Disconnected

I'm sitting in a cafe in the Indian Summer heat, sipping ginger ale and trying to generate a short post while the kids clamour for attention. This will have to be quick. It's amazingly hot here once again.

Peter's settling in at Cal Tech. A long weekend of sports in the sun, from Treasure Island to Golden Gate Park to Parkside to Holly Park, has us all sun-soaked and dehydrated.

Given how addictively wonderful the web and blogging are, it is disorienting to suddenly be unable to access the Internet from home. My Comcast modem has decided to stop sucking bandwith. It just sits there weakly blinking, like an injured droid in Star Wars.

So, tonight, unless I can coax it back to life, I'll spend my time with other friends -- books, probably. There's still homework -- math and Spanish -- and ordering Chinese food, baths, tomorrow's school lunches, this morning's newspapers, and several gallons of cold water to drink.

There's the matter of sweat. I'll change clothes. There's a persistent pain in my side for weeks now. More than clothes may have to be changed to alleviate that.

It's good to be alive in this moment, despite the discomfiture. There's soft music here, and voices of energetic young women studying together. The boys are clusstered around a computer, excited at a game.

The light starts to fade. Your image is framed in my memory by the setting sun, and as I look into your dark, distant eyes, they pool the yellow moonlight. Somewhere between the setting sun and the rising moon one of these nights I'll drift away, if only in my dreams, so that neither of us sleeps alone any more...Until then, sweet lover, imagined, real or a mixture of the two, sense my touch on the night breezes carried with the ocean tides.

You're never alone if someone holds you lovingly in his mind...