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[34] IN A HOTEL LOBBY, NEAR MIDNI GHT Pick-up Lines You’re 50; I’m 50. So what do you want to do about it? Even Emerson had cabin fever. Being in the woods so much, you’d like just once to feel the mud. All that walking about, carrying the soul like glowing embers in buckets. That’s too big a responsibility. And when something’s hot like that, it’s better off meeting something just as hot. How about we try for some joy? Response Correction, I’m not quite 50. And mud is no big deal, since women have typically more to do with it than fussing over how their boots have gotten dirty (have you tried to get it off denim or canvas?) —Walking, walking, with no destination or design, no pressing agenda other than reflection: now that’s something I’d like to have the leisure to do. Scribble in a notebook, pause, scribble again; look up in the trees where the squirrels run like thoughts as yet unbound; then come in at no set time to tea, or rum; or more quiet. As for those glowing embers we carry around in buckets– I’ve come to love the way they burn like gathered stems of willow, like fiery clusters on flame trees: staunch, insistent, not so easily summed up or dismissed; vivid hurt against silver-white canes of the ghost bramble. ...

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