The Corn Picker Show, Rantoul IL

Speaking of auras, I popped out just now to pick off a few errands. First stop, the outside world. Yes, I’ve been holed up playing word games again. But just outside, it is an unseasonal, climate-changey 60 degrees on this 6th of January. The whole population is monkeyed up crazy. Glowing with it. You can see the shifts in the brain just in the way the traffic flows and people behind the wheel are dazed and grinning.

First stop: Walgreen’s Pharmacy for some new pen needles. Insulin is a bitch. I find to my startled surprise, as in out of place in space, one of the fellers from down at the University standing in the grocery isle. He’s a theater techie in training. He’s startled too. He gives me the biker wave, side arm. He says he’s pedaled his bike the sixteen miles from campus. I say,
“I did that. Once.”
“Yes,” he says, “I had the wind at my back. Let’s see how I do getting back.”
OK. Sixteen bike miles, no biggie.
But no wind is blowing.
I should be out flying model aircraft. Are my batteries charged? Yes, I think they are!
But that damned writing thingy…

And I have to stop by the pet shop (The Aquarium) for some of that double osmosis water. The fish are looking anxious. They need a change of diaper.

The fish shop woman has been a tad flirtatious since she learned I was “a music professor.”
Flirtation with that woman is a nice thing to enjoy as an older man, even though she looks like she just got out of bed every time I’m in there, her ringlets wet, and that same sweater and jeans. Can’t really be true. I’m only in there once a month or so. Harmless. I have no idea what her world is like. How can it be civil to pry? But once, while pouring my sauce (the osmosis water), she was multitasking, cleaning a reptile cage. The lizzard bit the shit out of her finger and she manned the faucet bleeding all over my jug. The sharing of such a moment might have made her feel a bit too exposed. Since then, she’s let me pour my own, let me man that crazy shut off valve without a good connection to the shaft. She’s been cheerfully, smilingly, yes, even flirtatiously, taking my money. All $2.61 of it. So I usually prepare a little speech for her as I walk in from the street with my jug.

And today, with everybody krunked on the fake Spring, was no exception. I figured I’d shout out “Happy New Year, one and all.”

But there was no one in the front of the shop minding the till.

I got all the way to the back where the water was, and found instead of the woman a tall dude in jeans, no belt, no belly, pony-tailed, greying around the sides. He took my jug.
“You gonna pump?” I brightly said.
He went into a monologue about the weather. I held back from gloom and doom, my eyes looking around for the fish shop woman. Ah there she is. But she’s not speaking, not looking up from her task, not flirting, not even acknowledging that she knows me. Is this dude her new employee or her old man? Who knows? I try my ‘happy new year’ bit. It’s a total dud. No reply. From either. The dude goes back to the topic of the weather.

Their aura is unreadable.

So I don’t say anything more, and me and the dude take to watching the jug fill. Slowly. In silence.

He takes my water (heavy) to the register. He calls out,
“She’ll ring you up in a moment.”
A moment later she rings me up.
Now, out of her dude’s gaze, she is back to knowing me with her eyes and uncertain smile.
I say,
“Things are ok around these parts?”
She says, “Yes.”
But looks down.

The transaction.

My change.

It’s hot in my stripped down version of my winter gear. (Just a hoodie lined with fleece.)

Next stop: home. Back to work. This report. Straight up. We’re just of sight and earshot from one another, most of us. And to you, I confess I think it’s wrong for it to be 60 degrees in Illinois in January. I think you think so too. Wink. That’s mother nature we’re flirting with, and she’s got a new dude. We in a heap ‘o trouble.