"Have you seen how full the store is with cakes and candies and cookies?" M. said. "All for Christmas. But they're not just all in one aisle, they're everywhere...."
"I know, " I said. "They're all over. Leaping out and thwarting your well-intentioned way to the check-out... The aisles of cake closing in on you and the shopping cart--like the Clashing Rocks menacing Jason and the Argonauts..."
"Are you all right? I thought I detected a kind of cynicism in you tonight...?"
"What, me? No. Oh no, I was getting quite into that. Modern day epic in the grocery store. Maybe I sounded a bit cheesed off earlier, it wasn't the most productive of days. But this conversation's been quite funny."
"Oh, ok. Maybe it's me."
"You and your self-conscious reflection rupturing my supermarket epic... I dunno. Modern folk, eh. But are you all right?"
* * * *
We were in Fatapples in El Cerrito later that night. I was drinking an olallieberry milkshake (rather, I should say I was eating it, as the milkshake will support an upright spoon for at least half an hour) and talking to my cellist and composer friend M.
We are both prone to idealism. The subject of the Wikileaks cables came up.
"I don't understand," I said, "why there has to be so many secrets that have to be kept. If the world was different, these secrets wouldn't exist, they wouldn't have to exist if things were harmonious and honest and undesigning."
"The problem began," M. said, "when people stopped singing."
* * * *
I have often thought that if M. lived in another age he'd be a kind of Singer of Tales. He's a storyteller and an improviser. I heard him play the Kodály Cello Sonata once -- with all the melancholy of fascination for disappearing folk song.
* * * *
