I'm sitting on a soft patio chair listening to traffic and the mumbles of morning conversation. I can tell it’s fall by the way the air smells. The sun is strong and the afternoon will bear down with dry, autumn heat.
I just finished eating warm cereal with powdered greens - it looked like swamp sludge. There were prunes in there too. I placed one in my spoon, covered in green, and catapulted it into the garden. Maybe I did it to two, or all of the prunes in my cereal. Watching them fly trumped their flavor.
A future investigator is exploring the dig site of what was once my home. What could this be? she wonders while examining the fossilized drupe. Upon further inspection and after intense collaboration with experts in various fields, she determines it is part of a deeply profound ceremonial event, one that celebrates a rite of passage into the phase of life where a person, usually of advanced age, must incorporate more prunes into the diet. The softened fruit is easy on the teeth and helps ease the constipation that often accompanies old age. She determines that, rather than it being a shameful experience, for our Coloradian tribe, the process of aging was held with reverence and respect.
The Painting of the Prunes emerged as a blessing ritual, wherein dried fruits of various varieties (prunes especially prized for their mild laxative effect and high fiber content) are colored with polychromatic food powders then tossed with joyful reverie around the person for whom the celebration is being conducted.
Yesterday evening I watched two kids walk down the handicapped ramp from a Shell gas station. The boy was moving as if on an invisible pony (or unicorn or any other rideable creature), galloping freely, noodle arms, mouth open, head nodding in rhythm with his step. His older sister slithered sideways, her pelvis jutting forward, stirring the air with her fingertips.
I wonder if it's possible to have action without logic. Behavior like this is easy to accept, coming from a child's body. Housed in the skin of a grown-up, these random acts of play are often distorted into something socially meaningful, explained and interpreted as art, or labeled as insane.
A beautiful alien hears the thoughts of an ambitious young woman who is attempting to figure it out. The extra terrestrial, suspended in time-space, turns circles, dances with bubbles and listens to the angst and curiosity that impel an invention of logic for what is humanly ineffable. The young investigator proposes a kind of dried fruit ritual as the alien watches children move unreasonably and the narrator fling green prunes into the garden on a sunny autumn morning.
