porch

i do not endorse speeding, especially among teenagers, nor do i endorse riding horses.

sunday in the catskills is a day to sit on the porch. at home. where there are pancakes. at a place that serves local beer. whatever porches there are out there in summer, you should put yourself on them in the biggest chair available and you should eat and drink and enjoy looking around you. if the chair you find yourself in is of the rocking kind you are welcome to count yourself extremely fortunate and if the porches you find yourself on are of the covered variety, you can sit out there during the worst (which really is to say the best) of thunderstorms doing just what you were doing, which is a form of nothing perfected in the summer on porches up in those mountains.

so it is not surprising that on one of the first days of the real summer the sweetie and i found ourselves leaning back on the covered porch of a place that promised an upsetting variety of pancakes. there were locals and tourists and a handful of the ever-present harley riders, everyone sitting out there in the sun and storm mix, staring into those pancakes or into the sky. and there are often impromptu parades of motorcycles along the main street of this particular town, harleys mostly, with apologetic ninjas and other dirt-bike looking things sprinkled in. but today, somewhere nearby, a classic car show was brewing and a few old cars came purring along, mixed in with a chopper, a sport bike, a harley decked out like my grandpa's winnebago. but when i looked up from sneaking a slab of the sweetie's cottage cheese pancakes (you wouldn't think it, but they're worth stealing) i caught sight of an old impala sauntering low down the street, long, white, the backside of it looking like cat-eye glasses. i'm not good with times but it looked like maybe a 1959 and my breath caught at the sight of it.

now, what you may not know is that when i was seventeen, my dear, sweet parents gave me a car for my birthday. a 1970 chevy impala hardtop, four doors. a color tom waits refers to as "monkey shit brown". it was not a car i had the grace to appreciate right away there in the mid-eighties. it took months for me to realize that, although the parents had decided on this car because they were confident i could drive it into a brick wall at high speed and walk away, the relative safety would scoot itself out of my way and the high speed would step up in my mind. and when i looked at the speedometer in my friends' smaller, sportier, eighties cars, spedometers that stopped at 85, i laughed. until one afternoon out on jj highway just past belle center, i pushed the impala to prove it was worth putting in a spedometer that went on up to 120. and i will tell you now 120 is not a speed a person can maintain with any confidence for any length of time on a two lane country highway, but with two copilots screaming and laughing, that car shot through a landscape of farm ponds and tailing piles and strip mines effortlessly. not a shimmy. not a whine. like breathing. there is no way to describe with langauge how my insides felt, how my brain felt, coming up over rises and down into valleys, the car changing this road i'd travelled all my life into a new place, the speed changing who i was. so when that old white impala came past it whispered to me, reminded me that i am not the person i pretend to be, that my honda and volvo and subaru owning self knows some other world.

now later on in the evening we drove over to another little town with another wide front porch full of folks eating and drinking. we sat ourselves down at a table and ordered dinner. the sweetie ordered himself a german beer and i got myself a belgian style ale made by local folks just a few miles down the road. while we were waiting for our food, the sweetie began babbling about horses and a cart, some sort of rambling that didn't make sense at all. he seemed committed to this strangeness, the talk of the horses, a pair, and i stared at him until i heard the clopping.

here is where i should tell you about horses. as a child, i adored them. i recall a trip to see clydesdales and a falling in love that required me to collect little iron horses for quite some time. but real horses, non-clydesdale varieties at least, don't like me. not a bit. i have been told more than once that they can sense fear. i think they can sense crazy. they don't like it a bit when someone is as high-strung as they are and they let folks know. as a result, i have spent most of my time on horseback clutching to reins, mane, saddle, as frantic horses have attempted to buck me off, run away with/from me, and even rear up on hind legs and back into a car in an attempt to get rid of me. horses do not like me. except draft horses. those big monsters with crushing hooves and eyes the size of dinner plates. they are not at all afraid of me and so i like them, am grateful.

and of course you have to know that's what i saw coming along with the clopping. two fat belgian draft horses the color of wet sand, the color of my beer. they pulled a two wheeled cart and seemed to be just out for a stroll. they went down to the end of town and came back, rolling slow like that impala. folks on the porch yelled out to them, asked about the horses and the people yelled back about them being belgians like my beer. and today must have been the day to be whispered to on the porch because those horses whispered to me, too. they whispered about how i have been on the back of a runaway horse and survived, how i have been on a horse rearing up like a statue without falling off. their whispers suggested that all my whining about the bus and subway are nothing. that they know, like that ancient white impala, that i know another world.