(cicadas) Fancy smancy dinner

(cicadas)

Fancy smancy dinner night with Peter, Christy, Chris and Stephanie at Roy's, complete with Roy's Melting Hot Chocolate Soufflé that bled chocolate "motor oil" when you cut into the side right out onto your little ball of vanilla ice cream. It was good and it was pricy, but one can free one's conscience about an expensive meal when one has dined exclusively on saltine crackers many a night in the past two weeks.

We never ate at nice restaurants when I was growing up; I learned formal table etiquette in the auditorium at school from a local business man who hoped we would all go far but feared we would not. My first quarter of college was paid for with the change taken from my grandparents' pockets every night and dropped into a large green jug. There are always nights, like tonight, when I want to sit with some tokay under that little creek-side pine tree at my PaPa's fish hatchery and tear reality into little shreds that the stream of water will willingly take away. Water is the generous agent of forgetfulness on which the burdens of man are carried into the Lethe. "Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it." I, too, "am haunted by waters."