There’s a little more light in the sky because I’m a few minutes late this morning. You heard me right: my schedule controls the sun.

The air is clear and cold and the trees are black against the purple sky. The field is muddy and there are no deer, unless they are mud-colored and standing very still. Later, taking my offramp, there is a flatbed truck in front of me with a load of pipe. Pipe in shiny zinc metal and brick-red plastic in every size available from about a half-inch up to six inches in diameter. Estimate the length of the truck’s bed, estimate how many potential tin whistles are stacked there on the bed. Tin whistles, low whistles, organs, calliopes.

I haven’t heard a calliope since I was a kid. Those old steam organs they used to play inside merry-go-rounds etc. Remember them? The first instrument I’d associate with Ray Bradbury, for reasons lost to me.

Also the muse of epic poetry and the mother of Orpheus, thanks google. We’ve come down with a bad case of Greek mythology at home lately. As usual, one of the kids brought it home from school. Beta this time. Last night I even caught her in her room, reading a thick book of it for fun.

I sit on the rocking chair in her room in the dim light in that corner and try to read a book of essays on, basically, death and ask her what she’s reading and ten minutes later I shake my head to get all these Greek names out of my ears and say, That’s nice, honey.

Calliope was the mother of Orpheus. Calliope is a hummingbird. Calliope is a steam organ.

When I was young, I wanted a household where the parents (me and whoever) “read the classics” and quoted Shakespeare and Goethe all the time. Lived with such people, such writers, like old friends. Haven’t exactly managed to do that yet, although I do own “The Complete Works of Shakespeare”. But you know, who has time to read that shit?

When I was young, my parents subscribed to two magazines: Sunset, and Western Horseman. Oh, and National Geographic, which was great. Western Horseman was also fine, if you liked horses. Sunset Magazine, I have a split relationship to that magazine. The magazine itself is schizophrenic. The first half full of beautiful western-living articles (cooking, decorating, home construction, gardening, ads for cars that have grown from sedans when I was young to your gigantic SUV nowadays). The back half is full of advertisements. When I was young, they were ads for geodesic domes and gazebos and grills. Now they are primarily advertisements for camps for troubled children. Weight reduction camps for children with eating disorders. Camps for children with learning difficulties. Camps for children with discipline problems. Military bootcamp-type camps.

A kid I grew up with, he sent his kid to a camp like that, I read in a newspaper clipping my mother sent me. Whenever she sends me a clipping, I know it’s bad news. She only sends me the bad ones. Suicides of kids I knew etc. This one, this kid I grew up with sent his kid to this camp because he was raising rabble at school, and he slit some other kid’s throat. My point being, the second half of Sunset makes me wonder about the first half.

Beta looks up from her book and says things roughly like, “Theseus, what a bastard, ditching Ariadne like that”. I’ll be at a movie with her, watching the trailer for “Troy” or whatever, with Brad Pitt and I’ll say, “Look, he’s wearing boots although everyone wore sandals back then because he has ugly toenails” (read on some website). And they show all the zillions of CGI boats sailing over to Troy and crowd battle scenes and she says, “no way, everything was decided in single combat.”

1272 grams she weighed at birth, ten weeks early. The doctor told me there was a 90% chance she’d be normal, no brain damage. This was on my first visit to see her at the premature infant intensive care ward. I was thirty and very frightened. As he told me this, a little girl strapped into a walker scooted past. She had no fingers and sort of stared off into space.

Have I ever told you how lucky I am? We are? I used to wander the house at night, making sure everyone was breathing. Lurking in dark doorways listening like some weirdo. Now I’m forty-four and scared but I try to ignore it or let it wash over me and pass. Now I lay in bed and will myself not to get up, to sleep, they’re all fine, but I listen but all I can hear are my ears ringing. I will myself not to imagine dangers and catastrophes, because believe me, they are numerous and worrying doesn’t help and you don’t want to know how many close calls of one class or another you have daily.

So far, we have all gotten out of bed again in the morning. For our sunrise, our truck load of pipe.