Seven to eight years old

Arugula, beets, lettuce, peapods, and in the back little patches of chard and spinach.  I feel bad posting these photographs because it is clear how bad my weeding and soil enrichment are.  But the lettuce is pretty.

I'm sitting in my office, at my desk, my mind maps to my right and the orange Burton snowboard that is my wall art in front. To my left is K., on the push lawnmower, decorating the grass with patterns of lawn art in the cloverfield. It's been a good day of work, for both of us—me here and he there.

“We're all thieves,” he said today, as we stood out by the garden, talking to our friends, also K., and A. and R. K., the second K.--became a father thirty days ago. A.'s eldest turns two on Thursday. They were talking about the trucks they'd rolled, things they'd stolen in their misspent youth.

“Lift and let lift,” Brian Doyle says. 


[And this link also.]

It made me think about theft, about Bob Dylan, and what it mean to steal things. This is one of these topics that I keep dancing around because I want to talk about it seriously some day, like doctoral thesis seriously. Bob Dylan is our greatest songwriter, and what he did was steal.

My central thesis is that Bob Dylan stole every line of “'Love & Theft.'” Every single line. I understand the impulse. It somehow seems a prod to creativity to turn to another piece of art and feed from it. Allow it to nourish us and respond. But is it exactly fair? I can't decide.

Dylan says: “But to live outside the law you must be honest.”

That could have relevance, perhaps, to us trying to live after the law, after the prophets. Under grace.

Living in the land of Nod

Trusting their fate to the hands of God

They pass by so silently

Tweedle-dee Dum and Tweedle-dee Dee
        [also Dylan]

So what things have I stolen today?  Food from the ground.  Light from the sun.  Time from my future.