A Good Ear and Cortez, Colorado

Posted on July 15, 2007 in Disappointment Vacations

I’m at the computer late, my good habit of turning myself to bed at ten or so long abandoned. Playing solitaire, a game called Red and Black. And while I click on the cards against a red sunset, I think of a time when we found the one “California Cuisine” restaurant in Cortez, Colorado, not far from Mesa Verde National Park. I took a lot of pictures — now they are gone or lost in some box — and I remembered that I ordered red snapper, which surprised me to be on the menu of a bistro located nearly a thousand miles from the ocean where it found itself dragged up from the depths, its eyes bulging from the loss of pressure.

And tonight I think about what it takes to be a good ear, nonjudgemental ear. You don’t try to solve problems unless you are truly in key with the soul you give your time to. When I am at my best I am like that. And, as the scarlet clouds of Cortez, as the lights fade on that boulevard that stretches out into Route 666, I doubt that I have ever known a friend who has tolerated me as long as I have tolerated others, except Lynn. A few think that the listening can be reciprocal — you getting what you put in — but it never is. I’ve been a giver and when I look around for my own place, I find myself gasping like a sea bass or a blue-green rock cod, choking on an atmosphere which is not my own.

The last time I trusted someone I got burnt. And now others seem to be angry with me because I am watchful, because I don’t tell stories about what is really happening in my life right now and because I don’t open my heart for comment.