The return

Back from Oregon. Reno is clear and brown and there are dead leaves carpeting the front lawn. After a long drive home through miles of thick-to-thin fog and acres of forests and mountains, it's a sad sight.

The benefit of long drives through the dark with your wife dead asleep in the passenger seat: you have endless amount of time to think through the novel you'd like to write. You reject ideas and invent new ones. You compose the first paragraph out loud, then pull the car over and hurriedly grab a pen and a napkin to write it on.

Portland was alive and green and orange and very nice, if you don't count a bed & breakfast hostess who entered our locked room to make our bed and fold our clothes. I'm wondering why we even got a key. And Eugene was beautiful. We traveled up Chambers St. into the hillside and found a hundred big homes on heavily wooded hundred-acre lots, then took a right turn and found ourselves looking at downtown just two minutes away.

On the way home I listened to AM radio. Nothing else would come in. All we could get were political talk shows. I argued with the best of em.

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