Heat

 It's half past morning, just back from a walk.  These days it's best to start out early, for the streets are still usually shaded, with a light breeze that makes it easier to face August.

Yesterday, I began my usual walk around the neighborhood circle.  A few neighbors were out, as always...across the street, down the street, around the circle.  One doesn't simply walk unheeding here; one stops to chat.  It's pleasant.  It's neighborly.  So a simple round means a protracted time out.

As I made my way back toward the house, the heat was rising.  The temperature would have pleased anyone; it was a temperate 78.  The humidity, however, was 92%.  I had begun to drip, and had to stop a few times to wipe my glasses.

Still, coming across the drive, I thought I hadn't gone far enough.  So I turned back  toward the main street, promising myself that if I kept going downtown, I could treat myself to a coffee at the new bookstore/cafe.  And maybe a new book.  The town isn't quite bustling yet, though new arrivals to campus have begun to sift in, parents in tow (or towing them).  (I carry my mask everywhere, since few of them do. Sigh.)

It's easy to fall into praise for Epilogue/Prologue as the new place is called.  The Sanchez', Jaime and Miranda, have built themselves a wonderful space to share.  Well placed in the middle of the main business blocks, the two large airy rooms of books, brightly covered and adventurously displayed, it's somewhere to drop into, drop onto a chair, drop one's books and/or laptops on a table...spaced apart for a good sense of liesure...and browse or read while you sip a really good cool or hot drink.  Their pastry...genuine bunuelos or churros or a small plate of little freshly rolled tacos...sends me back to San Antonio days. 

The stock of books is huge for a store of its kind.  In the maze of high shelves, there are corners and rounds and hidden arm chairs, tables in and outside windows. It's clear that both the personable couple have a passion for the page as well as good palettes and, important, a perfect sense of reader comforts.

My neck was wet from the heat as I browsed, but two collections of short stories, Life Ceremony, by Japanese writer Sayaka Murata and Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz, fairly lept off their perches at me. For some reason, this beastly August weather has me edging more toward the shorts than toward whole works...longer library choices of late have seemed tedious and overdone, sometimes downright silly. (And frankly, the current romanticization of World War II by writers far removed from that horror makes my blood boil.)

These two writers, each fairly young and each fairly experienced, seemed to promise me paths into minds I need to explore.  Who is this generation? I have to ask myself with each turn of not only the page but daily life. 

Around me the world swells with evidence of the myriad ways I seem at a standstill.  I, whose favorite readings are among writers of other regions, countries and cultures,  lately find myself too easily startled by patterns of living I have to struggle to understand.

I can see your smiles...okay, yes, elderhood descends!...but not conservatism, not, I hope, the stodginess of a shrinking mindset. I'm plenty open to discovering, to finding out where and how and maybe why.

So last night I opened both new reads, tasting a little bit of the Moniz, then more formally beginning the Murata to settle into.  The first seems, as its title might hint, full of fervor and fire.  Her writing is clear but worms its way into the deepest parts of the heart and psyche.  

The second, perhaps not a surprise, given the translated writer, is cool, slim, dry...a pleasure to read on these too stuffy August evenings.  I can't wait to get to the Moniz, but right now, the Murata is a calm much needed.  And yet (here's the surprise) weirdness reigns in one tale after another.  Murata's sensibilities are strewn with absurdity that isn't, on second...chilling...thought, far off.  As I read further, weirdness becomes grotesque in some stories.  I wonder why she takes up those images?

What intrigues me is that each small story culminates in barely a moment or two and the crisis at the center, even in the longer stories, is sometimes only a sentence long.  Endings seem unresolved.  And yet...and yet...like ghosts surfacing, huge issues hang in the aftermath...who will love me when she is gone, asks an elderly woman who has lived with her childhood friend for 40 years...and then, in the hospital room where her friend waits for a cancer treatment, the two continue their spited arguments until they look out the window and see the snow fall, deeper and deeper.

Meanwhile, Book Group begins next month, and already I am thinking that our carefully plotted list for this coming year seems a literary lifetime away.  Maybe, like buying new school supplies each September, we should pick out our books not at the closing of the old season, but at the beginning of the new.  

Because so much time and mind and world has changed in the meantime.  And we might not have been paying attention.