Day Off

I have the day off from Jazz88 and I always want the days off to be simple, joyous, fancy free. Occasionally they are. Mostly they are a parade of errands, fun and otherwise. I owe the United States Treasury a little bit of money. They wanted it by December 2. I am sending the check today hoping that they will call it even. (they will not). I finished the book my wife Rachel and I agreed to read this summer. It is Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones.

I want to read more books but I am pulled in every night to magazines and sometimes even to news on my phone though I’ve really cut down on that. Reading at nighttime is really no substitute for a long daytime session of reading. I imagine I probably get three long daytime sessions of reading in a good year. A flight, a vacation, maybe a long repair job at a mechanic where I elect to wait for some reason. As a person who has never been a truly capable sight-reader of music, I still imagine that the reading I do in the middle of the day is how it feels when the great readers in town sit in front of a piece of music. I know the characters, the references and the general outline. I predict what is coming, I navigate my feelings while the plot rolls on.

When I get the five or six odd pages in during a session of nighttime reading it is barely the same sensation. I am flipping back, I am remembering character names, I am feeling the left side of the book hit my nose as I am dozing off. It is altogether a different sensation to try to cram a little bit of the book into my head before I sleep. Maybe those sessions are better suited for magazine reading. Something digestible. Books are digestible too, but not on the same timetable. I will be digesting Salvage the Bones for a handful of days, a couple talks with Rachel, a couple moments of reflection.