Fifth Day in America....

And here is how Andy; driving fast, singing well and being young, and I, navigating loosely, dreaming generally and being old, progressed South from Denver along the four thousand miles of road we travelled without any plan at all or even thinking about it much: Just stopping some-where for no great reason, or sometimes even that small reason seen just out of the corner of your eye, hardly seen at all, maybe a dog taking its time crossing the street as we come by in a fast (faster than the dog anyway) car, or seeing someone walking into a bar with a fiddle or a guitar (this is how we came to Salida) or a sign saying 'Boots and Coffee'. And we'd ask in the coffee place, or the boot place, or of folk we met around (or even follow the dog) what they recommended, where the music was, the good food, or old guitars, or where snap-button shirts with maybe contrasting stitching might be found.

And this is how we came to eat the best eating-out food I've ever tasted: In local diners where folk met for breakfast and sat for hours and talked about their latest operations or broken bones (it is a vigorous country) and homes and how their children were going wrong but would probably eventually come out all right. Or not.

Anyway they hoped. And in a language so full and metaphoric that I closed my eyes to listen and have hardly opened them since.

And even just a bit right for our children would be great considering how badly we'd done ourselves.

Or sometimes, you might consider that even our own going wrong was not so bad that it was no good at all.

A hard thing to measure though.