We are driving home from a late dinner in Appleton, a dinner of barbecued ribs with Joel and Cheri that was messy and saucy and everything a rib dinner should be, complete with discussions of beard washers in the men’s bathroom and ending with the sentence ‘That’ll do pig, that’ll do.’ We ate with our fingers. Esteban finds sauce under his fingernails.
We have roused the Beatles ‘Let It Be’Naked’ from its spot in CD 2 with a disk that Esteban made during the afternoon. His disk begins with the sweet virginal ‘Green Bird’ from a Cowboy Bebop something or other, and then switches to Audioslave. He never thinks about disk transitions.
I’m thinking about winter. It snowed quite a bit in the last few days, going from a completely brown and faded landscape to the one you see in storybooks and Christmas villages. Except that this is January, and there is nothing more desolate than after dark in January when it is cold and the wind is blowing and there are no people outside because they’ve all shut themselves away from the night. It makes your soul cold just looking at it. In fact, Esteban has turned the heater up to 75 degrees and has his seat heater turned up to High, which, after ten minutes in my opinion is hot enough to roast a chicken. Perhaps even a small turkey. In fact, I often turn on the seat heater on the passenger side when I pick up a pizza from our favorite little pub downtown.
