Into the blue

My daughter, age five, came home from summer school with a new harmonica and wearing her sunglasses.

She asked me if I like the blue.

I said yes, I love the color blue, it's one of my favorites.

She said no, Daddy, not the color blue, the music blue.

She had been pulled up onstage at a school assembly that morning and taught to play "the blue."

"Awkward"

A new poem by my old friend Richard Edwin Skubish, a man not heretofore given to poetry.

*

Awkward


The waitress faced us together in adjoining booths. Two strangers pretending to not notice each other - sitting together at an interuppted table.

You asked for cinnamon.

I pretend to be lost in business or mundane thoughts about photovoltaics or flooded soccer fields or milage to the next little town.

And you asked for cinnamon.

Southern drawl and you live way to north for it. Soft, shy voice, but you look like a powerful personality I once knew.

A personality that would have never asked for cinnamon.

OK, I AM lost in business and photovoltaics and flooded soccer fields. I know the milage to the next little town - to the tenth.

Why can't I ask you why you asked for cinnamon?

*

Skoob, as we have always known him, is a traveling salesman of high-performance chemistry equipment. We grew up together in the river town of Granite City, Illinois.

City of the great confluence

I live in St. Louis County. I consider St. Louis the city of the great confluence, because the Mississippi and Missouri rivers join together just north of the city. River traffic once made St. Louis great (it's no longer very great, by most objective measures); Lewis and Clark wintered their troops near the confluence, at the Wood River, the winter before they embarked on the Voyage of Discovery (which was largely a business trip, to get the Indians hooked on U.S. merchandise and networked in with American traders).

I also like confluences. I like it when different things come together. That suits me well. That's what I'll be writing about, here - different things coming together to create something new that continues to further evolve.