The trees are gilding themselves in gold leaf with here and there a blaze of organic fire you can almost use to toast marshmallows.  I love to see sunsets splinter through the colors and hear the wind applaud through the branches with long satisfied sighs.  Only the insane and the soul-dead sit indoors while this is happening.  But among the living I can still find my private bowers and serene sanctuaries out at Elm Creek.  While hunters prepare to commit Bambi-cide, today I stood elbow to antler with seven feeding bucks.  Even thumbnail Noerenberg Gardens has its exclusive hideaways if you follow the shoreline a bit.  The air is sweeter than cider, and you can't take a breath without feeling immortal.

And I am feeling immortal again, if not eternal.  Because the good news is that the carpal tunnel isn't causing the pain up my arms.  An MRI shows I tore some tendons in the shoulders.  Don't remember how, but it was probably quite a while ago, and it's an easy fix.  I just have to stop hefting heavy things for a few weeks and maybe get a shot of cortisone.  Don't even have to -- ugh -- turn into a normal person vegging out in front of the TV with a beer, which I find difficult to distinguish from terminal mystery or coma.  Of course, there's Blue Bunny Cherry Chocolate Bordeaux ice cream, but I can consume a half gallon of that on-the-fly and never gain an ounce.  Extreme longevity runs in my family, and so quality of life is important to me.  As Mark Twain said, “If you can't go to old age by a good road, don't go.”  My road is a little different from the one he had in mind, but the quote still fits, “good” being a matter of taste and values.

Photos below were taken in my living room, plus one is of the formidable branches that are finally down in the yard.  These last are the ones I threw shrapnel at on a fishing line that got tangled in my pants, and which caused me to throw the neighbor kid’s basketball in the lake, if you recall that crazy essay over on storytellersunplugged.com.  If you are reading this newsletter through the webpage link, you won't see any pictures, but you will find some new photos my webmaster just posted on the site www.thomassullivanauthor.com if you care to see them.

For the past few months I've been driving around every night from about 11:30 p.m. to as late as 4 a.m.  Sometimes I listen to music, but mostly I just think.  Think and feel, remember and fantasize.  It's an amazing time for me.  Currier & Ives print neighborhoods.  Expressway billboards.  Dark parks.  Deer in the mist.  A floodlit church searching for lost souls in the blackness.  Lost souls with neon tans scurrying across a parking lot to search for amnesia in a pew of barstools.  Orange lights tarnishing yellow brick roads winding through a subdivision.  Patterns emerge.  Rooms that bleed light and darkness each night like code by the clock.  Walls separated by people, and people separated by walls.  Floors like layers of sediment from unlike destinies in people's lives.  And finally, all but the most persistent window falls dark, and the houses become closets for people.  Sometimes it seems more real to me than the busy daylight hours.  I see, I learn, I think, I feel.  Oddly, I was never more alone and isolated than when I was married and lived in such a household.  Now I can see why.  I live in a bigger house these days, but the rooms seem like one, like a single self-sufficient island.  But the house doesn't own me.  It's an idea in my life.  A place to venture out from, destination nature.  May your house be one room and may you fill it with your dreams.

Here's the link to this month's column THOMAS SULLIVAN: COMPETITION AND OTHER WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, which deals with competition.  Sort of.

Sully

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