Back (from) Home

I went home for a few days just to relax and celebrate the birthday with my family. It’s been a while since I made the trek down to the family homestead, which now consists of an apartment-sized condo on the northern hills of West Chester just north of the wraparound highway that surrounds the great and terrible city of Cincinnati, Ohio.

It was nice to see Cincinnati in the fall. I had almost forgotten how beautiful it can be. That’s really the only thing I like about my hometown. The city sits in a bowl so the proliferation of airborne fungi and other assorted molds and spores in spring is a nightmare for even the strongest of sinus cavities. Summer is so hot and humid you feel as though you could drip and melt away in the jungle of concrete. And winter is as sporadic as a paranoid schizophrenic without his medicine.

But autumn! Ah, autumn is grand. The hills which surround the city are painted every color of the rainbow and the puffs of trees in the distance, when they catch the dying daylight, burn like torches against the crisp sky. You just don’t get that kind of beauty anywhere else.

At least not here in Columbus.

Currently, I’m sitting at my desk, listening to Miles Davis’s “Birth of the Cool,” an old cd of mine from the days when I thought myself a jazz trumpeter. I had lost it many years back and feared it had suffered the same fate as my baseball card collection when my parents’ basement flooded back in 2001. Oh what a sad day that was! But, hark! My Miles Davis cd, along with a commercialized compilation of Chuck Mingus hits, survived. Apparently my father had found them in a box a few years prior to the evil flood, and had absentmindedly stored them in a box underneath my parents’ bed. The discs survived a move to Florida and back and have now been returned to their rightful place. All is right with the world.

This week looks to be busy, as I have the new part time job to contend with, my regular job of nothingness, and that play which, despite my most earnest intentions, remains unfinished. No worries. I know what needs to be done. All that remains is typing.