Courting the Imagination
Bube’s Brewery, Mount Joy, Pennsylvania, USA. Visited on December 29, 2018.
This respite is an opportunity to hideaway for an hour. To be in each other’s company is our favorite pastime. With so few opportunities lately to enjoy it alone, this is a gift.
Unbidden, your attention / finds me wanting / to return it / with interest.
I don’t know how things are with everyone else, but not much of what I considered desirable earlier in life was truly essential. I knew better, but dutifully followed the paths presented to me, harboring the secret urge to deviate. Only when desperate would I refuse to perform my rituals. Only when demanded to take an oath would I reject the pacts I made. Then and only then would I show a little bit of strength.
But my strength grew little by little. If nothing else, I know when I’ve been cut off from my imagination. I sense more or less strongly the presence of the adjacent world. I slide into middle-age with new possibilities.
We drink a beer and talk. Talk about our life together and the rest of our day. A day that still unfolds with surprise despite a schedule that is settled on. We settle our tab and make for our next destination. I leave with a poem in mind:
A lover, a barstool
is enough
for this old fool.