On waking this morning, the first order of business consisted in catching a dissolving bubble of mirth and giving it due appreciation before it got submerged by the Things to Do. A whole parade of them. Life isn’t an all-expenses paid holiday sort of thing. Plus: we live in trying times, you must take a stand, this is no laughing matter, etc.

Except trying times seem like a given, and laughter always gets a bum rap. So, hail to thee sweet bubble of mirth, glad you found the brain space in which to grow, thrive, live and die.

Outside the window from where I write: backyard gardens lush with August harvests of tomatoes, green beans, squash and eggplant. On the screen: the usual mix of horrors and inanities from the news outlets. In the reading pile: Giordano Bruno’s De la magie, stalled at page 17. Slow going. Alain Mabanckou’s Le sanglot de l’homme noir: almost finished. Of course, Mabanckou is a published writer talking about other published writers so I need not apply some of his words to sixteen and seventeen-year-old boys almost straight off the dinghies that tossed them on to these shores. Some of them are  still inspired by tales from their childhood, told by their elders near the fire. Mabanckou claims that Africa no longer exists. Perhaps it doesn’t as a theme for a published writer’s next book. But as a heart space for at least one of those boys, the fire lives on as a memory trace of moonless nights. Just as the moon in the thirteenth to the twentieth night of its monthly cycle lives on as the light source for the outside games and dance circles he remembers.

Story: dribs and drabs, with the kind of slow building that occurs during long bouts of alone time. Two-hour classes with the boys during four afternoons this week. Plus all those other To Do things. Moving toward the fall in seasonal terms. In metaphorical ones too? Story-wise maybe. The fall itself may turn out to be a quick and brutal process. Or a bubble of mirth, who knows?

Getting there: another matter.