beach Diet — no carbohydrates, no sugar, all that — I gleefully indulge in a bacon cheeseburger and fries for lunch.  It is seriously delicious.  Greasy.  Salty.  Not salty enough.  I add more salt.  Man this is good.  I swear it: my heart rate spikes as though I were running a marathon, my blood pressure zooms off the charts; within a half hour I have some weird cheap fast food high, my head as tight as a balloon.  Whee.  What fun.  In the back of my head, a little voice admonishes me: wait until you crash….

Horses - II
We stop for an hour or so at the Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, Kentucky. The park is a ”working horse farm with 1,200 acres surrounded by 30 miles of white plank fencing…reating two museums…and nearly 50 different breeds of horses.”  Admission is a ridiculous $15, and we only have an hour, so we skip the museums and gift shops, slip through a hole in a fence, and simply wander around the grounds. The place is gorgeous — rolling fields framed by Kentucky’s signature white plank fences, indolent horses grazing placidly in the shade of wide spreading trees.  Horses have been on these grounds for more than 200 years, horses and, of course, money.  Remants of a different past remain in stone fences that surround a few of the fields.  We speculate on who built those fences.  We imagine dozens of African hands laying stone upon stone in the searing heat of a Kentucky summer.  A day like today.  95 degrees.  No wind.  Heavily humid.  I lay a hand on a stone fence and feel the stored heat.

Food - II
We’ve walked for half an hour in the park.  It’s profoundly hot. And I’m crashing.  All the fast food crud in my arteries or wherever the crud goes is making me dizzy, wobbly, stupid.  I’m craving something, oh no, like a fix.  Something like more fries.  I see a kid eating a bag of something, fritos or doritos.  Restrain myself from tackling her, swiping her snacks.  I keep walking.  Sweat it out, try not to mumble or drool. 

Horses - III
In an enormous old barn, lofty and cool.  We peer into the wide box stalls.  Horses stand, napping.  In one stall, a thoroughbred mare and, as the sign on the stall tells me, her Quarter Horse/Thoroughbred cross colt, both April 3, 2006.  I peer in.  A tiny bay colt, little stiff black mane and a tiny duster of a tail, stands close to his mother.  This is what Buddy must have looked like when he was three months old.  The colt and I regard each other.  His eyes are huge, brown, and unblinking.  We stand there a long moment in the deep silence of the barn. 

Driving - II
The cool of the air conditioner is blissful after the searing afternoon heat.  We head north, slipping into the line of traffic.  It’s hot enough that mirages, heated air that looks like silvery streaks of water, appear here and there on the pavement.  Somewhere along 75, still in Kentucky, a lone hitchhiker trudges along the edge of the highway.  His left hand is out, thumb up.  He walks forward into the heat.  We pass by; he recedes in the sideview mirror, until he is a speck, surrounded by tiny flickers of imaginary water.

A suburban neighborhood, on a summer evening, just after the evening meal…

Garage-sitters.
After about seven p.m., they come out.  Garage doors slide open, the lawn chairs get unfolded, and the garage sitters take their places.  You don’t quite sit in the driveway.  That’s more of an afternoon gathering, usually family, on the weekend.  On a weekday evening, you, and probably your wife, place the chairs just inside the garage. You have a little roof over your head, but you’re still outdoors. Maybe you have a beer, more likely you have iced tea.  And then you sit and watch.  If someone waves, you wave back.

Pick-up basketball.
If there’s a court, there’s a game.  Four guys arrive one after another, all with big baggy shorts. Two bikes, one car, one girlfriend dropping off the last guy, the one who brings the ball.  Shirts off, the game begins.  The rubbery bounce of the ball on pavement, off the backboard, through the hoop.  Play until dark.

Stroller derby.
You’ve got a big job, you work all day at a desk, at the end of the day you can’t wait to get outdoors and move. But you’ve got a kid; what do you do with the kid?  No, wrong answer, you do not leave the kid home with your wife while you jog around the neighborhood.  You take the kid and your wife with you, all three of you go jogging. Okay, so the kid isn’t jogging.  He’s sound asleep in the high tech titanium wheeled aerodynamically designed stroller that you, or sometimes your wife, push before you. Think of it as cross training. There you go.  Wave at the garage sitters.

SUV mommies.
They are tiny inside their giant vehicles. Intent on the road ahead.  Hands grip the wheel, ten and two. Four little heads bob in the back seats.  The SUV pulls into a driveway, a door slides open, a small child laden with an enormous backpack scrambles out, waves goodbye, disappears into the house.  The SUV waits for the door to open and close, then backs out and moves on. Carpool night. 

The runners
They run in pairs, they run singly, they talk while they run, they run in silence, they labor sweating and panting in slow motion, they glide by effortlessly, they wave one-handed, they are plugged into a walkman, they carry water, they run with nothing weighing them down but a t-shirt, a pair of shorts, a pair of fleet shoes churning forward.

The walkers.
You know each other by now, but only by sight, years of passing one another on the sidewalks.  The elderly woman with the canvas porkpie hat waves hello.  The pair of blonde yummy-mummies, striding and chatting and pushing two strollers, wave hi-hi.  The slouching kid with the long black trench coat nods up, barely, and mutters a yo.  The woman carrying the golf club never says anything.  Strides past, golf club held low, ready.  The dog walkers, you and the rest of them, you all carry plastic grocery bags, some empty, some not.  When you see each other, you cross to walk on opposite sides of the street, separating dogs, some who growl and strain at their leashes, some who trot along obedient and perfect. You wave at each other.   Hot enough for you? Oh yeah. Wait a day, it’ll change.  Yup, sure will.

Dusk.
A late whine of leaf blowers, two, then one, then silence.  A crackle of fireworks, then silence.  The low murmur of traffic on Route 40.  A truck downshifting, far off, on 70.  Thwup thuwp thwup of someone’s sprinkler.  Flicker and glow of path lights coming on in a yard.  Fireflies rising up like miniature hot air balloons.  A car gliding past.  A garage door closing. Inside a house, a TV flickers, blue, mysterious.  One late walker heads toward home.

In this month of writing 1200 words a day, the word count so far is 10,496.  A lot of those words are really rough, more sketches of things than even a draft, but words they are.  Today I’ll pause in the headlong collection of information, look at what I’ve got.  This isn’t revision yet.  That comes a good deal later in the process.  Today is a taking stock.  In this chronicle of the downtown explosion in Ricmond, Indiana, who are the characters so far? What is the story so far?  Where is the tension in the story?  Why does this matter?

It sometimes doesn’t seem accurate or fair to borrow the language of fiction — character, story, tension — to address the work of writing a piece of nonfiction.  The people involved in the downtown explosion are real people, not “characters.”  The events that happened are etched into memories and artifacts and documents; this is not simply a “story.”  And the notion of tension — opposing forces, thwarted desires, good vs. evil, the intersection of fates — to talk about “tension” when you’re talking about nonfiction seems a bit unseemly.  Wrong, even.

But it’s that last question — why does this matter — that carries all the rest.  When I teach nonfiction, this is the question I give the students to apply to their writing: Why does this matter?  “This” refers to the piece of writing they are working on, the subject matter, the “story” at hand.  Why does this matter?  To you, the writer.  To your readers.  To those you write about. To the world.

This is the question with which I will spend time today.  There is no one answer.  Forty-one people died in the downtown explosion in Richmond, Indiana, on April 6, 1968.  Many more were injured.  Everyone in the city, in one way or another, was affected. As a farflung wonderful writer friend recently said to me, the explosion is like a pebble dropped into a pond.  At the center, the greatest impact; then, the effect of the explosion ripples out and out.  How far does it go?  Who is touched by this?  What changes?

In any writing, you have to have days like today.  A day where you look at the ripples, the pond, the pebble itself.  Step back, if you can.  See what’s there. 

I sometimes think that in nonfiction this is harder. The stepping back part.  After a long day like yesterday, the worlds of fiction and poetry look very appealing.  I think of a friend here in town who writes at a big desk, writing lean surreal short stories.  I see him smoking his cigarettes, conjuring up worlds in his imagination.  I think of another friend, a poet; I see her walking and looking at the world, layering what she sees into images and smart metaphors.  I imagine my friends happy, content in their work.

Then I think of what I do, sitting hour after hour listening to people tell their stories, reading thousands of pages of legal depositions, looking at hundreds of photographs.  There’s something that happens, and I don’t know how: sometimes I take in so much of other people’s stories that I become stretched taut, transparent, and I simply disappear.  I am no longer there.  Only the story, the voices in my head, the images I cannot shake.  I walk out into the world, and am convinced, if even only briefly, that I wear a cloak of invisibility.  I can only see, not be seen.  In fact I am condemned to do nothing but see.  And see. And see.  

Yet, of course, I know this happens with fiction and poetry too, I know it does.  But still, as I imagine my friends doing their work, the ease with which I pretend they can step back from that work, leave it behind, I envy them sometimes.

Writing is a sedentary sport, but if you do it all day, by the end of a long day, this is what you feel:

Your fingers, which have been taking notes and typing todayfor a total of, oh, who knows - eight hours? - are numb by now, stumbling over the keys like ten little drunks. 

Your right shoulder, which you unconsciously cramp into a weird position when you type, kind of crooked up to your right ear, feels like it has a hot poker in it. 

It goes without saying that your butt hurts.  Eight hours of chair time.  Ow. 

And as if that weren’t enough, your ears hurt. You’ve been transcribing a tape, using the lousy little earphones — the ones that resemble furry M&M’s – that come with the tape recorder.  The earphones are so flipping tiny, you had to jam them about halfway down your ear canal so they’d stay put.  Now you can’t hear anything except some ringing in your head.

And then, and then! on top of everything else, you’re suddenly writing in the second person again.  Cut it out!  Annoying trait.  Stop it already! Enough, you.