songs of experience

My spring Janes 2006 season is in full swing, so today’s blog entry will overlap with what I sent out to my seejanerunners in week #5’s e-mail. Each Sunday, I send out the week’s work-outs (what, where, and how fast, etc. we’re going to run) along with a reading to think about and, perhaps, discuss in the 20-minute “circle time” we have before running. I choose a theme for each season [last season it was "nature"] and this season we are focusing on FOUND things … found literature, found art, found ideas (i.e. one Jane said she found reading for the first time in her adult/mothering life). Over the week-end, I had a cool “found’ expereince.

This week’s quote is from a book I FOUND shoved in among a stack of cheap, shiny-covered novels at a coffee shop in Raleigh. We’d stopped in after our races and St. Patty’s day parade (on an 80-degree day) for some raspberry smoothies and air-conditioning. The book is called Blue Highways (a journey into America) and its one that I’ve always wanted to read but somehow forgot that I always wanted to read it. Does that make sense? It got lost in my memory. I do think this book found me yesterday… so I went up to the coffee-shop lady and asked her if the used books on the shelves (with the bald backgammon board and missing-pieces chess set) were for sale. “Yes,” she said. “How much?” I asked. “However much you want to pay.”

Here’s the quote (I’m sure there will be more from this book. I am only on page 26!):

“I came to a ramshackle place called Smitty’s Trading Post. Smitty was a merchant of relics. He could sell you a Frankfort, Kentucky, city bus that made its last run down Shively Street, or an ice cream wagon made from a golf cart, or a used bulldozer, or a bent horseshoe. I stopped to look. Lying flat as the ground, a piebald mongrel too tired to lift its head gave a one-eyed stare. I pulled on the locked door, peered through windows grimed like coal-miner’s goggles, but I couldn’t find Smitty. A pick-up rattled in. A man with a wen above his eye said, “Smitty ain’t here.”
“Where is he?” I was just making talk.
“You the feller wantin’ that harness?”
“Already got one.”
“What’d you come for then?”
“I don’t know. Have to talk to Smitty to find out.”
“That’s one I ain’t heard,” he said.”

Two things strike me about this passage: 1.) when he says, “I stopped to look.” (think about that for a while, busy busy moms - myself included, of course) and 2.), that he was waiting for a person to give him/teach him what he wanted. You can’t FIND unless you seek, and you can’t seek unless you are open in your daily life.

Food for thought.