Free Range Nonfiction Reading Series

Thanks to everyone who came out and heckled my subpar jokes.

Here's the last piece I read. An oldie but a goodie.

The Blue Man

My house here in France is covered in spiderwebs, but I don't dare touch them because it's more their house than mine. They have to live here when I'm gone and they've never plotted against me.

For my last Saturday, I take the six kilometer bike path to Chalabre, the closest town with a cafe that's open in August and the only supermarket within pedaling distance.

I ride on a path which was once a train line when the industry boomed here decades ago. Once there were factories that made combs and yarn and produced metal wires for things like buggies and farm equipment, and for train cars they no longer need. The train stations now rest recumbent along the path, the cement platforms cracked with weeds and wildflowers waiting like parents for their missing children to come home.

At the butcher, I can buy duck and chicken, but I don’t because I passed the coops on the way to town. At the bakery I can buy bread, but not cheese. The cheese is in a seperate store and inside it, a dog sleeps beside the rumbling cooler to stay cold.

At the cafe, I will have coffee and when the barista asks the waitress who it's for, she will see me and say le homme bleu to him. In navy cargo shorts, a royal blue t-shirt, and my faded navy ballcap, I am the blue man and she says it roundly, warmly, like I'm of a period of time in which an artist used one color often, like Picasso in rose, Calder in steel, and of course, Picasso in blue.

When I pedal home, the sun will be starting to set, as it does here at 9 o’clock and I will sweep through the cornfields. By this time, the sunflowers have begun to bow in the absence of their master.

The longer I am away, the less the rest of the world exists, I forget what it's like to order in, I don't know which candidate has made some kind of gaffe that won't matter for 15 more months, and the life I'm not living there is finally begging me for things -- things like the change I'm usually too weary to notice is needed, when I am covered in tallies of seconds lost to things I would let grow here in France, like wildflowers, like spiderwebs across the wooden corners, which are beautiful, painted as they are, in only one color.