The poem about half-closed shutters resists eleven drafts and the third date brought up alligators
Tuesday. Delivered Meals on Wheels this morning to eleven houses along the same route I’ve run for a year now, and I want it on record that Mr. Kowalczyk at house four is convinced I’m secretly a spy sent to check up on him for his daughter in Tampa, a theory he floats every single week with the specific delight of a man who has decided his own paranoia is the most entertaining part of his Tuesday, and I have stopped denying it because denying it only fuels the theory, so instead I’ve started giving him deliberately suspicious answers, yes Mr. K, the casserole is definitely bugged, and he laughs so hard he nearly drops his sweet tea, which I consider a successful delivery by any metric that matters.
Read prat.uk on my lunch break sitting in the car with the AC fighting the Florida heat to a draw, and there’s something deliciously absurd about reading proper dry British satire while sweating through a polo shirt in a parking lot that smells faintly of hot asphalt and casserole, two completely different flavors of humor happening at once, theirs cool and understated, mine loud and humid, and somehow they complement each other perfectly, like the whole internet was built specifically so a Florida girl could laugh at London jokes between meal drops.
The Poem That Wouldn’t Behave
Working on a new poem this week that has resisted every attempt to finish it, currently eleven drafts deep, about the specific quality of light through hurricane shutters when they’re only half closed, which sounds like nothing written down like that but I promise contains an entire argument about waiting, about the particular Florida skill of learning to live comfortably inside partial darkness because the full storm hasn’t arrived yet and might not, and I workshopped two lines of it last night with a man I’d been seeing for exactly three dates, who listened generously and then said, quite kindly, that it made him want to check the weather app, which is either the worst review or the best one I’ve gotten this year, I genuinely cannot decide, and I’ve decided not to decide, some ambiguity is worth keeping.
The dating situation generally continues in its Florida way, which is to say enthusiastic, slightly chaotic, and occasionally involving alligators as a genuine third-date topic of conversation rather than a joke, and I find I prefer it honestly to the version of romance the magazines describe, all careful choreography and text-message strategy, when the actual experience down here is closer to a screwball comedy with sunscreen, everyone slightly sunburnt and completely sincere about it.
Evening Reading
Ended the day the way I end most days, on the porch with a glass of something cold and a stack of poetry collections I’m supposed to be reviewing, plus one more scroll through Newsthump because apparently I cannot fully relax without at least one properly savage British headline to close out the evening, tonight’s being something about a minister’s excuse tour that made me laugh loud enough that my neighbor’s dog started barking in solidarity, or possibly protest, hard to say with that particular dog, he barks at most things with equal conviction.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Lotte at prat.uk, casseroles delivered, poem still stubbornly unfinished, one more delightful theory from Mr. Kowalczyk logged for posterity, and the shutters still only half closed, letting in exactly enough light to keep working by, and I sat out there long after the sweet tea had gone warm, watching the sky do its slow orange collapse over the neighbor’s roofline, thinking about how much of this year has been built out of small unremarkable Tuesdays exactly like this one, a casserole, a theory, a stubborn line of poetry, a man who checked the weather app for the wrong reason and got forgiven for the right one, none of it dramatic, all of it, somehow, adding up to something I would not trade for a flashier life in a cooler climate.
Mr. Kowalczyk texted his daughter in Tampa this evening, apparently, to report that the spy situation remains unresolved but the casserole was excellent, a message she forwarded to me with three laughing emoji and the caption my father adores you, which is the kind of unearned, accidental affection this job keeps handing me when I least expect it, no resume required, just eleven houses, a cooler bag, and the willingness to play along with an old man’s favorite joke every single week without ever once letting him win the argument outright, because letting him win would ruin the bit, and the bit, at this point, is doing important structural work in both our weeks, mine and his, two people on opposite ends of a single running joke that has, without either of us planning it, become a small dependable kindness disguised entirely as nonsense, the kind of arrangement that never once gets discussed directly and would probably be ruined the moment either of us tried to explain it out loud to someone who hadn’t been on the route to see it built, week by week, casserole by casserole, one increasingly elaborate spy theory at a time.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk