Daydreaming: a memoir...

It's a monday morning before election day... all is a ghost town, not a soul on the streets. I'm working in the produce section of a still grocery; the only sound~ a faint echo of new country wafting down from a hidden speaker. The produce manager, Tom, has his hands busy with cantalope and honey dew. Sleeves rolled past the elbow, an apron tied smartly around his waist, he squeezes and rests each melon in a crate. His mouth is hidden with the pendant gray of a handlebar mustache grown to unfettered perfection.

Every morning before the sun comes up, this man greets me with a question mark to a hi or hello. Many of his comments end with that leaping note of askance. Sometimes i'll say 'Good morning' and he'll answer 'Is it?' A fair point... wishing to rid a little of the rhetorical. It helps the already light mood of our contented hands in menial labor. He has a lot to say and sometimes he does... Most of the time we don't say anything at all.

We are working without a word now... i'm thinking of Sundays field trip to the shooting range and a John Prine song on the radio.
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You and me, sittin' in the back of my memory.
Like a honey bee, buzzin' round a glass of sweet Chablis
Radio's on, windows rolled up and my mind's rolled down...
Headlights shinin' like silver moons rollin' on the ground

Gonna be a long Monday
Sittin' all alone on a mountain by a river that has no end
Gonna be a long Monday
Stuck like the tick of a clock that's come unwound- again...
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Hearing it again... bringing fragmented images and feeling. A nostalgia, wistful yet dear of an old love in an old town. Being back again in the simple hands of weekday labor. And a song in my head... and the way i make a song sing to me, to what i'm seeing and feeling. Sometimes my mind gets away, translated in music. And Sunday...

The sun was trying to crest the hill, its halo resting on the silhouetted spires of hemlock and spruce. The ground crunched beneath my feet with frost and spent shells of high-powered rifles. I was no longer in the grocery store.
Have you ever found a place that was impossible to think in? and so you didn't... as simple as that. I was at home in this feeling. Even against odds, on the range...