Small Pleasures

It was a banner day for me today. I made four major errors in our church bulletin. I still don't know how I screwed it up that badly, but there you have it. It was also my turn to play the offertory tonight, and that always makes me a little nervous. You'd think that it would pass after all these years, but the tiny butterflies of nervousness never fail to flutter. The offertory went better than it had any right to based on my amount of practice, but by the time church was done, I was in need of a little treat.

After church, I drove down an old highway toward a small town near Podunk that has fast food. Podunk, bastion of civilization that it is, is far too tiny to have even a McDonald's. Most of the time, that's a nice trait, but occasionally one needs an infusion of grease and salt. This other town is probably three or four times as large as Podunk, and it has an alluring assortment of grease with the additional assuring factor that none of my students will be behind the counter of these places like they might be if I went in to the town in which I teach. Anybody whose ever been a teacher can appreciate the potential importance of that.

There are two ways to get to this place, one a major interstate and one a rural highway. I like to take the highway. It goes past fields, through patches of deep woods, and over river sloughs. When I was a child, hundred-year-old oak trees lined the road and were like a canopy shading it on even the hottest summer days. Those oaks were cut long ago; too many drunks did themselves irreparable harm by crashing into them, I suppose.

Dirt roads intersect the highway at regular intervals, and almost all of them look like you could take a left or right turn on them and disappear into the lush piney green through which they slice their tiny knife-thin red lines. I always entertain the thought that one night, I'll just pick one at random and head off into whatever may be out there. Of course, since I don't have the Evil Jeep anymore, that's become a riskier proposition than it once was. PT Cruisers, as I've noted before, aren't really good for dirt road exploration.

Sunday nights are when MPB, our state's public radio station, broadcasts Echoes and Hearts of Space. I have been hooked on these since high school. The music is good for just drifting in the world of thought. Rarely are there interpretable lyrics, and the international mixture of artists sends spirals of thought through me like drops of dye slowing dripping into a basin of still water. They make interesting patterns. Those two shows were the first two experiences I'd ever had with ambient music. Now, of course, it's everywhere. Satellite radio can provide aficionado with 24-hours of commercial-free feed. Then, though, it was a special treat that only came on Sundays.

Now, I still enjoy it on Sunday nights. Driving down the old highway in the indigo gloaming, my imagination always runs wild. The open fields of a huge farm span both sides of a mile or two of the road. At this time of the year, there's a crop of corn and a crop of sunflowers growing. Because it's open farmland, there's very little light pollution, and on a clear night, the skies are wide open. It would be an excellent place to take a blanket and watch stars. It looks like something out of a dream. During the summer, the music and the light mix, and my heart always feels calm.

It's a small pleasure. I don't go every Sunday night. Sometimes, I come straight home after church or wind up staying late to work on something. Sometimes I just stay and talk. On the nights I do make this journey through rural Mississippi, I always try to hold the peace and carry it with me for whatever the week ahead may bring.