October 1, 2019

Syracuse sushi

We were hungry after the long day. There were reasons why someone couldn’t 
do Italian, and other reasons why burgers were off the table, and so on and so on, 
and so there we were, seven travelers in town for just the one night, finding ourselves 
at a window table at an improbable sushi restaurant in downtown Syracuse, wondering 
if we were in for a regrettable meal. And I remembered an afternoon in Brady, Nebraska,
when a man calling himself a “cowboy poet” stood up from his luncheon seat, recited, 
by heart, a piece he’d written years before, how his eyes grew wild and young again. 
It is easy to dismiss a paradox, shun one aspect of ourselves in favor of another, 
dull the gleam in the pavement to blend in with a neighboring sameness. The poems
were hardly beautiful. The food wasn’t exquisite. But these are the things I’ll remember.