Not just to woo

Dang, you know it’s hot when you drink three cups of coffee and take a nap in the hammock. E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” on my chest. Yoga unthinkable. Run to the beach not even crossing my mind. Day tagging out to evening. A breeze on my chest in my half-sleep making me think I was back along the Camino. That winter nap I took on the crest of the mesa. When I woke I could see for ten miles, a castle on a hill in the village I had come from, my seed glistening from the bush branches near me. So many days in the cold I couldn't remember what a hot day felt like.

Well here it is. I did take a bike ride to the beach. At a baseball diamond I had to get off and sit on a bench to see what happened to my baseball dreams. How vividly could I envision showing up at the park for a game in this heat? Or the fastball seeming to rise as it approached? What was wrong with my swing exactly? Not so vividly. The bench was so hot it instantly made me sweat. Once again, either it was too far away or the mind’s not sharp enough to see it. Back on the bike to the beach, where I formulated a new theory of love based on a teenager in a pink bikini doing little jumps in the surf with her boyfriend.

That that little blond boy will be lovestruck his whole life over her, long after she’s left him in her wake, that he is in the one percent who actually once had her, ninety-nine others less lucky, this girl conveying that larger-than-life feeling, rooted in physical beauty of course but more than that, that every boy has one like her, only in his mind, and that men will always sing love songs for this reason and not just to woo.