We landed in Memphis like original sin

Very short work week for me, maybe for you as well (I'll keep my fingers crossed which will explain my lousy typing; nothing will excuse my atrocious spelling). I was off yesterday for Labor Day (why was anything open, considering the point of the day?) and a week filled with medical meanderings just makes it easier to work from the house. Can't say my wife is all that thrilled about this turn of events ('for better or for worse, ja, aber nicht for breakfast, lunch and dinner!') but she's being a very good sport about it.

We had lovely post-Apocalyptic-Hurricane-Named-Earl-That-Wasn't weekend weather, complete with cloudless, wind-swept skies, cool early mornings and bright sunshine all day. All in all, lovely weather to cap what (I think) was a very nice summer. Yesterday morning, after months of gimping, then walking, and then sort of power walking around the track at the Norwich Free Academy up the street from my house, I finally got up the nerve to jog. In the big scheme of things, far less than one small step and yet.....

Haven't done any jogging since before I became a crash test dummy for orthopedic surgery years ago. There's no medical reason why I couldn't jog or run, just like there was NO reason why, after my first knee surgery, I was too afraid of open spaces to walk forwards down a flight of stairs, so for months I used to turn my back and go down backwards. Didn't do a lot of jogging, maybe out of twelve laps, close to one and a half (total), but since I've been averaging less than none and a half, it was good. And yeah, both knees were sore for hours afterwards but .....

As I rounded the track,I was listening to John Hiatt whom I had interviewed some thirty years earlier when he was touring behind an album called Slug Line. I remember both of us thought life as we knew it couldn't get any better than it was. It occurred to me yesterday as I was sub-sonic speed zooming around the track that we were right. At that particular moment in time, it was as good as it would ever get.

Except, until a moment ago when I stumbled across the Hiatt clip from a German TV show, ohne filter, I came across something else and found myself echoing Tonto's refrain to Clayton Moore. "And if I were like lightning, I wouldn't need no sneakers. Well, I'd come and go whenever I would please. And I'd scare 'em by the shady tree and scare 'em by the light pole, but I would not scare my pony on my boat out on the sea."

-bill kenny