Playing Catch Up

We're home now. With high speed internet! The blog seemed like a really good idea before we realized internet is a luxury at hotels/log cabins/wigwams/motels/hot springs/ etc. During the trip, we wrote some and uploaded pictures/movies in hopes of posting them. Ideally, that will happen. Maybe it's good we weren't able to post real time. Memory usually softens things and makes past reality a little kinder. Plus, I think Orion and I are at the point where we can laugh (mostly) at what drove us to annoyed silence on the trip. This is what happens when you are released from the prison cell that is a car with the person you, um, have many feelings for.

Recap: December 21-22 Las Vegas, NV (Luxor)

December 23 Sedona, AZ (Log Cabin)

December 24 Holbrook, AZ(Wigwam Motel)

Captions are from Cormac McCarthy's THE ROAD. These are my favorite passages from the book. Orion read the novel to me first as a bedtime story and then as I drove. That is until, I sat down for a couple of hours to simply finish the sucker because I wanted to know what was going to happen to the man and the boy.

He thought each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

The man squatted and looked at him. I’m sacred, he said. Do you understand? I’m scared.

The boy didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bowed, sobbing.

You’re not the one who has to worry about everything.

The boy said something but he couldn’t understand him. What? He said.

He looked up, his wet and grimy face. Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

No lists of things to be done. The day providential to itself. The hour. This is no later. All things of grace and beauty such that one holds them to one’s heart have a common provenance in pain. Their birth in grief and ashes. So, he whispered to the sleeping boy. I have you.

Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.