Venture into the Outside World

Last night I did quite an unusual thing for me.

In the company of my wife and my neighbor G. and his wife, I went to a party far from home.

The occasion was the 60th birhday of my longtime good friend and neighbor directly across the road, the famous potter, K. Here is his site, which illustrates beautifully the great distinction of himself and our gravel road.

Every year there's a birthday party for K., but the most recent ones had all been held at his house, directly across the road. But obviously 60 is such a round number that this one had to be held at a bigtime venue far beyond our humble, gravel road, a theater a good 25 miles away, and at night and in the rain.

There were a LOT of people there, and a good time was had by all.

I was noticed by a lot of people, too, and for various reasons. The main one was that I seem to have developed a reputation for sensibly never leaving my nice "homemade" house on our nice gravel road, and therefore there were a lot of acquaintances and friends present who hadn't seen me for years, and, of course, vice-versa.

A lady there complained that she only knew about five people there, and I wanted to tell her that all she needed to do was to keep looking, and eventually the cloaking scrim of 15, 20, or 25 years would fall away and she might find that actually she knew a good half of the many dozens of the people who were there, as I had discovered, in spite of seldom leaving the easy familiarity of our beautiful gravel road.

The flyer that the redoubtable L., K's wife, sent out urged people to bring along poetry and some food, and E., my wife, brought along something called "spring rolls" that she got from one of her homes away from home, the local and very genuine Thai restaurant. And I brought along an excerpt from one of my novels (all of them unpublished), that I was going to pass off as poetry, because it was poetry.

It's been a tradition of K's yearly birthday parties (which I am certain is actually L.'s idea -- she is an extremely loving lady), to have everybody read some poetry, but that was when the parties were held in the greater confines of their house right across the road. But this thing was too bigtime, and besides, there was live music.

K. has long had a little band, and they were the stars of the night, not least because he was joined on the stand by his two sons -- the older, K., on I think bass guitar, and B. on the drums.

And later in the night that was followed by other of the numerous musicians on hand taking their turns on the stage. So, alas, up to the time I left, which I thought was pretty late in the night for me, there was no poetry reading, which was fine with me.

Nevertheless I had spent entirely too much time earlier in the day rehearsing reading my excerpt as loud as I could in front of a lot of people and actually having as much fun reading it aloud, with all the proper inflections, as I had had while writing it, and so the Great Outside World missed this sterling chance to hear me give this stunning delivery -- complete with a few bad words that I personally never use but which were used profusely whenever the mood struck her by the female character whose stream of consciousness recollection I would've rendered.

That, however, is the way the world goes, and even though poetry is a form of music, generally musical performances with instruments trumps it by a country mile.

And besides, K., the star of everything last night, and deservedly so, had a fabulous time, and so did we all, and I have still not quite wound down from it. Maybe dashing off this post, as I am about to finish doing, will help.