I am adrift this morning in the music of Bach. The Brandenburg Concertos, 1, 3, and 4. I confess, however, I have no idea, without looking, when each one starts or ends. They play on my turntable, and at some point I will get up and flip the record over. It occurs to me that it might be time to take a deeper dive into the music, and really learn it. I’m retired. It’s too hot to work outside, and why not?

I was born into a world of 78 rpm records. Then came 33-⅓ followed by 45. They got me through my teens. I ignored eight tracks, no car, but liked cassettes and made lots of mix tapes. CDs were a big deal. We had intense discussions about digital vs analog sound quality, and I never could get my wife to leave the CDs in their cases. The digital revolution introduced me to ripping, but I never like file sharing, too buggy. I owned a Walkman and eventually an IPod.

It was weird-dream night yesterday. At the end of my first sleep, I made a long shot from nearly halfcourt with one second left to win the game, only to have time put back on the clock. The other team scored, and they won the game. In my second sleep, a salesman stopped by to scope out a project and as we walked onto the porch I noticed a big fire in town, close to the house. Embers were falling on the lawn and fires were starting. I looked west to see if the fire had spread. It had. A big fire tower used for training was burning. I was surrounded by fire. That woke me up, too.

I labored yesterday on Labor Day. It seemed fitting. A friend came over and we did a makeover. We dismantled an artifact of my previous life and made it into something new. It was an entertainment center, perfectly designed to house CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes with a big space for the TV to sit. It was a well constructed, heavy-duty piece of furniture. But it came in parts, so I removed some of them. The top half to be exact.

Labor Day. It used to mean the end of summer for me, with school right around the corner. But today school starts in August. Thankfully, I’m too old for school. And the dress code used to change as well. No more white shoes. Or straw hats. Does anyone pay attention to that anymore? I doubt it. Not in a day and age when people wear blue jeans to church, and shorts everywhere. And I can’t remember when I saw a pair of white shoes on an adult male.

There’s a warm stillness in the air, fed no doubt by rain, the air is just too heavy to move, laden with moisture as it is. We expect a wet weekend, but the rain will be spotty and I doubt any of the rivers will flow because of it. Although maybe the odds will fall in the river’s favor and it will flow again, at least for a while. I think we’d need more rain than the good earth could handle to get the aquifers back up so that the springs ran once again.

Nothing quite compares to the thrill of walking out your backdoor in the dark of the early morning to feed your cats and finding yourself face-to-face with a yellow garden spider with its web wrapped around your head. It’s an arm thrashing thrill. I’m pretty sure the spider was equally excited. I mean, as meals go, I would have been a big one. But I got away, fed the cats, and helped the spider relocate.

Talk about feel-good news. Taylor Swift is engaged. Judging by my social media feeds, the entire world is happy for her. Heck, I’m happy for her. And I think she’s happy for herself. Of course, I have no idea how she manages the life of a public figure. There are just so many instances when I’d rather not have people looking at me that I can’t imagine having people looking at me all of the time, and we look at Taylor all the time.

I have a kitchen trash bin given to the family by my mother-in-law. It’s made of wood and at one point was a handsome piece of furniture, which is an odd thing to say about a trash bin. Most people have their kitchen trash bin hidden behind a door in a cabinet. Not us. Ours sits right out in public in all its wooden splendor. Unfortunately, waste, including food, generates moisture so the inside of the lid looks the worse for wear as does the top where it’s been touched by a generation of hands.

A year, any year, has always felt like it runs on a bell curve. Cool, short days start the year, long hot days fill the high middle, cool, short days end it. September was always the tipping point, the beginning of the downhill slide into December. It was time for football, hunting, and the holidays–Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. The four months of fall were action packed and sped by unbelievably fast.

It’s a cool, still morning here at my little homestead. Fall is just around the corner, although it’s not that big a deal in Texas. In fact, it could stay hot well into October. But the plants know, and they’re getting ready.  Leaves are turning. Blooms are falling. It’s the light. It comes later. Leaves sooner. The perennials are thinking about their roots. The annuals are saying good-bye.

I think I’m going to allow that the world might have passed me by. Not real sure I’ll miss it. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t miss me. But it’s not uncomfortable being in a backwater, or being a backwater. I can float around and sample the goods as I see fit. But as a demographic, the only folks who care about me are doctors. Basically, I think I’ve seen, read, and heard too much, and understand that most of what’s supposedly “new” is only new to people who don’t know anything.

I love to see mothers and children in a bookstore, gathered, laughing, talking. My favorite store favors them. On almost any day I chose to visit there will be children, with mothers, mostly, but sometimes fathers. There are toys and games. The children play at the feet of mothers who stand, talking with one another. It makes the store feel like a living space, and sometimes I stay to drink a bit of coffee and eat a roll, and maybe to start a book I just bought.

Well, I slept all night, except for one tiny wake up. But it only means I was really tired from not sleeping the night before. And the experts are in agreement that you can’t catch up on sleep. So, I’m not really sure what to do except plod on. And that seems to be a recurring theme in my life, and life in general. Plod on. But since I’m now a slow-moving, sloth-like creature it means I get to look around, and that’s a good thing. It plays straight into my natural tendencies.

The inevitability of life. Not sure what that means, but it popped into my head last night while I lay in bed. It seems like a good idea, too. An idea I should spend some time parsing. I think it has something to do with things I want compared to the things I actually get. And it’s not about shopping. In a small way, it also has something to do with acceptance, an acknowledgement of what’s real, and right now. Somewhere in there, of course, is striving, of working towards something.

I went to see Butch Hancock last night, and I almost hate to admit it, but it was my first time. Of course, there are lots of artists I haven’t seen in person. So, I’m not singling him out. I just wish I’d seen him when the songs were new. It was the same with Jimmie Dale Gilmore. I got to his music late, and I’ve never seen him in person, but when we still bought CDs, I bought a few. I mention Jimmie because I realized last night that Butch wrote one of the songs Jimmie performs that I really like, Just a Wave, Not the Water.

I lost a day yesterday. When I got up in the morning, I thought it was Monday. I was surprised my doctor’s office was closed. I wondered why a music festival friends were attending had its closing day on a Sunday. I even texted another friend to ask if we were still on to meet and listen to music that night. He said, yes, but, and this is when I snapped back, he said today is Sunday, the show is Monday. It was a disconcerting moment, because I was truly in Monday mode.

We fried things last night. Fish and potatoes. Lovely. The fish was cod, cut into bits, dredged in mustard then cornmeal and panko. The potatoes were Idaho, sliced on a mandolin to paper thin sheets, soaked in ice and water, then dried and fried. My host had two fryers with clean oil for each. We started the meal with a heaping helping of cold shrimp dipped in an array of sauces. Lovely, again.

This is a short sleep story. I have figured out how, after waking at three or two, or one, to get back to sleep.  I lay down, roll over, say, begone to my ruminating thoughts, think of sleep, and there it comes. Hardly a great self-help manual, but that’s what I’ve got. Somehow, I have managed to find the stopcock that will open and dump everything from my brain except the need for sleep. Maybe it’s my years of training coming into play.

The removal of the dead has commenced. All throughout the garden stand the remains of the seasonal plants, almost all natives, who have succumbed to the heat and lack of rain. This includes grasses of course, because we are at the edge of the country and windblown seeds find my yard a convenient way-point. The digging or pulling is sometimes difficult because the ground has hardened, but that is normal.