Sur la Route

At the library day before yesterday, I paid my whopping $13.00 fine, and finally handed back the anthology of French short stories that had contributed so much to my indebtedness--especially "Sac au Dos," a lucid account of the horror and senselessness of the Franco-Prussian War which I had read, backwards and forwards, four or five times. Then, my mind and my account clear, I walked, like one being pulled by a string, right back to the French language section where I put out my hand--picked up almost without looking at, and carried to the checkout desk Jack Kerouac's Sur la Route, and Geniuses Unknowns' Trois Soûtras et un Traité sur la Terre Pure. My Roots, so to speak.

Today then, Phil (that's a picture of him sitting at his new piano) called, and we chatted pleasantly for half an hour or so. He reminded me that twenty years or ago when he was reading On the Road, I said to him, "This is me. These are my Roots."