Reminded of this Guy

On Facebook this morning, someone posted The Blower's Daughter, my second favorite song on this cd.

I've been writing pretty steadily, off to a spinning class this afternoon and very nice company later. Life is odd, odd, odd, but most days I like it.
I think this is the year I learn Italian and make the trip there. It's been a lifelong dream and there's no time to squander dreams, it seems to me. I need to drive somewhere soon, too, to make the 2009 goal of some place in the U.S. where I haven't been. It must be a modest thing: Pittsburgh, Sandusky, somewhere that I will wish were White Sands or the Keys. I plan to knock both of those out this coming year.

I mean to say: Life does what it does, and sometimes, it astonishes.
I mean: She's back, a little road-worn but back.

This morning's offering from Season of White Flies:

"The gaslight district was a myriad of characters: young couples with their hopeful, correct politics and all-cotton, all-wool clothing, the old woman who fed the birds, stooped over and as old as time and who reminded me of the woman on Mary Poppins who sang the Tuppence song and who could trigger the most intricate form of melancholy in me. Some mornings the coffeeshop contained a complete cast of weekday morning regulars. It was an Edith’s that Aram never saw and on its best most village-like days, I wished it for him.
The music: Celtic, some Broadway, told me who was working before I walked fully through the door. When Lena wasn’t there, the two waitresses played Sinead O’ Connor and the music set the tone and the number 17 stopped all along the front windows with the alto-voiced woman announcing Number Seventeen Mount Airy before seven beeps that threatened the doors were about to close and I wished that life had such alarms: the tea kettle’s shrill whistle, the bus’s little song meant to indicate departure, instead of the unspeakable way that we are meant to predict what’s about to boil over or vanish on us.

What it wasn’t was a wishbone or a crucifix, a babytooth, a scrap of ribbon, a lock of hair or a locket as a keeping place. What it wasn’t was a lucky coin or a treasure map marking the crucial X for the fortune worth chasing and the fortune left behind to do so,
What it wasn’t, couldn’t hope to be, was inconsequential, especially now with the miles it walked with me, literally in the same shoes and the way lost, it was dearer to me than ever.
Because my grandmother used to say that a Papoutsakis woman will walk one thousand miles for someone she loves, two thousand for someone she hates. Because what a Papoutsakis woman can hate with such vehemence must surely be someone who wronged the someone she loves. That’s a lot of mileage to cover for stasis and stasis has been the dance-step of choice too often, where I have been led some times and gone so far as to choreograph others."